I miss 2018-2020 when tech channels were down to earth and focused on useful shit like budget builds, where to find cheap GPUs, etc. Now it's just a competition to see who can suck off China and Nvidia the fastest.
Yup, all because of advertisers and sponsorships. All the money is in the big high end products, with huge margins and associated sponsorship budgets. Meanwhile, most good budget builds are reaching a couple years back into the hardware stack for proven, marked down good deals on shit that'll get you 1080/60 on medium on most relevant titles. No sponsors are interested in having you promote the old hardware they've since replaced, they want to sell the new shit. So they reach out to you and offer you a bag of cash and a piece of brand new hardware to do a build around to get mindshare - Even if you're not doing a fully promoted review and spec walk, they just want to get the new shit into mindshare, and the old shit forgotten about. I have never, once in my life, seen a company sponsor an influencer to do a build/video about an old hardware line they just marked down to clear out.
Similarly, advertisers aren't particularly interested in the budget audience. By their very nature, they're cost conscious and doing a lot of work to get the most bang for their buck, and they don't have a lot of buck. They're not brand loyal, they're not going to indirectly promote your brand by owning it as a status symbol, and they're not liable to be swayed at all by normal advertising. They're a shitty market to try and sell anything to because they don't want to buy shit.
And even if you post a video, its views are likely to be mediocre, because everything in that video that might draw attention is probably years old. There's no interested new tech eyes on hand for hardware that's not brand spanking new, and there's not a lot of repeat/returning audience as the kinds of people building budget rigs aren't building them frequently, and don't usually watch more. There's only a niche audience of tinkerers who see budget builds as more of a challenge space, who'd be interested in the minmax as a game itself, rather than a means to a different end.
Combine these together, and you end up with mediocre video revenue and views, and no sponsorship support. You're also unlikely to be able to effectively monetize your audience with Patreon/Merch/Subscriptions for the same reason advertisers can't effectively sell to them - Why would budget conscious people pay you for something you're giving them for free? Its a hard space to survive in, and a lot of people give in to sponsorships because it just makes their job easier in so many ways. Less money stress, less production budget stress, more interest from new products and spaces.
These days, the only real place for budget builds is as occasional filler content from an otherwise cutting edge channel, often just using old sponsor backstock they had. Everything else has gotta be the new shiny thing to get the money and attention.
