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Hardware Review Sites and Vendor Relationships
VL writes "Manufacturers demanding content changes is nothing new in the tech site community. We take a look at this topic, including one very public example that started in the past three weeks."
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One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.
But the damage was already done.
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Change your content, or else: Manufacturer's demanding content changes is nothing new in the tech site community. We take a look at this topic, including one very public example that started in the past three weeks.
Date: March 15, 2004
Manufacturer: N/A
Written By: Hubert Wong
Just under a year ago, we provided some insight on the inner workings of running a tech site. Yes, there are thousands of sites out there, and despite the diversity, there are several constants in our universe... costs, advertising, readership, and most important of all, integrity.
Running a site, especially a tech site, isn't free and there are plenty of costs involved. Everything from the hardware purchases (not everything is free, which is a general misconception I think), to the server and bandwidth... it all has a price.
This is where advertising comes in. If the site is lucky enough, advertising will net a nice income each month, but for a greater number of owners, they'll be lucky if it helps them break even.
Of course, an advertiser is not going to consider a site that doesn't meet their traffic requirements. Readership is what makes our world go round. Without our loyal readers, VL wouldn't be where it is today, and I would say that the same goes for the majority of sites out there.
Casual readers come and go, but a loyal reader is somebody that means a lot to a site. It's common knowledge that most sites track their traffic. This gives us an idea of trends, and how to cater our content. We're not too concerned about our uniques a day, but rather our bookmarks and returns. People who bookmark and/or return multiple times a day make up a site's readership. Uniques are new visitors who either stop and go, or decide to stay. What turns a unique visitor into a regular reader? Content? Yes. Attention to detail? Sure thing. Integrity? Nobody likes a site that lies about a product just to suck up, right?
Granted, the last point isn't something that is respected by a great number of sites (the actual number is more than you think), but the site's I do frequent on a regular basis (Ed. Note: Including our own :D) do try hard to stick with their journalistic integrity.
There are instances though where manufacturers will try to influence
a site's review. Sadly, this happens quite often, and it becomes
a problem when this influence attempts to change a
writer's perception of the product. This is something site owners
need to deal with constantly, and yes, here at VL we've been asked
to have a change of heart on more than one occasion.
Errors or omissions happen, and we're more than happy to make
amendments, but as a reader, you can rest assured knowing we'll
never mislead you because somebody asked us to so they can improve
sales.
Luckily, most Tier-1 manufacturers; i.e., the ones who have a good amount of exposure within the enthusiast community, do respect a journalist's right for free speech. Sure, even some of the big dogs take issue with what we in the community say, but that's the price of exposing yourself with press releases. Whether a product is released and performs less than expected, or if it
Don't bother, it's just VL trying to push up their ad revenue.
How about Oracle asking for MySQL to remove their stats from the benchmark table
"Note that Oracle is not included because they asked to be removed. All Oracle benchmarks have to be passed by Oracle! We believe that makes Oracle benchmarks very biased because the above benchmarks are supposed to show what a standard installation can do for a single client."
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While its not exactly reviewing all the latest and greatest, www.dansdata.com is my favorite "independent" web review site. He usually sticks to cameras, small computer parts, and other neat electronics, but he's a no BS kinda guy who will say something sucks when it does.
I've found that anandtech.com has been fairly accurate over the years.
Seconded. Dan rules. He reviews everything from small computer cases and bisarre amount of heatsinks, over LED flashlights and soap bubble pistols, to radio controlled tanks. His writing is excellent, and he's also very knowledgeable, which at least keeps me checking back every day for new articles. And no, I have no relation whatsoever to Dan, I'm across the planet from him. I'm just an appreciative reader, who really should get a PayPal account and plonk some $AU his way some day.
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Just to say so up front, I write for The Inquirer (www.theinquirer.net), and do a fair amount of hardware reviews. I also go to the trade shows and the like, and talk to other journalists. You learn a lot there.
:). You learn even more if you do not drink. I don't.
You also go to parties afterwards and people get very drunk. You learn a lot more there
The things you learn are open secrets, all the vendors know what is going on, and all the writers and reporters do also. Some employees may not know thier bosses are not quite clean, but that is another issue.
I was talking to several DRAM vendors about benchmarking at CES, and was told, by name, and usually by several sources that certain web sites would not review a product without advertising dollars. In fact, advertising dollars could significantly skew the results of a review.
These were not offhand comments like 'we think that they don't like us', it was direct 'If we don't cough up the cash, they won't review us'. Several different sources in the DRAM and other industries told me similar things, and for the most part, 2 or 3 names kept coming up. No, I will not name them.
