Youtube reviews

C

Cass2017

Guest
I watch a lot of Youtube for everything from daily vloggers to educational content as I find it more interesting than normal tv however one of my gripes though is with photography reviews/reviewers, it seems that everything seems to have a marketing agenda & I you never know if you are getting an honest review or are they just selling a product on behalf of the supplier to receive an income? it seems like a full time job now & they are just paid commercials instead of magazines (as its a lot cheaper.) Who can I trust? it seems nobody! are they reviewers or photographers! why would I want to see an unboxing? all I want to know is if this product is good or crap and would you spend your own money to buy this product.I think I have watched every photography youtube channel out there & I can only think of maybe one reviewer and even then I would have to buy it on Amazon to review myself and return within the 30 days if I think it doesn't live up to the hype.
 
you never know if you are getting an honest review or are they just selling a product on behalf of the supplier to receive an income
This has always been the case with reviews in all forms of media.

There are some popular/well-known magazines that will never give less than 4/5* to a product from an advertiser.
 
Jared, Matt & Tony do seem to tell you if it is sponsored content, so i would tend to have faith in their reviews.
I think it helps to follow the reviewers / photographers / content providers so that you can get a feel for them.
 
This has always been the case with reviews in all forms of media.

There are some popular/well-known magazines that will never give less than 4/5* to a product from an advertiser.

Like What Hifi! - shame it has to be on this free platform though.
 
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Jared, Matt & Tony do seem to tell you if it is sponsored content, so i would tend to have faith in their reviews.
I think it helps to follow the reviewers / photographers / content providers so that you can get a feel for them.

The problem with that is if they highlight the product in too much of a negative way they would be sponsored for long.
 
If they say it's sponsored, you know to expect mostly only the good points.
But they buy a lot of the kit themselves, so you do get more honest reviews.
As i said, follow a variety of them for a while to understand how good / bad they are.
 
There does seem to be a helluva lot of 'sponsored' reviews on YouTube these days but most of them do say if the item has been given or bought for review.
I don't mind watching them as long as they aren't to biased and plug the supplier in an over the top way.
 
Every "sponsored" video I ever did, I was 100% honest.
If it was crap, I'd say it was crap.. in fact I did , quite often.

I used to get quite a few dashcams sent to me and some were just utter trash and I wasn't afraid to say it.


Amazon is now the same. Every review is sponsored and every review is 100% positive because they want to continue getting free stuff.
 
I take everything I see on YouTube with a "pinch of salt" - there is a lot of biassed, misleading and downright wrong stuff on there.

It's far too easy these days for anyone to set themselves up as a self-proclaimed "expert" and it seems many people do.
 
Like What Hifi! - shame it has to be on this free platform though.
Hmm that sentence seems to me an oxymoron. What do you expect from a free platform.
You know "If you get it for free it's because you're the product"
If they can't make money on subscriptions or from advertising how are they to make money and keep it running then?
 
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I quite like "The Angry Photographer". He doesn't have any affiliate links and appears to give an honest opinion.
 
I have spoken with a photographer guy in Scotland that does reviews small time on his YT chanel and although he has given a good review he has told me they are over-hyped because he wants the hype of people sending him stuff to review and being able to broadcast that for others to see.

I think the recent reviews(from a number of people) of a certain brand of filters are a good exaple of misrepresentation. They all state that there is no colour cast or no effect on the quality of the image etc when there images clearly show they are wrrong. The manufacturers own images even show colour cast.

With reviews it is about the ability to weed out the bullcrap and try for yourselves and return if not happy.
 
It's the way of the world unfortunately. My 10 year old has a youtube channel where she reviews these little toys she collects, it has over 300k subscribers.

The company that makes the toys (a very large world wide brand) offered to send her toys free of charge for review purposes every two weeks on the understanding that no negative reviews would be posted.

Have no doubt the camera companies work the same way for example have you ever heard any of the fuji x photographers say anything bad about the equipment fuji send them for review? I haven't.

As an example when the x-pro launched I had a chat with one of the fuji x photographers about it, I had seen the content he had published online about it and was considering buying one. Everything he had put online suggested that this was the camera to own there simply wasn't anything better. When I spoke to him about if face to face, he told me to keep my Nikon gear as for anything serious the x-pro wasn't up to it and he used his Canon gear for any serious work.
 
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