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Marques Brownlee, who has been doing tech reviews since he was in high school, is one of YouTube's biggest influencers with nearly 15 million subscribers.
Long before the term "influencer" became a thing, Marques Brownlee was busy building his brand and YouTube channel, MKBHD, which he began in 2009 with a review of his new HP laptop. Twelve years later, Brownlee is a digital star and one of the most respected tech influencers in the game, with videos that routinely garner millions of views from his nearly 15 million subscribers. He has a team of five (and is currently hiring), who helped him produce more than 120 videos last year alone. His channel features interviews with some of the tech industry's heaviest hitters, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Bill Gates. As he continues to grow his media empire, the 2016 Young Futurist has big plans for the future; he's already launched a podcast, Waveform, and a new YouTube channel is in the works. Though he's keeping details about the new channel secret, he did tell the Verge, "It will have a lot more casual content and things that people have wanted to see but haven't seen from the MKBHD channel. And that's going to be a lot of fun."