blue2kid3

Ok, it's time to join this discussion, I fully agree with the OP here based on me watching other content types, mostly gaming, and seeing that youtuber's like Blitz for example in his No Man's sky video he put #ad in the title where it is visible. The case is similar where he has been given a free key to the game. He has to fully disclose the fact that this video is sponsored, or supported.
 
And while I understand these are two different categories, I believe the rules should be the same. Many of these popular gaming youtuber's affect the decisions of many people wether to buy a game or not, mostly the former. The same should be in the tech category. Linus and LMG affects the decisions of many people, and him giving a slightly biased review or not properly discolsing a sponsor affects alot of decisions.
 
Now please understand I am not blaming LMG in any way, this happens in alot of categories with lot's of different youtubers. The rules aren't strict enough for when sponsors are interfering. I hope that people understand the fact that the influence these youtubers have is alot, and even the slightest of bias due to a sponsorship, or not fully discolsing wether the equipment was free or discounted in ruckus' case, can cause alot of mayhem, such as this post right here.

Alternative title: This is why I watch GamersNexus...

It kills me to feel like this and to jump into this but maybe it is just me. 
 
 After thinking about it for months and months I felt I should voice my concerns directly to the source. 
 
 I strongly feel that LTT including Linus has become very Unethical. Now I will state I DO NOT think Linus or anyone at LTT is a bad person in anyway. In fact I would say they are good people.
 
 I just feel Linus and LTT should no longer be trusted as an unbias review site / Youtube channel.
 
 I encourage you to make your own opinions on the subject. 
 
 What are Ethics in reviews, what is inappropriate and how do you stay unbias? 
 
 Pay to Play: It is unethical to keep the product after a review ( unless purchased from retailer with own company or individual funds) 
 It is unethical to be compensated in exchange to review a product regardless if its positive or negative in conclusion.
 
 What is okay? It is okay to have advertisement but advertisement must be clearly outlined and opinions must remain out of a payed advertisement I.E. It is unethical to say in an ad this is the best product we have seen. A review must be objective and can have option. An advertisement should not cross "contaminate" a reviewers opinion I.E. "This is the best product we have ever used at our company" 
 
 It is more my opinion that sponsored content is wrong by both using products for personal gain, and using sponsored content as if it is beneficial for a consumer. Why? Because sponsored content will have a context of give and take it is not a zero sum gain. Sponsored content is always in the light as if it was a review or objective and something a consumer can trust and take another word for, however that is the exact opposite purpose of sponsored content. In a typical commercial you will always see why brand A) is always better than brand B) this is easy to dismiss and think critically as you know company A will always put product A in a better light than product B in sponsored content this should never be the case as it leans far to heavily on your trust with an unbias reviewer so it is much more difficult to separate or discern when product A is getting its best foot forward. IE a 3090 playing a cherry picked list of games because that is the goal of sponsored content and is anti viewer and anti consumer. 
 
 
 I don't want to make anyone feel any way to strongly about this post. All I want is for those to maybe become encouraged to think for themselves and hopefully have more transparency and improved Ethics at LTT.
 
 
 With only love - Bluekid
 
 

In the video Linus said he paid for the Ruckus gear at his old house ($1,000 AP), but for this video in the new house he says that Ruckus sent him over $10,000 worth of their networking gear. At the start of the video he says "With the help of Ruckus who sent over not only this but another 5 (supposed to be another 7) of their WIFI 6 access points and Ubiqiti who provided the PoE switch that is going to power it all... Like seriously, this is over 10 grand of the best wifi gear money can buy" and just before the Backblaze sponsor spot he says "So yeah thanks for sending those over" [referring to Ruckus].
 
By saying they 'sent over' the gear it implies to me that they provided it to him for free. If that's not the case then it really isn't made clear in the video. It should be made very clear whether or not he paid for it, received it at a discount, or was provided it for free. In the video he demonstrates the product, reviews it (tests it against other access points, tests its network speed and range) and ultimately endorses the product. If the company is giving him thousands of dollars worth of free products that he is keeping for his own personal use in his home then he really needs to declare that when endorsing them.

Ethics are always a big mess. No review is truly unbiased. One can only try.
I get the feeling your beef is more with sponsoring content in general rather than LTT. I think I've mentioned this in another topic, but portraying your product as positive and a better choice is literally the point of sponsorships and ads. Of course they'll cherry pick a list of games for the 3090, because they want to show you it at peak performance or in some popular/relevant games. I don't agree with that being anti-consumer. By that you could say even non-sponsored reviewes are anti-consumer and anti-viewer, because they only benchmark the hardest to run or most popular games.
 
