chavvdarrr said:
What's your opinion on reviews which are paid down - with condition that results will be "satisfactory" for the one who gives the money.
The reason for my question is that I just read somewhere
, that yesterday such offer was made to a site which is discussed from time to time here (the site is not focused on video cards). They rejected the offer ... but i wonder if it was wise... (actually I proposed they should accept the offer&money and then make
real review ...
)
an excerpt from the offering: [q]
xxxx (ICQ# ) Wrote:
We are confidence on X product..... normally, we pay for the website (example: *****tech, ****hardware) to review the card ....
we want to ensure a great review and good result on it.[/q]
Usually, such agreements are not merely verbal but require signed contracts between the parties which stipulate the reviewer will do a,b, and c, and nothing else apart from a,b, and c, because the paying sponsor has already determined that a, b, and c, will provide it with the kind of results it wants to see published. These are actionable contracts which provide at most law-suit fodder should the review site do a "real" review instead of the rigged review it has agreed to, and at the least the web site won't receive payment until the review has been published, and in a case of non-compliance no payment will be made. So you can see that in these cases doing a "real" review in abeyance of the one they agreed to do would be pretty much impossible.
Also, it always pays to remember that people lie--and that they spin yarns from all sides of the issue. When someone says, "We were offered the same deal but turned it down," that may, or may not, be true. It could easily be that they were never offered a similar deal in the first place, and that had they been offered it they'd have jumped all over it immediately...
You can never be sure of comments like these when you read them.
As a matter of policy, I think all IHV product reviews done on web sites should be paid for by the IHV, in addition to providing the review products, of course. That's because they essentially represent advertising, especially when they concern pre-shipping prototypes reviewed with pre-released drivers. However, the web sites should not agree to be constrained to IHV demands on how the products are to be reviewed--review methodology should be at the sole discretion of the web site. It is at this last point that most web sites cave in and knuckle under, as they become fearful of being "scooped" by a rival site, and this plays right into the hands of the IHV.
The problem is really not so much that IHV PR departments try to see their products presented in a positive light, it's that some people will do or write anything in order to get paid...
Technical journalism is not without its own share of whores...
