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Tech Review Sites and Payola
cheesecake23 writes "How often have you read a hardware review and thought: 'No way was that an honest opinion, the reviewer was bought'—? The Daily Tech has gone undercover to find out whether or not payola is accepted among the 35 largest online English-language hardware review sites. Questions asked and answered — Q: How many sites would take money (or sell ads) in exchange for a product review? A: 20 percent. Q: How many sites would additionally consider selling an Editor's Choice award? A: None. Q: Were any regions of the world more corrupt than others? A: No, it was 20-25% almost everywhere. Q: Does it depend on the size or age of the site? A: RTFA. Although no bad actors were explicitly unmasked, the article contains enough information to make a whitelist of quite a few good guys."
Slashdot takes it, just admit it.
How else can the editors explain Roland Piquepaille, among others?
How much to get an article on Slashdot? =p
I remember when Toms Hardware Guide was a good, unbiased resource..
wait...
In today's corporate-controlled world does anyone take reviews without a hefty dose of skepticism?
I'm not trying to say that there aren't neutral reviewers but, with marketing budgets as they are, is anyone surprised that some "neutral" reviewers are actually paid enough to be biased?
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
How do we know daily tech did not take any payola from the reviewers surveyed?
Maybe they only take money from people they know are from major companies, because if they took money from anyone who asked, they would be quickly exposed.
Isn't that akin to asking death row inmates if they're guilty?
And why not, exactly? Oh, because they might sue? Come dear, this site talks about government oppression (and the need to oppose it) constantly. Resisting the evil **AAs is considered civil disobedience (automatically noble, of course). But you can't list the few sites, who — verifiably, one assumes — have agreed to accept something in exchange for better reviews?
Sorry. No Pulitzer prize for this piece of investigative journalism...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Ask any Congressman and they'll be happy to tell you they don't take gifts from Lobbyist. Then you start asking have you ever accepted a trip, expensive bottle of wine or dinner, etc and the story changes. There are other ways of pressuring and where as I think there are legit sites like Tom's I think the percentages are much worse than presented. At the very least many sites are biased whether the bias comes from personal conviction or encouragement is the question.
Pardon my naivety, but exactly what is so "immoral" about it? I've never really understood that. "I've got a radio station. You've got a song. Let's talk." Seems perfectly natural to me.
A radio station could play a song a hundred times, or a million. If everybody hates the song, they're still going to hate it no matter how many times it gets aired. Meanwhile, the record company is out a pile of cash. It almost sounds like a win-win for the consumer.
Obviously, bribing magazines for good reviews seems like a different matter...but the radio thing -- and especially the choice of the word "immoral" -- is kind of lost on me.
Breakfast served all day!
I've always been a bit annoyed that hardware review sites almost always get cherry picked engineering samples to test. Normally this isn't a big deal, but they always test the overclockability of hardware these days (I swear Ars, HotHardware, HardOCP, and the like would overclock hard drives if they could) which is fairly pointless with a sample size of 1. Worse, they have no way of testing if that overclocking is going to cause the hardware to fizzed out after 2 months. They also rarely include factors like "will the manufacturer maintain driver support 3 months down the road and fix the bugs in the current driver?" which is far more important than clocking it up to 105% and running Supreme Commander.
I know I'm being a little unfair here, but it's one of the main reasons that I rarely bother with hardware review sites anymore unless I'm actively looking to buy a particular piece of hardware. Well, that and their tendency to spread articles out over hundreds of pages with as little content as possible on each page.
A good example of this is the 120 page article on Core2Duo heatsinks posted to Slashdot a few days ago. At no point did the hardware review guys examine the fans to see if they were bottom of the barrel "will die in 6 months" models, or if they were high quality fans worth the $50 price tag on the cooling solution.
I read the internet for the articles.
I found many reviews to be very unreliable for the most part and stopped reading them. Monitor reviews are especially bad imo. Rarely will a reviewer even mention what type of panel it is (TN, S-IPS, S-PVA etc)and that's an irregularity in my view because cheap panels like the TN's get the same or better ratings as the usually superior S-IPS panels (which look obvioulsy different to anyone with 30 seconds instruction). Dell and Samsung seem to always get positive reviews. Then some riot ensues in the forums likes when Dell had banding issues. In the past year Dell has ben swapping inferior panels into displays after they already got reviews with superior panels. The forums are full of "Dell Lottery" posts and thread threads complining about buying one monitor and essentially getting another. After months of this, I think I have seen it mentioned once in an article in the may sites I see visit. Dell ads are flashing on the sides of most of these sites. Reviews seem to be becoming an extension of manufacturers marketing just like TV and print news always seem to be inserting the latest entertainment product made by the ABC, FOX etc. I find the best way to see it good reviews are merited is to follow how the forums react.
