Amnesia wrote:
Dan....an important aspect of all reviews these days is some form of declaration by the reviewer about the source of the unit and payment. DCR does it all the time and has a clear policy. So questions would be:
Is this a unit supplied by shimano for you to test?
Is this a paid review in anyway?
I just think in this era any review should make it clear from the start whether it is truely independent etc.....
This is not an accusation, but just an important component of reviews in today's world.
very reasonable post. no problem. we state quite clearly what our policy is, and often in duplicate. our partners are always listed at the bottom of every page. we don't engage in "paid media." we often, also, state it in the article just to be clear. we list shimano as a partner, tho this brand is not in for the long haul with us, month in, month out. shimano absolutely does occasionally run a campaign with us thru the year, they wrote us checks last year, and they almost certainly will this year.
therefore, i think it's safe to assume that we will cash a shimano check this year, and you should filter what we write through your cynic's goggles. that's likely to be the case with a lot of our reviews this year, as it appears we are (for whatever reason) in favor with the manufacturers in 2020. as gplama explained above, they can be fickle.
if this PM proves to still generate errant numbers one side, there won't be any hiding that here.
yes, the unit was supplied by shimano. i don't intend to keep it when i'm done. and i never sell product that is provided for review. my policy is that i prefer to pay for product that i review, but [rant mode] i don't feel the need for the manufacturer to profit from this. brands usually don't in my experience have an industry price just for those of us who're buying a lot of products only for testing purposes. [/rant]
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman