Marton Barcza (TechAltar)

Marton Barcza is a popular tech YouTuber.

He has 704K subscribers on his YouTube channel, ‘TechAltar’.

Introduction-

Marton Barcza is a Hungarian; he hails from Budapest, Hungary.

The name ‘Marton’ is the Hungarian version of Martin.

Love for tech-

At 12, Marton received a Nokia 3310, his first ever phone, from his father.

As Marton’s father water-damaged the phone while surfing, he gave it to him.

He fell in love with the phone and went on to get a Nokia 3310 tattoo on his leg.

After Nokia 3310, Marton had three other Nokia phones including a Nokia 5210, a Nokia 5310 XpressMusic.

He was in love with these Nokia phones, and this started his tech journey.

For many years, Marton used Nokia phones before making the switch to smartphones.

Education & career-

In 2010, he joined Corvinus University of Budapest in Budapest, Hungary to study for a bachelor’s degree in international business; he graduated in 2015.

From 2011 – 2012, Marton was an exchange student at Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.

From April 2012 to August 2012, he worked as a Sales Intern at Shenzhen Shentou Investment Co., Ltd. in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.

From September 2012 to March 2013, Marton worked as an Audit Intern at KPMG Hungary.

Then, he worked as a Google Ground Intern from September 2013 to December 2013 in Budapest.

Then, Marton worked at Oppo from November 2013 to May 2016, in various roles like Hungarian Ambassador in Hungary; Online Community Manager in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China; and Product Expert in China, India, The Philippines, Malaysia.

As he wanted to move back to Europe and be closer to his family, he quit his job at Oppo and started working as a Product Marketing Manager at Delivery Hero in Berlin Area, Germany; he worked here from January 2017 to March 2018.

Then, Marton quit his job to become a full-time YouTuber.

‘TechAltar’–

He was inspired by the tech YouTubers like Marques Brownlee and wanted to create similar content.

In November 2013, Marton started volunteering for Oppo and became their Hungarian Ambassador.

He used to receive early access Oppo devices for free and his job involved testing and adopting the software of the phones, translating the software and OS to Hungarian and promoting the phones.

Marton decided to review these phones and publish the reviews on his channel; so, he started publishing videos of the Oppo phones on the TechAltar YouTube channel in Hungarian.

On 17 April 2014, he published the first video, ‘{1080P} OPPO Find 7a videó teszt’.

TechAltar YouTube channel was originally started on 4 October 2013.

Marton soon realized that producing Hungarian YouTube videos is too niche; so, he started producing videos in English.

Later, he was employed by Oppo as an Online Community Manager and felt that he couldn’t do objective reviews of Oppo products by being their employee; so, he started reviewing other brands’ products.

Working at Oppo, a successful company, made Marton very knowledgeable about the business of technology, and consumers, and this later helped him become a successful YouTuber.

‘The Story Behind’ series-

He grew bored of reviewing products and felt that as there were many YouTubers reviewing gadgets, he couldn’t do much value addition through his review videos.

Also, at the time, the phones were mostly similar to each other which made reviewing them difficult as the review videos would mostly be similar.

So, Marton decided to change the niche of his channel.

As he studied business, worked at Oppo, lived in China and travelled Asia observing the working mechanisms there, and had good knowledge of the phone industry, he decided to produce content on the working mechanisms of the phone industry as a whole, business decisions of the brands, and tech trends.

This was the start of ‘The Story Behind’ series; the first episode of this series is titled ‘Does Windows Phone have a future?’ and was published on 15 June 2016.

This series became more popular than his review videos.

Becoming successful-

At the time when everyone was producing review videos, Marton pivoted to making analytical videos for ‘The Story Behind’ series; this novel content made him a successful YouTuber.

Around April 2017, TechAltar YouTube channel hit 100K subscribers.

In March 2018, Marton quit his full-time job and became a full-time YouTuber.

As of February 2024, he has 704K subscribers on ‘TechAltar’, 167K subscribers on his ‘The Friday Checkout’ channel, and 804 subscribers on ‘The Friday Chillout’.

Marton earns from a variety of sources like advertisements on YouTube, merchandise, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing.

He has a team for helping him out with his YouTube channels; the team comprises two video editors and a writer for ‘The Friday Checkout’.

Initially, Marton used to film videos in his living room and in 2022, he moved into a studio.

For video production, he uses Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Premiere Pro for timeline, Adobe After Effects for animations, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for images and illustrations.

Story behind the name-

Initially, Marton’s channel was a gadget review channel, and once, at 2 am, an idea struck him that the table on which he reviews the gadgets is like an altar to technology; so, he named his channel as ‘TechAltar’.

Other projects-

In March 2018, he along with Maya, started ‘crrowd,’ a product review community.

To develop this, Marton took a two-month bootcamp on Full Stack Web Development at Le Wagon.

But he shut down crrowd, in August 2022, as he grew very busy with his YouTube channels and other projects.

Marton launched ‘Technorama,’ a Nebula original series.

Personal life-

Marton is in a relationship with his girlfriend, Maja.

He used to have long hair until he turned bald.

Marton lives in Berlin, Germany.

Some interesting facts about Marton-

• He is a polyglot as he knows English, Chinese, German, Hungarian, and French.
• Marton’s favourite YouTubers are Michael Fisher of MrMobile (he loves his reviews), Andong of My Name Is Andong, and Alex Aïnouz.
• He knows cooking Chinese, Indian, and Hungarian dishes.
• The Philippines is Marton’s favourite vacation destination, and he loves diving there.
• Berlin is his favourite city in the world.
• Marton’s favourite games are Heroes of Might and Magic III, StarCraft, World of Warcraft, Medieval II: Total War, Shadow of Mordor, and The Witcher 3.
• His plan is to spend money on charity, and he cares about the environment, open and free internet, foundations like Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla Foundation.
• He is mostly vegetarian.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Marton Barcza?

Share with me in the comment section below.