I once overclocked my ethernet card.
at the time, getting 11Mbps was pretty good!
and you're right - I had to have special LANCE controllers to achieve that speed. its true. most could only go to 10.5.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
So there was this guy on trial, he says to the jury "Looks like I have money, you have power, let's talk. We can work something out".
What's wrong with the above? Money is trading hands between private individuals for mutual exchange, but something the public owns (i.e. the judicial system) is getting used not for the greater good of society, but for individuals. It's the same thing with radio. There's a limited amount of bandwidth the public gives away with knowledge that the owner will use it impartially for playing music. If payola is legal, radio stations may as well be owned by the record companies themselves. If Virgin records had a radio station, they'd use it to shamelessly promote their own artists. This isn't so hypothetical since Virgin does in fact own a satellite radio station, but that's OK, since in so doing, they are not using up the limited public bandwidth.
This is a little abstract now that most radio stations are owned by Clear Channel and have no claim to independence, but this was originally meant to allow some separation and moderation between the consumer and the record companies, while allowing new artists and record companies to have low barriers to entry. There's still college radio stations, pacifica radio, and NPR stations, but aside from that, unfortunately non-bias in exchange for public goods does seem to have gone with the times.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
All English speaking countries except Australia....8->
Who was expecting honesty from the land of convicts down under...
or maybe we are better at smelling a setup...
The beef is that he is his own personal shill. Nearly every story he submits is a link to his own blog.
Whether they're interesting stories or not, and whether his stories are worse than having no Roland at all, it's the sort of blatant self-promotion that people on Slashdot are finely attuned toward hating. It is an affront to the sort of chaotic diversity that we've grown accustomed to having here, and folks don't like it.
Kid-proof tablet..
I finally wised up the the coincidence of endorsements of parts for performance cars, and the size of the ads in the magazines. Once I figured that out, I started seeing this sort of thing everywhere. In many places it's obvious, in other places it is more subtle. Recently I've noticed that this viral marketing is effecting web searches.
I'm thankful for this little bit of 'research', but the job that was done was cursory and will simply make these charlatans be a little more sneaky about how business is conducted; where there's money to be made, product placement can be bought.
This is one of the arguments for open-sourcing development of software and hardware; 'products' compete on merit, not marketing.
Best regards.
IGN/Gamespy. What Gamespot calls a gumball, Gamespy calls, less charmingly, a "Gamespy Spotlight". But the content and the principle is basically the same: the Spotlights are those thumbnail screenshot links that you see on the site's front page. "What you're looking at on the front page is not what the editors decided is the best game," the media buyer informed me. Source: kotaku.com - They actually have a whole section on ethics including one bribe that I'm sure is utterly reasonable.
In the same way that payola for music is illegal (in the US, although actual prosecutions are almost non-existent), it would benefit the tech industry if payola "reviews" were outlawed. The problem there is that there were attempts to make non-payola reviews of tech articles illegal, by banning reviews that were not authorized by the manufacturer. Dunno if that ever passed, but it wouldn't surprise me. Nonetheless, without independent monitoring, the industry is nothing more than trickery and fakery. Why? Because those are so much easier and cheaper than actually doing any real work. If you make the money anyway, why not take the easier road?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Taking money can also be somewhat more subtle than "ok, it will cost you 30 silvers for a 95% score".
For example, in traditional printed media, advertising money was always a big set of shackles. The "if you don't give us 95% or more, we'll not advertise in your magazine" threat was around in various shapes for as long as there were reviews magazines, and some caved in big time.
I remember, for example, that back in the 80's some game magazines even let big publishers write their own shameless advertising as a review... and I only started to suspect something's fishy when one had given itself 115% score.
Others do it for the previews and free material to review. Being a review magazine or site puts one in a very tight spot, because you depend on having stuff to review and _preview_. No freebies to review, no reviews, no site. In a nutshell, it's the worst kind of conflict of interest: the same guys you're supposed to honestly review and grade, are the guys who control your air supply and can tighten the noose around your neck any time they stop liking you.
Even if you were rich and bought all the stuff to review (though that's a _lot_ of money), previews can still make or break your popularity. If you review games and you're the only site who has no clue what's EA's _next_ game gonna be like, you're fucked. If you're a hardware review site and are the only one who has no clue what nVidia is up to until the card actually hit the shelves (i.e., up to 6 months even after launch), you're just irrelevant.
