Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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.
eden.h4xx.com - whacky free for all image board
They talk about journalistic integrity as in not changing reviews to get ad dollars, then go on to talk about the HardOCP deal. I am not going to get into that, because my comments get bitchslapped down whenever I support a company that is not in /.'s good graces.
They should have picked a more relevant example, like Tom's Hardware and the Intel P3 fiasco where the 1.13's had a critical error in them. It really seems like they were just trying to get mentioned on Slashdot, and seem like a really good review site.
Influence will always occur, never take a single opinion as fact. But unless there is a dramatic smoking gun, memo, email, hidden video of the editor at Bill's place on the lake sipping a pina colada (yea, sure), proof will be very hard to come by. Look at a long track record of information, and if you see a lot of ads by one vendor, grain of salt time.
The manufacturers are dictating what is revealed so they don't look bad?? Who would have ever thought.. I'm shocked.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's an odd thing to say before posting to Slashdot.
I understand the need to hsve integrity in what is reported. Any person trying to stifle a collection of facts (which is what HardOCP had/has), should be strung up like a traitor.
Now, if there was libel or untruth involved, I'm the first to say they need to be punished... but... don't try to hide your own faults by beating up on a website. Nobody likes a sore loser (or vaporware company).
[cheapplug]For some journalistic goodness, go to oldos.org[/cheapplug]
Jay | http://oldos.org
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
We already read the same exact thing, but in different words and headline over a week ago. This new article brings nothing new to the table except for a slightly misleading headline.
/. headlines until something new actually surfaces in the case.
The [H] issue has more to do with halting what someone feels is slander, and little to do with the widespread problems with hardware review sites skewing benchmarks to keep a vendor, advertiser, or to get free stuff.
Unique as the issue may be, it's not worthy of multiple
If I wanted a 15 year old's opinion in essay format on the issue, I would have simply gone to [H]'s forum.**
** - Not that a 15 year old is less intelligent than anyone else, just young people tend to not have their heads glued on straight when it comes to business and law. Wisdom takes time to build.
Isn't the whole point of the lawsuit that they aren't?
Worried you might not keep your virginity forever? Try new Linux(TM), guaranteed twice as effective as LARPing
I have never got a request from a hardware manufacturer to beautify anything related to them at TuxMobil - Linux On Mobile Computers. Actually laptop manufacturers do not seem to care about Linux users. But there are other caveats. As discussed at SlashDot I had severe trademark trouble with the former project name MobiliX. There are other legal issues, which may occure in an instant. For example if some lawyer accuses a website owner not to obey certain legal requirements. At least in some countries (e.g. Germany) a dedicated law for internet content exists.
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."
Error: Id10t detected
In the old days, if you advertise enough the paper would automatically tweek the review. Infoworld had done this with a compiler review. If you read the review, then looked at the score card, you would notice that they did not match.
Fight Spammers!
If this sort of thing is common, can anyone recommend any review sites that they trust?
--
Real-time deal updates
1) Ad revenue created by page hits
2) Post non-story to slashdot
3) PROFIT!!!
A LOT of Eula's are like that. Read Java's Eula.
Finally someone who not only "gets" hardware review sites, but can also sum them up in entirely in 3 very short lines.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
You mean that there is no journalistic ingrity out there anymore? Hooray and thank you, Fox News!
Dude, where's my packet?
The reviewer said all data came from the manufacturer's public information & Google. Finding it on Google doesn't validate the data. You need to look at the site that Google sends you too, validate that it is a trustworthy site which has information that you can use.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
Wisdom takes time to build.
How old was Strom Thurmond when he died?
The ______ Agenda
Yes, that caught my eye too. I find most of the hardware-review sites I read on Google, for that matter. And the whole point of all of this is: how do you "validate that it is a trustworthy site"? Any site? Answer: you don't. Everything on the Web is basically taken on faith or not at all, and you have to use your own judgment as to what is reliable and what is not. But, really ... that's the way things have been since the invention of written language. I mean, how often have you heard the expression "You don't believe everything you read, do you?" That is more true now than it ever was before. When you think about it, back in the age of books (the old-fashioned non-battery-powered, non-backlit kind without a microprocessor), there was an editing and review process for virtually everything that was published. That guaranteed a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than we have on the Web. Yes, it's true ... anyone can publish their works to the whole damn planet for the price of a free Web hosting account, and that is generally a good thing. But that doesn't mean the quality or reliability of that material is any better: on average it is quite the opposite in fact.
The problem is that some (many, I think) people look at information found via Google as somehow having been vetted or approved by that organization. How many users even grasp that once they click on a link on a Google results page they are no longer even connected to Google? Google is primarily an index, not a repository (yes, I know they cache pages but they don't create or maintain that information.) The World Wide Web is the repository, and like most public receptacles it is largely full of crap.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
On the other hand vendors couldn't care less if we demand changes. I still remember when Oracle issued a press release claiming it was the inventor of relational databases. I immediately fired back demanding a retraction. They never did, several years after you could still find the aforesaid release in their database.
Now imagine if we asked them to stop lying about SQL being relational...
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
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!
Do you know anything about IT? Or are you one who think IT is only the million dollar projects? A small companie orderbook or a mere webshop don't count?
The stats on mysql showed that for simple setups mysql outperforms the big boys. Factor in price and oracly quickly becomes a terrible product. (A webmonkey can maintain mysql. Oracle needs a dbm)
BUT only on small/medium applications. That is what the benchmark showed. But oracle doesn't like that to be known. It shows people the medium to big benchmarks and how well it does and hopes everyone forgets that they suck at small and are not really good at the gigantic stuff either.
Check out the benchmarks at the top of the pyramid. No oracle.
But I can understand oracle agreeing. Isn't it against advertising standards to name your competitor? Not allowed to say, we are better then those guys? Wich is why in washing powder commercial they literally have brand X.
Anyway would you trust any product wich people are not allowed to test?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
it does not validate the data, but it does validate that the information is "publicly discussed".
If the information covered by NDA can be found using google, then it might be safer to assume that writing about it/commenting might be ok. [though IANAL... so....]
--
Time is on my side
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.