I'm kind of amazed people are as bad as they are at understanding what conflict of interest is. I've already seen comments like "well can you PROVE that he's been dishonest?" or as one comment on the Coreteks video says " the best you can do is try and juggle and balance that conflict of interest"
I really thought this was a thing they teach high schoolers but i guess not.
They teach high-schoolers anything these days?
Anyway, conflicts of interest are not a problem if they're disclosed and rigorous methodology is followed. Of course you're not going to be reviewing the product you're being
paid to advertise as a sponsor spot, and you should always disclose whether you bought or received an item as a sample. Sometimes you just have to recuse yourself and refrain from reviewing an item you're too closely affiliated with. But if you're doing things right, most conflicts of interest can be negotiated easily. Show your work, show your numbers, and try to present as honest a conclusion as possible.
It's like we've been so burned by scummy business practices that we don't understand what
good business practices are anymore. A car magazine in the 80s was sponsored by all the big brands, but so long as they weren't blatantly partisan towards any of them and didn't obviously get the numbers wrong (saying an engine develops 500HP instead of 300), you could still expect to be trusted. And that's the key here:
trust. GN has all their procedures because accurate numbers help build trust in their brand no matter what their sponsorship deals are. LTT tried to muscle into that turf with all that expensive gear and crew... without doing the necessary homework to provide good numbers or even basic proofreading on their videos.
That is what GN was calling them out on, and that modular laptop bullshit aside there wasn't a lot about conflicts of interest because the business model for media has always relied on sponsorships.
I've seen some people throwing around the idea of
only taking patreon and viewer money. Which at face value is a good idea: after all, the viewers will naturally want the most accurate info possible, right? Theoretically, yes. In practice, no. If your viewers over time become majority vocal Nvidia fanboys who hate AMD more than anything, but AMD then releases a brand new GPU product line that blows Nvidia out of the water (stay with me here, it's just a thought experiment)... well, you have a lot of incentives to either stay quiet and don't review the new Team Red GPUs, or emphasize any downsides, real or imaginary, compared to Team Green. Why? Because if you don't, you risk upsetting your fanbase, and upsetting your fanbase means less money in your pocket.
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