I don’t disagree with much (if any) of Dave’s analysis. I was also making a slightly different point, though …. though it’s reflected in the “who benefits” question.
A lot of traditional, by which I mean print press, reviews are/were either done by employed writers, or freelancers. While the exact nature of the mechanism has changed in today’s world (i.e. Patreon, sponsors, affiliate links, etc) the motivation is the same - money (or goods in lieu).
In either case (employed writers or freelancers) there is a direct pressure on time. Put it this way. I was freelance. Mostly, I pitchd a few ideas to an editor, who would commission some or all, and I then had to deliver x articles of y words each, by dd/mm/yy date. The quicker I could produce an article, of acceptable quality, the more articles I could do per week, and the moe I wpuld earn. Fortunately, and for me it was why I was freelance, it wasn’t my sole source of income or even my sole motivation for doing it. In short, I only did things that interested me and a large part of why I did it at all was because it interested me.
Roll forwards to today’s world and the world of print reviews in much, MUCH less dominant, and that has several implications. The wall that used to exist between editorial and advertising arms of a publisher (or at least, good ones) simply doesn’t exist in today’s YT “influencer” world, so you have to rely on the standards of the “influencer” to give honest feedback on the product despite that being the person that does or does not suffer from manufavturer ‘pressure’ …. or benefits. As a freelancer, I got paid whatever I said, positive or negative. Standards, at least to a point, were upheld by the editor as getting future work depended on providing them with good quality copy, few mistakes and on time. What constrains ‘influencers’ who rely on manufacturer-supplied product if they threaten to withhold the next eview product? And to their credit, some of the major influencers in the computing arena have taken on major corporates tht have tried those bullying techniques on smaller sites.
To that extent, I support the Patreon model. It does give the “influencer” a degree of independence if they buy, albeit with Patreon money, their products to review without the supplier holding a sword over them. Similarly, YT channels big enough to face down aggressive suppliers because of their size have a degree of independence too, and a few (in the computing arena) have held some bigcorporate’s feet to the fire when they tried to bully smaller channels.
But in either case, if money is the motivating factor, then there is a hard limit on how much time you can afford to put into a given article, if you want to either make a profit as a business, or a living as a freelancer, or YT influencer. It’s as simple as time = money.
And that is why I do disagree with Dave on one thing, that being that his reviews are “boring”. Are they great “entertainment”? Not really. Superb production qualities? Again, not really. But …. firt rate quality of information, thoroughness of testing, comprehensive and exhaustive product examination? Oh, hell, yes.
Dave, if I was looking for glib presentation, a facile sense of humour or a 10 to 15 minute “show”, would I think of your reviews? Maybe not. But if I’m looking to buy a product, or even just to get a really good feel for or understandig of a product that interests me even if not to buy? <Bleep> yes.
But …. I think your reviews speak for themselves. If you were doing them to make a living, you couldn’t do them like that, because you’d starve. So my read on it, deduced solely from watching them and having a pretty good idea of how much work went into them, is that profit can’t be the driving force, and that is why they aren’t “boring”. At all.
Dave’s Garage is another interesting case. I don’t know the guy, but my read on him is “retired, and very comfortably off”. Again, not doing it for the money. He knows his onions, has “been there, done that, got the t-shirt” and it isn’t about monetisation. Why does he do it? My guess is, ’cos he wants to, and can. For most YT sites, and most ‘net’ reviews, it is about making money one way or another because unless you’re either pretty wealthy (Dave of Dave’s Garage probably fits into that) or at least financially secure and probably retired, it’s hard to do otherwise.