As others have mentioned and linked to, it's very important to think about what you are looking at: a review, sponsor segment or an ad. Bluntly, if people don't think for themselves and take anything that anyone says at face value when they say "best product ever", whether that's a tech channel or the queen of Britain for all I care, that's on them. Also, these entities are businesses that need (and want I assume) to make money to survive. That money has to come from somewhere.
I agree that sponsored content should be indicated though I feel they do an adequate job at it. I also feel that if people would actually watch the entire videos (not accusing you of not doing so), they wouldn't miss the sections where they say it's a sponsor or announce that company X has provided product Y. In the home WiFi video it's literally only 25 seconds in before he mentions Ruckus and Ubiquity sent over the equipment. Others have mentioned Linus may have simply asked them, but in reality, do we have any idea what went down or are we, as usual, just speculating? Maybe he asked for free stuff, maybe he merely asked for a 5% discount in return for some exposure and they went "hey man, it's on us, good luck with your house", maybe they even approached him with a "hey noticed your house renovation, want some gear?" attitude.

Mh, I've can't say that I felt poorly advised by ltt videos when they show something I might be interested in. At best I get a product demonstration that convinces me, at worst I get  demonstration where I know I won't get royally fucked over. And if I'm actually interested in getting one of these products, I still look up other channels or sites.
 
I don't have a big problem with ltt using those products for personal gains. It's definitely not best practices and makes me quite envious because I can't make use of it. Have you seen the video of the recent studio tour? Man, they have so much hardware lying around that I could build an infinitely petter pc than I have right now, with just their unused hardware that's already 2-4 years old.
 
And taking them home after a video or not sending them back is just how the game is played, if it isn't some excessively large or expensive product. I remember Linus having to send back a lot of hard drives iirc? Companies sell 100k items, and allocates 5k of these for advertisting purposes. What should the company do with those one-time used products that get sent back to them in varying conditions?  GN will probably put that product a lot harder to the hest than LMG, and LMG will use it a lot more than fairly known unboxing channels.
 
I also don't know the legal aspects of advertising, sponsoring and the like, which makes it easier for me to be somewhat chill about it.

You're not reading what I said. You're literally agreeing with me. "In some way", which obviously, means in one of many different ways.
 
You're not an LMG employee, you're an unpaid forum moderator. You're just as much on the outside as the rest of us.
 
This is factually incorrect. FTC regulations are freely available online to read. You should check them out for yourself because it seems like you're misinformed on the subject. Do you think ads/informercials/paid product showcases presented as journalistic content on television put "THIS IS A PAID ADVERTISEMENT" on the screen out of the goodness of their own hearts?
 
You're also confusing product placement with paid advertisement. Two totally different concepts, two totally different sets of laws.
 
 
You're literally describing the definition of the word "sponsored". The company is "sponsoring" your project because they're financially assisting you for your project. This requires disclosure and adequate language. In the case of this video, they gave him $10,000 of free network equipment for his house. They subsidized his home infrastructure by a significant amount in exchange for a video dedicated to them. This is absolutely an ad. It's basically an infomercial.
 
 
 

Glasswire and Backblaze would have paid for those sponsor spots shown in the video (15-30s ad spots baked in the video). They likely aren't informed which specific videos those ad spots go in to, only that it will be videos on the LTT channel. It's unlikely Glasswire or Backblaze had any involvement in the project.
 
Reviewers receiving and keeping review samples isn't uncommon. LMG's warehouse is full of hardware they have received such as laptops, PCs, phones, and computer hardware. They keep these in their inventory so they can go back to them later for other content or comparisons in other reviews. For example keeping an RTX 2080 so you can compare it to the RTX 3000 series cards is a very reasonable thing for a media/review outlet to do. The honest truth is that for a large media outlet like LMG getting a free $1500 laptop that is owned by the business isn't really that valuable to them outside of the content they use it for. However, when it is receiving thousands of dollars worth of networking gear that is being installed in his personal family home (presumably it is staying there and not being removed after the video is finished) I can understand how it does blur the lines between what is sponsored and what isn't and how it may influence his coverage of the product. Linus does mention in the video that he received the products from Ruckus, but they can do a better job declaring that. If they haven't been paid to promote the product then maybe don't call it a sponsored video so as to avoid confusion between the two, but definitely denote that they are receiving free products from the company. Maybe in addition to mentioning it aloud in the video have a banner across the bottom of the screen saying "Provided by <Brand>" where they first introduce the product where it would normally say "Sponsored by <Brand>" on sponsored videos.
 
Tom Scott has done a really good video on declaring advertisements in Youtube videos, as well as receiving free products. Though, please keep in mind that LMG operates out of Canada not USA or UK so any laws and regulations mentioned regarding the US regulations (FTC) or UK regulations may not apply to LMG.

Yeah I'm fine with LTT as entertainment, some of their videos with extreme PC builds and other things are interesting.
I didn't know that about audio products, kind of understandable if audio companies want reviewers to be unbiased, but at the same those companies are missing out on promoting their products.
So who is sponsoring the video then? It isn't clear in the video description, and I think having to watch through the video is wrong.
There has been topics on clickbait and disclosing sponsor spots before, and it seems like the fanbase either wants to defend LTT or doesn't realize its wrong because they always watch every single video.

Linus took free stuff from Ruckus and didn't disclose it whatsoever until waaaaay into video. Not in the title, not in the description, not disclosed at the beginning of the video...
 
That video is actually particularly egregious in how blatantly they're deceiving the audience. They're not even following YouTube policy at this point, let alone actual law.
 
I missed the part where he said "sent over". Still though...

I totally agree. You know how YouTube shows "Ad" in the corner of ad videos on the thumbnail and overlaid on the video itself? That's because they're required to by law. If LMG was following the same regulations that YouTube has to follow, they would put the term "Ad" or "Advertisement" in the video title or thumbnail. In addition I think they should be forced to put the "PAID ADVERTISEMENT" text permanently in the video as well, just like TV ads have to do if the ad is presented as journalistic content.

They should just follow consumer regulation and follow FTC law. For example, these "showcase" videos should plainly display "PAID ADVERTISEMENT" along the bottom or top of the video just like they do on television. They need to stop gaming loopholes because they're unregulated on YouTube if they want to continue virtue signaling for "the consumer" in their videos when they whine about other companies.

For a review to be useful it needs to compare to other current and (recent) past products, for the data to be accurate(for new releases) you need to retest older hardware with current hardware and software, to retest it you need to keep the product, this is particularly true for GPUs and CPUs where the performance can fluctuate a lot based on the software used/tested, and the games/applications used to benchmark often change from one generation to the next, making older results impossible to compare against new ones. For LTT it probably would be financially possible to buy it themselves, but for many other reviewers it isn't.
I agree with this, the lack of tags in titles in sponsored content is ridiculous in my opinion, and that isn't only about LTT, but Youtube in general.
I personally think sponsored content should have at least two of three requirements, one is to have "Sponsored" somewhere visible in the thumbnail, the other is to have "Sponsored" at the start of the title, to avoid things like "This product is amazing and incredibly cheap - Brand YYY Product ZZZ..." with the "Sponsored" hidden as the last word in the title, making it invisible until you hover or click it. The third is to have "Sponsored/Advertisement" written in some corner of the video during the entire sponsored section of the videos. The thumbnail requirement might be a bit unnecessary if the title already makes it obvious enough though. Some of these are already done in some countries in some way, but in my opinion should be made more obvious and more countries should adopt these requirements.

Let me start by saying this is not calling out specifically LTT or Samsung.  This calling out all companies and all tech youtubers.
 
Also, this isn't talking about Sponsored Entertainment content like Intel's Extreme Make over or LG's Ultimate Bathtub gaming setup.  This is pointing an issue with sponsored videos on brand new products
 
The problem with Sponsored videos on brand new products is we, the fans/consumers, don't get a review of the product.  And this practice of sponsored videos on brand new products needs to change.  Lets take the Samsung Odyssey G9 Neo video.  Samsung shot-gunned the Neo G9 to all the tech youtubers for 'sponsored' videos.  It's free promo videos for Samsung without the complications of reviewers pointing out issues.  
 
Imagine if CDProjeckt Red sent Cyberpunk 2077 to all Game Reviewers for 'sponsored' video.  You'd be pissed, because you'd never know all the issues with the game.  Why is it different here with Samsung? (or any other company).  What if AMD 'sponsored' all the 6800XT content and there were no reviews/benchmarks?  Again, why does Samsung get a pass here?
 
I understand that Linus clearly specifies it's a 'sponsored' video.  That's not the problem.  The problem isn't 'sponsored' videos for entertainment pieces, it's sponsored videos on new products.  And people look for guidance with purchase decisions and with the fluff of a sponsored video (oh this looks great, look at those blacks) with no actual detailed review, the consumer loses.
 
