Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Business of Online Reviews For Hire
Rick Zeman writes "Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service. The New York Times tells of the rise and fall of the founder of one such hired third party service who had has been so successful planting paid fake reviews that he no longer trusts any online review. He should know. Because of him and his kind, it's estimated that one third of online reviews are fake."
I wonder if this includes www.oracle.com ?
Give us a link that doesn't require registration.. aieet?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
When the only article in the story is requires a login. Next, please.
about the marketing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo&noredirect=1
"You are satan's spawn. Just kill yourself"
This post is provided without warranty as to reliability, accuracy or otherwise or fitness for any particular purpose.
You only learn from reviews what something can't do, not what it can. I usually only look at negative reviews myself, and possibly fact-check against positive reviews. A product has to be truly great to garner all positive reviews. ...like Sonos-- check them out at Sonos.com, or buy at your local Target store! It changed my life! ;-)
I've seldom trusted consumer reviews, not because they might be fake, but because "consumers" often lack enough experience with large enough numbers of competing products for their opinions to hold any weight. When I'm looking for reviews of a product, I want professional reviews from journalists who are dedicated to researching the genre.
Back in the 1980's, if you read a review on the internet (usenet at the time, there was no web yet), you could be sure it was from a "real person", and was a real opinion, not a paid shill or something written by a marketer. You could be sure the resulting discussion was being engaged in by real people as well.
That culture has been lost from the entire internet, and it is increasingly hard to sort out what's real from what's not. Some of them are obvious, but the better shills are increasingly sophisticated. This is one of the many prices paid for the eternal september. It was overrun by the marketeers and the ad men, who ruined the commons for the rest of us.
Captcha: throngs
This product and or service does exactly what is says it will do and is the best product ever. I have brought many similar {product x}s from here and this one actually works/is the best.
AAA+
Does Consumer Reports still have a good reputation? If so, problem solved
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I also used to be skeptical about online reviews, especially when I saw MyCleanPC.com had so very many great online reviews. But then I tried out MyCleanPC, and I saw the truth for myself! The truth being, of course, that all online reviews are fake.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/business/book-reviewers-for-hire-meet-a-demand-for-online-raves.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all ?
Still searching, but figured I'd drop this one for now.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Does Consumer Reports still have a good reputation? If so, problem solved
Except they miss a lot of products. I used them for a time, and found that unless I was buying a car or a major appliance it wasn't all that useful.
Finally got through.. Ah "customer" reviews. Good entertainment value at least.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This article is extremely insightful and very well written in a clear and concise format. It helped me and my family greatly and we are thrilled that we took the time to register with NYT. The article was so good that I have gone so far as to take out a one year paid subscription to the online version of the NYT.
I really can't stress it enough. If you do not read this article, you are losing out. I would read this article again.
Bill Needledick
Westbury, MN
When you've got a website that use comparative charts of all the products they have reviewed, you can have some trust in their value.
That doesn't mean they there are no review that were paid for, or that no bad side of a product were purposely omitted, but at least that way they can't fake every performance, because they still have to compare them against each other.
Apart from that, I guess it's best to stick to the website(s) you know you can (more or less) trust, and to always triple check, or more, with user reviews and other websites.
It has long been known that many companies hire "armies" of reviewers and commentators to promote their product and hide any negative information under a ton of PR releases. Waggener Edstrom and a few others advertise their purpose and MO.
In the beginning, it was easy to pinpoint shills and marketeers; the word astroturf entered the English language after one of the first of such campaigns was identified. Now, they have become smarter; they use several accounts, with some doing "normal" comments and reviews to be seen as reliable and to be able to vote the more strident accounts up. These last accounts are either just spewing the PR garbage directly, and get created and abandoned very quickly, or they create a "personality", almost always biased towards a single company or product, but always somewhat discrete, trying to appear as genuine fans, upbeat about a product. These are harder to identify, as sometimes a blind fan might not be different from one of these shills; but usually blind fans don't get up voted as quickly as these are by the other company accounts.
Slashdot has been resisting these tactics, but they are pervasive, and there is money in this kind of trolling, so it is always a difficult battle...
