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I'd really like to see one of the popular influencers disrupt the review industry by coming up with a way to bring back high quality technical analysis. I'd lo
by ryan29 5y ago
I'd really like to see one of the popular influencers disrupt the review industry by coming up with a way to bring back high quality technical analysis. I'd love to see what the cost of revenue looks like in the review industry. I'm guessing in-depth technical analysis does really bad in the cost of revenue department vs shallow articles with a bunch of ads and affiliate links.
I think the current industry players have tunnel vision and are too focused on their balance sheets. Things like reputation, trust, and goodwill are crucial to their businesses, but no one is getting a bonus for something that doesn't directly translate into revenue, so those things get ignored. That kind of short sighted thinking has left the whole industry vulnerable to up and coming influencers who have more incentive to care about things like reputation and brand loyalty.
I've been watching LTT with a fair bit of interest to see if they can come up with a winning formula. The biggest problem is that in-depth technical analysis isn't exciting. I remember reading something many years ago, maybe from JonnyGuru, where the person was explaining how most visitors read the intro and conclusion of an article and barely anyone reads the actual review.
Basically you need someone with a long term vision who understands the value you get from in-depth technical analysis and doesn't care if the cost of it looks bad on the balance sheet. Just consider it the cost of revenue for creating content and selling merchandise.
The most interesting thing with LTT is that I think they've got the pieces to make it work. They could put the most relevant / interesting parts of a review on YouTube and skew it towards the entertainment side of things. Videos with in-depth technical analysis could be very formulaic to increase predictability and reduce production costs and could be monetized directly on FloatPlane.
That way they build their own credibility for their shallow / entertaining videos without boring the core audience, but they can get some cost recovery and monetization from people that are willing to pay for in-depth technical analysis.
I also think it could make sense as bait to get bought out. If they start cutting into the traditional review industry someone might come along and offer to buy them as a defensive move. I wonder if Linus could resist the temptation of a large buyout offer. I think that would instantly torpedo their brand, but you never know.
- ______-_-______ 5y agoI use rtings.com every time I buy a monitor. https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tools/table https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tools/table They rigorously test their hardware and you can filter/sort by literally hundreds of stats. I just built a PC and I would have killed for a site that had apples-to-apples benchmarks for SSDs/RAM/etc. Motherboard reviews especially are a huge joke. We're badly missing a site like that for PC components.
- Ajedi32 5y ago> I just built a PC and I would have killed for a site that had apples-to-apples benchmarks for SSDs/RAM/etc. Userbenchmark has benchmarks for SSDs[1] and RAM[2]. Can't help you with motherboards though. [1]: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/ https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/ [2]: https://ram.userbenchmark.com/ https://ram.userbenchmark.com/
- gruez 5y agoI can't take them seriously for anything because of their CPU benchmark debacle.
- throwaway2037 5y agoI never heard about this. Can you share a link? I am interested to learn more.
- ______-_-______ 5y agoJust google userbenchmark bias. Basically, when AMD shook things up a few years ago with huge numbers of cores, UserBenchmark responded by weighting down the importance of multithreaded workloads in their scores, so Intel would stay on top. Now their site is banned from most subreddits, including both r/intel and r/amd.
- dralley 5y agoYou can get the gist by reading through this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/dzdacg/userbenchmark_now_ignores_more_than_8_cores_rates/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/dzdacg/userbenchm... It wasn't one event, more like the ratings for CPUs just became laughably, transparently, utterly worthless, to the point where Intel i3 laptop CPUs were scoring higher than top-end AMD Threadripper CPUs. And they refused to acknowledge any issues. Within a month or two after AMD started shipping CPUs with more than 8 cores, they tweaked the algorithm to ignore >8 cores. And various other ridiculous changes that hurt AMD's rankings.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoI mentioned this in another comment, but I think GamersNexus is doing exactly what you want. Regarding influencers: they're being leveraged by companies precisely because they are about "the experience", not actual subjective analysis and testing. 99% of the "influencers" or "digital content creators" don't even pretend to try to do analysis or testing, and those that do generally zero in on one specific, usually irrelevant, thing to test.
- viraptor 5y agoI hope they do a good mix of entertainment and GamersNexus's depth. I'm struggling to watch GN without zoning out after a couple minutes. It's good deep content for sure, but if it was in written form I'd just skim and get the interesting bits.
- throwaway2037 5y agoYou wrote: <<bring back high quality technical analysis>> How about Tom's Hardware and AnandTech? If they don't count, who does? Years ago, I used to read CDRLabs for optical media drives. Their reviews were very scientific and consistent. (Of course, optical media is all but dead now.)