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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.
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.
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.
There are other reasons to consider payola immoral, but there is a straightforward reason: if the DJ's only spin songs they've been payed to play, the those who can't pay won't get paid.
Simply put, payola keeps small artists and those without the backing of a well-monied party at a distinct disadvantage. The major labels certainly form an oligopoly, and, cartel or not, they have maintained their oligopoly through 1) control of the distribution chain, 2) buying out the supply of new talent, and 3) through squeezing small players from the most effective publicity channels. #1 is threatened by the internet, and is their largest problem right now. #2 is the fault of bands stupidly signing disadvantageous contracts; to a mild extend newer bands are wising up, though. #3 is still an issue. Payola is the direct way of doing it, and gave the majors their initial dominance. Nowadays, it is a little more discreet; "independent promoters" get money from the majors, and then they in turn turn over "stuff" to radio stations (stuff ranging from blatant cash bribes to concert tickets to give away through on-air contests). Direct or not, payola floods playlists with songs from well-funded labels, at the expense of smaller labels or self-produced bands which do not have the resources to buy their way onto playlists.
There is an exception; a record label can straight out pay to get a song played, but the radio station has to disclaim that it is a pay-for-play, and the amount of airtime devoted to pay-for-play is limited by law (I believe it may be by considering such to be advertising; and radio stations are limited in the fraction of airtime which is advertising). This sort of payment is probably unproblematic from a legal and a moral standpoint, unless playlists are influenced by who is buying advertising (which would essentially be old-skool payola again).
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..
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?
For obvious reasons, I can see why they may want to avoid 'outing' those who are involved in payola, but it would be nice to get a few more names from the article on who we can legitimately trust.
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]