Mine was damaged in shipping. One star.
Which are always written by news reporter who rely heavily on ad revenue for income.
Well here's something that those tea-partiers and libertarians don't want to hear.
The "R" word. REGULATION
Unless you want to live in Somalia, you should realize that there IS an important role for government beyond just self-defense and essential services (like police, fire, waste management). MARKETS need to be REGULATED, with binding rules and penalties for the offenders.
Don't take it from me, just read up on Adam Smith who called it "The Tragedy of the Commons". (If you don't know who he is, may I suggest you take a basic class in Economics? Hint: he's not a friend of Karl Max).
Of course Mr. Smith was writing about a simpler time in the18th century; the "commons" he was referring to was that used by grazing cows. So in our MUCH more compex world, it stands to reason that we need a MUCH more sophisticated regulatory system to prevent people like Enron (remember them?) and more recently, investment banks and rating agencies (paid by the people they rate!) from gaming the system. In addition, since more of our commerce is going on-line (yay for shopping in our bathrobes!) regulation needs to follow.
Unfortunately Romney and crew (who benefit the most from the lack of regulation) are going to try to convince you otherwise. For example they really don't want to restrict the ability of billionaires to dominate elections with their money (alright I guess if you're a billionaire, I'm not. Welcome to the 1920s, age of the robber barons). Also, as slashdotters well know, they really don't want to cut down on a corporation's right to regulate Internet traffic (bye bye net neutrality).
I'd tell you how much he's personally benefitted but he doesn't seem to be disposed to releasing his financial records. Still that hasn't kept some forensic analysis of what he has released from turning up some interesting things:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/business/in-romneys-tax-return-clues-in-foreign-taxes.html?ref=politics
Yeah, this seems to be about book reviews. If enough people submitted reviews, there's bound to be some negative ones. Just read those, and ignore the five star ones. For better accuracy, do like any other statistician, and throw out the highest and lowest scores.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You can show someone a pile of reproducable scientific papers a mile high, and show him a couple of testimonials, and the human mind wants to believe the latter every time.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Mr. Todd Jason Rutherford went into the business of poisoning the well, making the internet a worse and less reliable place, and now he just can't trust online reviews... Poor fellow, a dear innocent lamb in a cruel world.
Seriously, fuck this guy and the horse he rode in on. He poisoned the well, let him drink deeply. The only unfortunate part of his sordid story is that he helped impose the same lowered quality on the rest of us. Ah well, at least his business collapsed, ironically thanks to a bad review...
We shourd probably start using something like a web of trust for online reviews and ratings.
It's great to see the different reviews on chinese sites like dinodirect and ahappydeal. Start looking at the reviews and you get the impression they hired someone to make a few english reviews and then copy-pasta throughout the entire category.
You come across a lot that are just plain wrong, with the paster obviously not english speaking. Cameras with reviews about how it works as promised "it's a great replacement for your original charger" and so forth.
Bloggers are contacted constantly to write reviews.
I've been blogging since the 1990s. A few times a year, I'll write an article about some software and a few months later someone with a competing product will contact me asking me to review their software. Most of the time, they are pushing an open-core system and I reviewed a 100% F/LOSS package.
There has never been any suggestion that I do more than an honest review, but they have offered to help get the system up and working should I run into any issues.
I've never done any of those _requested_ reviews. It doesn't interest me and I don't blog for profit. I blog as a way to
a) help others
b) help me remember key steps
Based on my online searches, it appears that commercial video codec transcoders are the worst at this. They build hundreds of websites around a single stolen transcoder with slightly different GUIs - usually just to make ffmpeg have a GUI on Windows or OSX. Crazy.
Any of the mpg2avi, mpg2h264, mpgtomp4, ipad/ipod-video-converter and hundreds of similar tools are just like that - stolen code they try to repackage for $19.99 with a GUI. I've never seen a valid review for these online.
BTW, use the FLOSS tool handbrake for these converstions. If you need an output format that handbrake doesn't support, use ffmpeg or avconv directly. Those really are easy-to-use tools.
I look at it this way. How many people really have time to write long reviews for products they use. I am rather a verbose writer, and have put up some reviews, but they have been concise. Second, how many people are absolutely satisfied with a product. Those that are are of no use to the rest of us. Like my opinion of a retail store, I am more interested in the exceptions rather than how it deal with expected input. How does the store deal with returns and haggling over price. How does the vacuum deal with ninja lego pieces. Does the pretty metal computer get easily dented. Does the story get lame in the middle.
In all honesty the reason these commissioned reviews work is because there is a lot of crap out there that is basically the same, and all we really want is validation of the choice to buy one piece of crap over another. It is why movies are now made or broken in the first weekend due to social media. No one want to go to a movie that has been lambasted on facebook. It just is not cool.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Does Consumer Reports still have a good reputation? If so, problem solved
Only partially. To the best of my knowledge, Consumer Reports is still well regarded in terms of freedom from vendor capture, editorial independence, and similar virtues; but it's carefully cultivated area of expertise (necessarily) moves rather slowly and covers limited ground.
Cars, consumer durables, that sort of thing, no problem. Books, music, games, movies, and similar cultural ephemera? Less useful. Consumer electronics not so well known that David Pogue might have heard of them? Less useful. Reputability of the various obscure online retailers who are quite attractive in terms of their ability to cut out the middle man, or at least replace him with a cheaper middleman(Well, let's see, I could go to Best Buy and pay Belkin to slap their sticker on a KVM switch manufactured by Guangdong Light Industries, or I could pay some dude in Hong Kong a third as much to drop-ship me the same damn thing, albeit without a brand sticker and an incomprehensible manual, hard choice...), also not an area of strength.
Even if Consumer Reports brings the consumer electronics tech side of their review mechanism fully to parity with their traditional areas, their scope is inevitably going to be limited compared to the vast volume of stuff out there.
This is an inevitable result of buying stuff online. If I want to know if a book is any good, I'll ask the people in my local bookstore, or at my library. That's right. I'll talk, face to face, with actual, living human beings about.. and get this... actual, physical books.
I don't respond to AC's.
When I'm reading reviews on Amazon, etc., I only look at the one-star and two-star reviews to see what buyers do not like about the product. You can tell pretty easily what's a real gripe ("Slashdot has too many Packt Publishing reviews") and what's a paid shill from a competitor ("Slashdot has too many Packt Publishing reviews, I only read those really excellent books from O'Reilly").
The trouble with crowdsourcing is that crowds can be sourced. I've been pointing this out for several years now. My "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" paper covers this. Some review spam is remarkably inept. My favorite, in the paper, is a set of three restaurant reviews that were clearly scraped from reviews of a car wash. Carpet cleaning reviews on Yelp tend to be amusing. The same phrases reappear in many reviews. Many reviews mention a company different than the one being reviewed. We know, of course, that over 80 million Facebook accounts are fake. Many of those fake accounts are being driven by 'bots posting fake reviews and social stats.
Social spam has been around for years, but went big-time in 2010. In Q4 2010, Google merged Google Places results into main web search. Google Places results could be easily spammed with fake reviews before that, but few people had bothered until those results boosted rankings in web search. Then the spam floodgates opened. Google was so heavily spammed that the mainstream press noticed. Google had to back off a bit on using Places results in web search to get their search quality back up.
The legacy of that debacle is that it became widely known that social spam was a safe, almost respectable SEO activity. Link farms, the previous way to spam Google, are expensive to run, and when Google detects one and blacklists it, an entire server farm suddenly becomes useless. Social spam doesn't put SEO operators at risk. The social networks even host the spam for free!
There's a potential winner in this - Amazon. Amazon knows if you actually paid money for the thing. They have identity data from credit cards. Amazon can still be spammed, but the spammer has to spend money, so the cost per spam is high.
Are the police/fbi involved ? because they should be, what the companies employing him did is fraud and false misrepresentation, across state lines too, conspiracy to defraud is a criminal matter no ?
What are your opinions on "Consumer Report" reviews? Are they legit to any degree? I'm trying to find a dependable central A/C & heating package. Every damn review out there is well written astroturf lies. After reading around a dozen positive reviews for a particular brand/model, I almost bought it, but luckily, I ran across a very negative, very detailed, review. Whether or not that one negative review was legit or from a competitor, I truly could not discern. It just seemed like a real dissatisfied customer warning others not to fall for a piece of expensive high-maintenance garbage . So I kept looking. Still am.
This article was totally gripping and enthralled me from beginning to end. I should've been doing analysis on my pump temperature data, but thanks to this article, I guess my report will be late. I'm so glad that I subscribed to the NYT, because David Streitfeld really knows how to do his research and produce an accurate and compelling report. It changed my life; I'll never look at online testimonials the same ever again.
Does Consumer Reports still have a good reputation? If so, problem solved
Sort of. Their website is littered with the same privacy-invading trackers as most other sites. As far as I am concerned that's a major no-no for an organization that claims to be on the consumer's side and that's enough for me to not renew my yearly subscription. But I have not yet heard of a case where that same attitude has poisoned anything else there ... yet.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
But Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan would all approve of this! How can you not say it is wonderful???
Please give priority to 'Social Media Consultants' and 'Search Engine Optimisation Experts'.
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
You have to learn to weigh up and read between the lines of both amateur and professional reviews.
:-
... (where I have written both good and bad reviews myself without censorship) and you will find lots of people saying Ryobi stuff is crap, but there is also a minority who say it is great. I have no doubt there is variation in people's experience (sometimes I have been the only person defending something myself) but clearly the balance is bad in such a case. But the ones saying crap often go into some detail as to why it is crap (or why it is good), and when they do that it starts to sound genuine.
For example, just an example, Ryobi garden machinery is crap, as I know from experience. Look up reviews eg here
www.reviewcentre.com
One issue raised about Ryobi is that you cannot easily get spares (in UK anyway - and Ryobi stuff sure needs spares). This is something that you might not think about when you buy (I thought it was a legal requirement for certain classes of goods), but having been warned by the reviews you can check out the point for yourself - try ordering a spare part from the place that is selling the whole items. And by "spares" I don't mean gloves and goggles (as the salesman will), I mean things like ignition coils and drive shafts. My point is that reviews can make you aware of aspects you may overlook, that you can then check for yourself if you don't believe it.
OTOH I read a customer review raving about something along the lines : "It's great! just as I expected! I am delighted with my new gizmo. It does everything I wanted it to. I can't wait to try it out for the first time !" Idiot.
Called "Testimonials".
For a gentle (and fun) introduction to the world Testimonials, the ancestors Reviews descend from, read the stories of O'Henry's "Gentle Grafter". Available free via Project Gutenberg.
Also read the back (advertising) pages in old comic books, from the nineteen-fifties and 'sixties. visit a collector, if you know one, or a shop where you can peruse imperfects.
There are lots of other literary sources, including movies. W.C.Fields selling a patent medicine that "cures hoarseness" is famous. In the trade the practice is called "shilling". It was around before writing. Monkish Testimonials can be found on vellum. The printing press spread Testimonializing wider, farther and faster. The computer did not really effect Testimonializing as testimonial value is in the distribution. The internet distributes... And what about Twitter?: "Shiller@hype: I lost 20# drinking Amway Soap! Screw Diets!"... ... ...
What about the 1-star reviews from competitors? I don't know if it happens often in books, but there are other categories where it's pretty obvious.
For the weirdest example of this happening, look at the reviews of sleeping masks on Amazon. Lots of horseshit 5-star and 1-star ratings on every single one of them. Apparently it's a super-competitive niche.
You have to assume that AT BEST any customer data you see has been screened. If customer satisfaction data is published, the only rational reason for doing so is as a form of advertising.
Only a third of online reviews are fake? The idea is laughable because most on-line reviews are positive.
People are much more motivated to post a negative comments than a 100% positive one. This is because when people get screwed, they are angry which is a strong motivator for action. When you get what you expect, you are in contrast mildly pleased and this doesn't normally prompt a response. Also, there is a rational motivation for posting a critical review. The things you specifically point out are more likely to be fixed because of your having complained about them, if the developer is paying attention to reviews at all. 100% positive or maximal-rating reviews give no actionable feedback. So both from a rational and irrational motivation standpoint, a customer is much more likely to give a negaive review when poorly (or even fairly) served than a satisfied customer is to post a positive review when receiving exceptional service.
Additionally, is it really credible that exceptional service is the NORM?
I therefore assume that unless there is some barrier between the reviewing organization and the reviewed one, that the top ratings are ALL shills of some kind or another. The only ones worth paying attention to are the middle-rating and negative ones, and you can rarely trust that the negatives are uncensored.
I'd like to see some research by third parties on what the relationship is between customer satisfaction, likeliness of customers to review products and how those ratings look compared to what customers really think.
Privacy invading trackers? You mean the ones they use to know if they have any traffic and if so is it getting where it wants to go on the site?
Analytics software is used to quantify behavior so the people building and operating the site can make decisions. Nobody cares about you as an individual in this regard. You are just part of an aggregate segment of traffic.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I learned long ago that you should make sure that you look at the negative reviews to really get a feel for a product. For one, there's always some of the dopes that are never satisfied with anything and will give awful reviews for trivial reasons. If their reviews AREN'T present, then they're being removed or edited out, which should make you wonder what else is being removed. Then there's usually some people who are unhappy with some aspect of the thing for a legitimate reason - these are the people to listen to, to be aware of what the thing's real issues are and consider whether they affect you.
I don't reply to ACs
Privacy invading trackers? You mean the ones they use to know if they have any traffic and if so is it getting where it wants to go on the site?
If they weren't happy to hand that data off to 3rd parties by using 3rd party trackers then you would have point.
Nobody cares about you as an individual in this regard.
The key here is "in that regard" -- once that data is collected, especially once it is collected by companies that collect it from thousands of other websites, it can and will eventually be repurposed for other uses.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
While fake reviews are never good... there are enough incompetent idiots out there posting reviews, that requires specific strategies to deal with.
Using walmart.com as an example, they ask everyone whether they'd suggest the item to a friend, and compile the votes. Anything less than 70% posiitive is likely a crap product. And you can't buy enough reviewers to move that percentage too far into positive territory. From there, reading the top two comments, then reading through as many of the comments that rated the product poorly, to see what kind of pitfalls I need to be concerned with, and selectively discarding any which could be defects (unless there's a high number of such comments.)
This strategy works well on many sites. Sadly Amazon doesn't allow sorting comments by lowest rating first, nor do they request whether you'd recomend the product, so there it's a free-for-all... read as many as you can stomache and take the chance. But even there, buying reviewers wouldn't give them enough signal-to-noise to hide a significant number of negative reviews.
However, they certainly COULD buy enough reviewers to damage the otherwise positive reputation of a competitors product. I suspect this doesn't happen because such behavior might legally be considered libel.
Reviews certainly are immensely useful... I couldn't stand buying from some stores (like walmart) because you can't trust the company to only stock decent-quality products. But with a large number of reviews, consumers are finally empowered to keep from falling victim to such dirty behavior, and a little bit of peeing in the pool won't be able to change that.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Review for hire is far from being a new phenomenon
I can't remember how many times I had fallen victim to that scam, often ended up purchasing crappy software that did nothing close to the raving reviews I had read in computer magazines
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
In fact, I use them extensively in making decisions on buying lots of stuff. It's pretty easy to know which products have a lot of reviews from shills. I first find products with lots and lots of reviews (or sites that have lots of reviews about the product). I read some of the positives, then some of the negatives to see how they stack up. It's pretty easy to tell who put a negative review in because of a bad experience and not necessarily because of a bad product.
If I'm making a really serious buy, I'll check forums too. It's really rare for forum posts to have many paid comments and communities are good at pointing them out. I've been using Reddit for this lately too; I've found EVERYTHING on there and can usually get some good commentary on a product (unless it's really, really obscure).
I think that as with any reputational system, it's easy to reduce defections to an acceptable level.
Simple increase the cost of defection. Make it harder to be a fake reviewer, and easier to be a real one. One thing a lot of places do, which I imagine works with many products is, require the person to actually buy one (and wait some period of time) before they can review it. Then if you want 300 reviews on Brand X TV, you have to make 300 accounts, with different emails, names, and credit cards, actually buy 300 of them (and not return them). THEN you can give all 300 glowing reviews. That makes it hard for even professional reviewers to efficiently beat the system.
Also, make it against the TOS, and give the TOS some teeth. (f.e. sue them for fraud).
Ignore 5 star gushing reviews (and 5 star reviews in general). Start at 4 star reviews. Highest rating reviews rarely give any worthwhile information to begin with. Always better to see what negatives are said. It's also a good idea to take 1 star reviews with a grain of salt as well, to avoid user-error idiots or rating bombers from competing products. Whenever I am shopping on Amazon or similar site, I start from 2 star reviews and go up to 4 star reviews. Never felt misled once about my purchases.
This is the exact issue I was trying to draw attention to in my submission of Why Amazon is Google's Real Competition.
People 'shop' not just for consumer goods, but also for opinions about politics, childrearing and family strategies, education opportunities, medical information and doctor reviews, etc. They use the 'net as their go-to solution.
The average info seeker believes that the large web portals are neutral purveyors of information. The fact is, those companies' business models are only indirectly aligned with the interests or well being of the seeker.
Slashdotters are likely far from average in credulousness when it comes to web reviews, and sorting through the chaff.
How to haggle in a marketplace of ideas? "I'll trade you five reviews, and not a review more!"
What do you think about angies list paid service. I guess they make it slightly expensive to shill your stuff.
Yeah, this seems to be about book reviews. If enough people submitted reviews, there's bound to be some negative ones. Just read those, and ignore the five star ones. For better accuracy, do like any other statistician, and throw out the highest and lowest scores.
I'll second that suggestion about discarding outliers. I'll also add in a few other things - for example weighting the reviews of those who actually purchased the thing (Amazon has a "verified purchase" icon next to reviews, but they don't use the lack of a purchase to weigh down the reviews/ratings by people who've never purchased the item). A store like amazon could also identify shill accounts. For example, my book on Amazon got a single 1-star review (out of a total of 5 good reviews) that dragged it all the way down in rank. That 1-star review went into great depth about the spelling and grammar errors in the book, which my professional editors never found (and neither did any of the other reviewers, for that matter). The account that did the hatchet job only ever reviewed one item (my book), and never purchased the item that was reviewed. For the small volume of sales that I do on that book, a single bad review from a psychotic ex (like the account used to downrate my book) makes a big difference.
Another good one would be to use the median instead of the average when aggregating the ratings. IMDB lists the average for "The Hunger Games" as 7.4 (or similar), while the median is a pathetic 4 or 3. I feel like I was suckered into see that slideshow of a train-wreck by IMDB assigning it a high aggregate rating. Had I actually paged through all 15 pages of reviews, I would have seen that almost everyone hated it.
Having modpoints for the purchasers would help a great deal as well. For example, once a week you get presented with a review of something you've been recorded as purchasing and asked if you agree with the review (and how much you agree with it). Amazon certainly has the data to do this, but they don't.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Let's take newegg.com for an example. If a device or part shows up as one of the top ranked and people buy it and it doesn't work properly, every single one of them is going to go review it poorly. It's called pushback. That's why fake reviews only give you a boost in sales for a couple weeks. After that, they're drowned in actual reviews that are pretty pissed off.
https://xkcd.com/1098/
I like my spaghetti with source.
http://www.angieslist.com/ is completely legit and all it's reviews are great!
there is one solution to all of this! Video testimonials!
I nice example: www.bubobox.com
Reviews are funny, fake or not. It is additional material to the five buttons you have already pressed in all combinations so you know you will no longer know how it works/find how to do it/why it did not work. Nothing like direct experience. It is funny to discern the PR/marketing patterns. You can see it HERE! But if you are offered some profit, you are SUPPOSED to be take it, be tnice and get some monetary value off i! A small but is expected. Actually, producers have a very strong incentive to want fair reviews: they may get an idea for the next version or even a full new patent idea! Would they offer royalties if they get a new patent idea from a fair review? (..) I have the project to review a videocamera, but I would be giving them specs for the next version... :)