There are some youtube like channels like Unbox Therapy or Linus Tech Tips that have millions of subscribers.
I am curious. Some stuff they review like electric cars they obviously can’t keep, but for a lot of items like drives, notebooks, drones, bluetooth speakers etc that cost hundreds to maybe a thousand dollars or so are they (probably) getting that merchandise free and keeping that stuff forever?
I don’t know about the two you specifically mention, but I have read Amazon reviews where people said they were given stuff or got it at a discount in exchange for a review.
Sometimes stuff is borrowed, but a lot of times popular youtubers will be given stuff in exchange for a good review.
From the seller’s point of view, it makes a lot of sense. It’s basically advertising. For the cost of their product (their actual manufacturing cost, not the retail cost), they get the product in front of a very large number of members of their target audience. So it’s cheaper than a TV spot and probably much more effective at reaching their target demographic.
I’ve seen some youtubers give some of the stuff away as prizes to subscribers when they end up with more stuff than they can use.
That would be the Amazon Vine program. I believe the Vine reviews are clearly marked as such.
I don’t know about YouTubers, but Microsoft for one has always always had a very strong outreach program for donating brand-new items to journalists and bloggers in advance of their reviews.
Including in one famous case in 2007, laptops.
Aside from Vine, it used to be common for manufacturers to do this as a form of soft astroturfing (surprisingly, most people who get free stuff review it highly). Amazon now (in the last few months) forbids that outside of the clearly marked programs they control.
‘Good’ here nowadays tends to mean ‘good quality video talking about the product’.
it used to mean ‘video saying only nice things about the product’, but it seems like product vendors are now happy to take the rough with the smooth, because they hope that on balance, their product is good enough - and holistically, having their product reviewed on a channel that has some reputation for objectivity is better than just having someone rave about it, because he got it for free.
I’ve only got 12k subscribers, but I have a handful of vendors who send me smallish stuff for review, for free. I do also review some things I buy for myself, either because they’re interesting in their own right, or just because it’s content that expands my channel.
Most YouTubers now mention that a video is ‘sponsored’ if they got the item for free.
I just decided to do this myself for every freebie product I get, where possible (i.e. not possible where the review consumes the item - such as a self-assembly kit). I figure that being willing to part with the free item should demonstrate that I’m not in it for the shiny toys (I reckon it probably happens to drive sales too - some of the people who compete to win the giveaway will go and buy one when they don’t win).
There are YouTubers who specifically don’t accept freebies - Zack’s JerryRigEverything channel, for example - most of his reviews are phones, and many of the phones are destroyed in the review by bending, scratching, dropping, etc - but he buys them all out of his own pocket - he makes a living doing this from the YouTube ad revenue on the reviews (plus additional teardown and repair tutorial videos he also does on the handsets)
One of my favourite examples of a sponsored video is Matthias Wandel’s reviews of these DeWalt power tools he got for free. In this video, he reviews the table saw - he discusses how the paint rubs off the top surface of the table - in another video about the same product, he takes the thing apart to repair a serious manufacturing fault - and the way he labels the video as ‘sponsored’ is just beautifully tongue-in-cheek.
I’m fairly sure DeWalt is still cool with all this.
Video game reviewers tend to be given the video games for free and make a big stink about it when publishers don’t send them their free games.
I don’t know about “making a big stink about it” so much as “are less likely to review games they’ve had to pay for”, FWIW.
The “stink” is "are less likely to fairly review games they’ve been given for free, since the quid pro quo is “preserving a pipeline for free goodies” for “continuing to provide positive marketing, rather than objective reviewing”.