If you follow the hardware sites, you can pretty much pick up who is 'dirty'. When 5 sites review the same new video card, all with the same *yawn* benchmarks, and 4 get one result, and the 5th gets a different result, and praises the 'loser' in the commentary, what do you think is going on? I mean, it is rather obvious.
The flip side of it is I get accused of bias just about ever day. Other than it getting rather old, it is usually not worth commenting on. I get accused of loving AMD, loving Intel, and being a liberal weenie and a republican nazi over the same article.
The truth of the matter is I get what hardware I can from who I can, and write about it. I bitch out HP all the time for blatant management stupidity, but I can't recall ever reviewing one of their products badly. I buy a lot of them with my own money. Strangely, they won't talk to me.
I also review a lot of AMD gear, and almost no Intel stuff. Why? AMD sends me things when I ask, without any pain or hoops to jump through. Intel won't. I know they can, friends in the industry have intel sending truckloads of chips to them on offhand remarks. I would almost say they don't like me or want me near thier products. If I ever do get one, I will write about it fairly though, I think that is what they are afraid of.
Last but not least, I know at least 3 of The Inq writers, me included, have been offered money to do something, or not do something. All the ones that I have heard of turned them down. At CES in January, a vendor who I know and like tried to hand me a wad of bills. I (politely) turned him down, even though it was probably more money than I had seen in a month, and it would have made the difference between another day of dollar menu items and water, and the not totally cheap buffets in vegas. Others have been offered 6 digits to do things. Personally, I don't know why he turned that one down.
What it all comes down to is ethics. Once yousell out, you are done. How can you trust them ever again? Easy you can't. That is why I turned down the money, and why the site puts reporting first. If it were any other way, I would be gone.
Other sites make other decisions, and they quickly get the reputations that they deserve. The community knows, and if you look closely, you can pick out who is clean fairly easily, it isn't all that hard.
-Charlie
The issue arose when ATI failed to offer support for MS's XP-Media Center Edition (MCE) until more than 2 years after the rest of the tuner vendors did so.
In Oct 2003, ATI announced "support" for MCE in 2 ways: a "hardware encoder" card, the eHomeWonder, and drivers for existing AIW cards, called "Encode", a software MPEG encoder.
A public Beta was started with just 15 members, and the performance of Encode was abyssmal, if it ran at all.
Public discussion ensued at several sites concerning if ATI was even serious about MCE support, or if they were going to intentionally screw with MCE to instead support their own PVR solution; MMC.
The folks at ATI threatened the owners/moderators/webmasters at several sites to CENSOR FORUM COMMENTS that revealed ATIs piss-poor customer support (if you bought a $400 video card that was supposed to work with MCE because the vendor said it would, but then ATI refused to release the drivers, wouldn't you be pissed off when the makers of numerous $60 tuners provide drivers for free?).
ATI still won't release drivers.
Rage3D STILL censors posts that go into any detail about ATI shortcomings whenever ATI calls to complain.
Even the MICROSOFT NEWSGROUPS (microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter) are censored upon ATI request when the posts detail how ATI has utterly failed to bring out a MCE solution that works.
ATI's "Encode" solution for AIW cards was used by just one OEM and results are not very good compared to other tuners. their eHW card was not selected by ANY large OEMs and ATI has resorted to selling this "OEM-only" card through the "Grey Market"
ATI's sales success with tuners in the MCE arena is really bad. Even vendors who go to ATI for video cards turn and run away from ATI tuners and buy those that actually work like Hauppague and Avermedia.
And HDTV? The new ATI HDTV Wonder is nothing new. The other manufacturers have offered similar performance for 2 years+. But ATI releases the new card to much fanfare despite the fact they are 2 years behind the times. Again, posts stating this are CENSORED AT ATI DEMAND from numerous enthusiast websites.
And when anybody complains about the function of ATI tuners, the crappy ATI support, links to working Encode drivers, or discusses ATIs strategy in depth, ATI responds by intimidating and CENSORING user forums, gets the webmasters to "Ban" anti-ATI posters, and basically subverts the public discussion intent of open forums.
So while in the Hard OCP case, companies may use crazy lawsuits, in the real world, all most companies need to do (like ATI does) is threaten the website owners that they won't get any more goodies to play with and they will lose advertising, and "POOF!" whatever the vendor doesn't like is gone into the ether of internet revisionist history!
"Dans Data / will say something sucks when it does."
Just had to buy some speakers for work, and there was only one site which ignored the manufacturers' claims of power rating, and talked instead about the wattage available from the power supply, the likely efficiency, and the ratings printed on the back of each driver. Most other sites seem to take specifications at face-value.
In fact, Dans Data has been known to:
(-) Tell you a speaker gives 20W output even when it's described as "250W total system power"
(-) Actually test CPU heatsinks with a resistive heater
(-) Relentlessly mock manufacturers who describe 10^9 bytes as a gigabyte
(-) Take everything apart
(-) Know enough about overclocking to laugh at people who do it badly
(-) Pick-up digital camera manufacturers for lying in their "megapixel" ratings (I think some of them count each colour in a pixel as a separate pixel?)
(-) Write reviews in valid HTML that are all on one page, and use the full width of your browser window without Flash animations
(-) Test PC power supplies under load, and compare it with manufacturer specifications
(-) Get out the multimeter for pretty much everything, from LED flashlights to power supplies and batteries
And of course, the famous:
(-) debunking a load of wacko free-energy products and "this'll make your toaster healthier" new-age power connectors.
As Dan would say, "reccommended."
How did this "article" even make it to the front page? It is horribly written and is not even news.
The piece was as in-depth and well-written as all articles on "hardware news sites", ie. utter bollocks. The only thing missing was the overclocking performance graphs.
Tom's Hardware has nothing to worry about from IBM.
/. regulars are well aware of, are exactly that. Death comes to your data on these drives eventually. Too bad for a large number of customers, it came sooner rather than later.
/. story points out, why bite the hand that feeds you advance facts on hardware under ndas, and direct contact with company engineers?
IBM's GXP Deathstar hard drives, as
When the news first broke on these drives, some tech sites came out with the news, and others kept fairly silent. Silence isn't a crime. But continuing to use Deathstars in review gear should be. Why? Because some readers, myself included, used reviews and testing gear examples from Tom's Hardware to build our first computers. Take advice and recommendations from the experts, and you get a better computer, right?
As the current
Consumer Reports buys everything they test. With the money that Tom's Hardware has made from advertising on its site (from reader views), they should be doing the same.
Don't take my word for it. Check the dates of when the Deathstar stories first appeared. Then check the hardware reviews on Tom's Hardware. Not just hard drive reviews. Check reviews of other hardware related or dependent upon hard drive speed to get some benchmarks or results. Then see what hard drives are used in the benchmarks, and in the review gear.
While some of their readers went down in flames, others were announcing that the there was a problem, and they continued on as if nothing was wrong. They may have acknowledged the problem in a small story or two iirc (maybe not even that), but they continued using the hard drives in their review gear, without a footnote or warning about them.
Why?
Bishop, some of your comments ring true and are worth further discussion.
This is exactly the reason why we at Geartest.com don't buy any products for review purposes.
In the linked write-up, VL/ViperLair/Hubert Wong says of running his site (emphasis added):
There is a psychological phenomenon called "buyer's remorse" that product marketers and salesmen try to take advantage of. It's a subconscious type of anxiety-based self-hypnosis. The principle hinges on an individual's desire 1. not to be wrong when making a purchase, 2. to have made a sound buying decision and 3. to get the best deal. Buyer's remorse tends to manifest itself most strongly on high-ticket items.
By making a personal (financial or emotional) investment in a product, you are much more likely to have a favorable opinion of it. Remember that the next time a salesman tries to get you to agree with him about the positive aspects of a product (car salesmen are notorious for this). It lowers healthy consumer skepticism and inclines you toward a positive opinion of a product. That's exactly why anyone who does reviews should never purchase products for reviews and expect to maintain any credibility.
That should go without saying. What I would add is that you should read critically and keep in mind the biases that each of those sites have. There is no such thing as a completely objective review. Reviews are subjective by their very nature. The best you can do is try to determine which reviews are fair and honest, then filter out any inherent biases.
Numbers are not the be-all and end-all. For example, we have seen how numbers can be manipulated with recent benchmarking scandals. How many times have you read comments here on Slashdot where people are sick and tired of the same sites running the same benchmark tools, then posting the results here, presumably just to drive up their traffic numbers? They don't add anything useful. Everyone here can download those same benchmarks and run them.
With the exception of the hardcore technical reader, the majority of consumers out there -- who look to reviews to help them make decisions -- do not have the knowledge or background to properly or usefully interpret or understand those results, even when explained in plain language.
It's fair to say trust the numbers, but only to a point. If you have made buying decisions based on a review, and you find that a site has a good track record, stick with it, but don't stop reading critically. The people who write reviews are just as human and fallible as you are. The commentary and interpretation that come with a review are at least as valuable (if not moreso) than raw statistics. Numbers do not tell the whole story -- they are only part of it.
The rest of Bishop's tips are good to keep in mind.
One thing I would add. Stop supporting/giving patronage to sites that pander or otherwise offer skewed reviews and little value.
Support those that offer fair, high-quality reviews and information. It's the only way to guarantee that the best sites stay online and the manufacturers provide access to those who offer you the high-quality content that you want.