And, yeah, both only work for big players. If Trident came and said "we'll only send you our next graphics card to review if you promise to make it look good", chances are you'd laugh them out of the office.
In fact, the side effect of being in the pocket of the big players, is that a lot of sites proceed to shaft the smaller players as some kind of "look, we can still give bad grades too!" proof. Some of the sites and magazines that caved in, at least then just shifted their whole band to the high end, and everyone equally gets grades between 90% and 100%, or between 4 and 5 stars. But I can think of some at least in the game reviews arena who figured out they still have a reputation to build, and proceeded to have to demolish some obscure or indie game regularly, to show that they can give low grades too. They're impartial like that. You better trust them that EA's review actually earned a 95% score, 'cause, look, they also gave some minor player a 15% this month!
So going at one of those pretending to be a minor player looking to buy a review, well, duh, of course won't work.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The rot is far deeper. This article vastly understates the problem: there are so many levers manufacturers can pull in order to influence or bias reviews, payola is only the start of it. Development of corrupt benchmark software used by the review sites can be bought, biased compilers (Intel compiler) generate some of the code being benched, advertisement money can be withheld or expanded, early or free samples can be provided or denied.
The review sites, in turn, can do a lot to make review seem fair while applying a subtle bias. They can limit themselves to certain benchmarks, (de)emphasize or arbitrarily weigh some results, frame the the article, or spin the conclusion.
It is not hard to see this in action. Take the pervasive and saturating Core 2 hype on all sites, last year, for example. Many sites were running the same biased selection of benchmarks. Nearly all sites avoided 64-bit benchmarks.
I would like to see a bootable Linux benchmark CD that runs stock GCC compiled code in 32 and 64-bit mode and provides various workload, scalability, and throughput tests. Something that is open and runs precisely the same code on all machines. Something anyone can pop in his own PC or laptop. But then, even if that were to exist, would the sites start to report that benchmark in their reviews?
The German-language 'PC-Professionell' (they belonged to Ziff-Davis back then) used to always carry a full-page advert for 'Waibel' computers on the back cover. Inside the magazine, they would review various hardware and Waibel *always* got the editor's choice award. The way I remember it, even if they were not reviewing any other PCs they would still review the finest offering from Waibel so they could rave about it. As far as I remember, other Ziff-Davis magazines did the same but it is PC-Pro I really noticed.
Another computer magazine called C't also reviewed Waibel hardware once or twice. In the last review they gave, they indicated the hardware was ok at best (I think they were overclocking) but that the XP Licenses were illegal - something they got Microsoft to confirm. This was in late 2002. Waibel ceased trading in January 2003.
I am sure that Waibel paying for full-page back-cover adverts, and the rave-reviews inside were just a coincidence.
Quoting the DailyTech article: Once presented with the data for this article, Schnieder paused before responding. "I think if you look back even five years, you would have seen this type of thing be much more common than it is today." He concludes, "Like most things, the marketplace will eventually weed out the businesses and websites who choose to operate in this manner."
Waibel closed. I occasionally look at a PC-Professionell nowadays but I can't see any obvious weighting in their reviews so hopefully the company works differently nowadays - almost 5 years later.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
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I quit journalism because I got pressure to favor advertisers' products. I had the Exec Editor of a trade print publication attribute my name to a press release and it was called a "review." I told her that if she did it again, I'd sue for defamation of character. \
For related reasons about the integrity of the mag, I quit.
That was 2000. I can do more good as a poster than a writer...
=D
http://www.maximumpc.com/
One of my favorite personal sayings, "I've been around computers so long I can remember when non-Microsoft products were PC Magazine's "office applications of the year".
First read the glowing reviews of the product on several tech sites. Then type the name of the product into Google followed by the word "sucks". Read those "reviews". The truth is normally somewhere in between.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I've been writing for both print and online mags for 15+ years and have never been hassled by a supplier over a bad review or been offered anything for a good review (UK based). Most editors I've worked for have been very clear about working to a 'ad dept does not talk to editorial' policy.
I've often been told about how much US editorial is 'bought' but wasn't aware it was so endemic globally.
The closest I've ever come to any possibility of being bought is that some manufacturers let you keep the hardware/software and some insist on having it back after the review period. In recent years this has shifted to the latter in the UK due to changes in tax law that prevent review kit from being treated as tax deductible.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil