Hello Srajan, I want to chime in on the latest emails by Peter and Craig. They and your answers made good points. But nobody mentioned advertising yet. For most of us, that's the biggest giveaway. How can reviewers maintain honesty when their livelihood is tied up with their opinions? Until that's no longer an issue, I personally think that all talk about honesty is compromised at best and wishful thinking at worst. Sorry, just had to get this out of my craw. Tony Treer
Ah, the old tit-for-tat argument. To that I simply say, good luck when you need the services of a judge, referee, building or car inspector, mediator or any other service professional who gets paid to render an opinion or interpret rules or laws. Reviewing is no different. It's work, it must be paid especially if the reviewer does it for a living and the commodity being solid is time spent to render an educated opinion or value/performance judgment. The potential for conflict of interest is obvious. So is that it can and must be managed. Beyond that, I'm back to letting our audience decide what they want to think and believe about how well or not we manage. It's a very basic very old argument. It won't go away until readers are willing to fund the reviewers they want to read and thereby replace the existing ad-based model. Since at least online the subscription-based model hasn't really been successful, some reviewers are currently trying to augment their ad revenues with Patreon contributions. Can those eventually replace ad revenues? I think the jury on that is still out. For us the old imperfect model continues to work so I haven't been motivated to change it. I rather create content than fight the system.
If you want to change the system, I can give you my business bank account number and you can start making financial contributions. If enough people did, reliably and on a monthly basis, the ads could eventually disappear. Until then, they are what they are: reminders that your privilege of reading us for free is paid for – just by others, not you! Srajan