Why bring this up?  Now that Neo G9 is getting in to hands of consumers in Europe, there are reports of issues.  HDR being washed out.  Screen flickers.  Scan lines.  Again, Samsung misses the bullet because all the units they sent out to tech youtubers are 'sponsored'.  I'm not saying the Neo G9 is bad.  I don't know.  It could be just some bad units, or cable issues, etc.  The only real review so far is from Hardware Unboxed, which is great, but we wouldn't say 1 review of the new Intel/AMD CPU is 'great'. 
 
Allowing 'sponsored' videos on new products is a slippery slope and the practice needs to change before all companies realize 'look we can get promo videos out there without the criticism of reviews'
 
Again, not calling out LTT specifically.  I posted it here because Linus has the biggest reach to make a change in the practice.  We've seen him stand up against the companies to help stop bad practices.   Lets help stop this.

I went back and forth with a lot more information in this thread: 
 
 
Explains the situation a lot better, I just don’t have the energy right now to retype an essay in this thread, lol.
 
You’re going to have issues on this forum getting your point across on this because it’s filled with fanboyism and people that don’t understand the laws and regulations that content creators are able to dodge.

They have never been the channel I go to for legit reviews (That's GN for me) - I go to LTT for the fun ideas and crazy builds, knowing most product reviews are sponsored. 

To be fair, “sponsored by” is intentionally vague language. It could be anything from supplying the item, paying for a straight up ad, funding costs for a project, etc.
 
LTT and many other YouTubers get away with absolute murder, skirting all kinds of federal regulations around advertisement disclosures because they’re operating under a loophole, making content for a platform. Since YouTube isn’t responsible for creator content following stuff like FTC law, creators can do whatever they want.
 
If LTT was broadcasting their content on TV like this they would end up getting fined left and right by the government and amass all kinds of lawsuits.

It isn't unethical to keep a product, as long as the reviewer is allowed to do an unbiased review,  for example look at HW Unboxed and companies getting upset over their reviews.
But I think the sponsor spots are kinda unethical, videos aren't even marked as being a "showcase" anymore so you're forced to click on a video and read the description in order to know if the video is a sponsor spot for some product.
I personally got tired of the clickbait and no clear difference between a review and a sponsored product overlook, so I don't take LTT as a review channel anymore, IMO they're more of an entertainment channel. I watch other channels for reviews and in depth analasys of products i'm seriously interested in.
 

I strongly disagree with many of your points here. First off the pay to play point. It is not unethical to keep a product after the review so long as BEFORE the review when LTT talks to the company they make it clear that keeping the product or not would have no baring on the end result of the review. At that point if the company tells the staff to keep the product regardless than that's no harm no foul in my eyes.
 
Secondly the Sponsored spots. They make it ABDUNANTLY clear over and over and over again what a sponsored spot is and make the videos very clearly labeled that they are sponsored. They do more than enough to inform the viewer that the video is not a review. If the viewer STILL takes that as a review that's THEIR fault. At some point people need to accept personal responsibility for themselves. There is already to much hand holding and white glove handling of people in this world, LTT does more than enough in this case to be able to wipe their hands clean IMO.
 
As you said in your post, its just your opinion and you have every right to see it that way, but me and you definitely see this very very differently 

So jelly!! 

B550 AND X570 will both support PCIe 4.0 for the first 16x slot and the first M.2 slot.
So as long as you only plan to have a 4.0 GPU and 1 SSD, then both chipsets will perform the same here.
 
With B550 the rest of your slots will be PCIe 3.0.
With X570 all expansion slots are PCIe 4.0.
 
Basically X570 only becomes relevant once you need more 4.0 expansion that 1 GPU and SSD.

The b550 board offers you 20 pcie 4.0 lanes which come directly from your cpu. That is enough to support a graphics card and pcie drive. Everything else (wifi adaptors, second m.2 slots) will run at pcie 3.0 speeds which is fine because unless you have 2 gen 4 drives it doesn’t matter. Just make sure to put the 4.0 m.2 at the higher m.2 slot closer to the cpu.

Seem pretty ok. It is technically overpriced, but everything is. If you can't wait, then go for it. What are the test of the specs, psu, ssd (hopefully NVME)

Months ago the word was Q2/Q2 2020. 
 
That was before COVId-19, we haven't heard any updated releases from them. 

I want to say that they said something about a summer release after the initial release, but not sure which summer they meant.