Techpowerup "Advertorial By AMD" Draws Controversy

[tom_w141]

29 minutes ago, HKZeroFive said:

Are people seriously not concerned about this? If this was an advertorial by NVIDIA or Intel, I bet those same people would be screaming that it's misleading.

I agree its not 100% legit but that is more on TPU than AMD for selling them the spot. From a business perspective an outlet was willing to sell them a page where they could write whatever the hell they wanted, so of course they took it. The problem here the fact that an advertorial even exists. I agree it should at least be more heavily plastered in "This is a sponsored ad" signs.

21 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Linustechtips yet again proving that they are totally OK with companies kicking them in the face. 

Even some users on TPU are saying "they need to do this in order to make money!", the same reason people here use to justify basically anything bad Linus does. 

 

Yeah, it's "clearly" labeled an "advertorial" (which sounds like a made up word to me) since it has a really small text saying advertorial in the top right corner. This is totally not shady or misleading at all...

/Sarcasm

 

I am willing to bet that a lot of reactions here would have been different if it was the i9 the article was about. But since it's AMD this horrible practice needs to be defended. 

 

Fuck TPU for doing this. I used to like that site but this really is a fucked up thing to do and it completely breaks the trust I had for them. 

 

This type of behavior should not be accepted. It is for crying out loud borderline illegal because it harms consumers.

Agreed see above, though for me this damages TPU's credibility more than AMD's. I would expect any business to do the same when offered what TPU offered them. Say whatever you want and put whatever graphs you want in, hell yes. As I said above the issue here is an advertorial even exists. But as a Ryzen user with an Nvidia GPU I can say this is dumb AF. False articles benefit no one, if you are pro AMD congrats your product won't actually do what the article says.

 

Lastly and probably the stupidest part. WHY? The 580 beats the 1060 and 570 beats the 1050Ti anyway. There are plenty of legit reviews saying this so why risk the potential backlash of a fake article.

[TOMPPIX]

are people mad because of the ad or are they mad because the advertorial text was small?

[mr moose]

40 minutes ago, Nineshadow said:

To be honest, a lot of companies resort to advertorials to promote their products.

 

 

And I despise them all equally for it. 

 

2 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

are people mad because of the ad or are they mad because the advertorial text was small?

They're mad because it is deceptive advertising. 

[TOMPPIX]

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

They're mad because it is deceptive advertising. 

phew, i was just about to edit my post. haha

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, tom_w141 said:

Before you even start reading it says Advertorial by AMD. Now fuck knows what an advertorial is, I'm guessing it means sponsored editorial but they bought the space fair and square it says its an ad at the top so I don't think this is a big problem. It might fool the unobservant but I think most of us would notice the "ad by AMD" part and if not we can all smell something fishy with a one sided article like this, at least I would.

And you read all the headers when looking for opinions  and FPS graphs in the review section of a website? 

[TOMPPIX]

actually i would prefer this style of ad instead of an ad taking up half my screen and at the same time it gives me a seizure.

[LAwLz]

36 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

actually i would prefer this style of ad instead of an ad taking up half my screen and at the same time it gives me a seizure.

So you prefer deceptive and misleading ads where you will always have to second guess "is this review really trustworthy or is it really just an ad?" over the things you can obviously see are ads?

That is a very dangerous way of thinking.

[Valentyn]

Ugh. Companies need to learn that this is not okay. People need independent sources, not ones influenced or directly playing editor on their conetent.

[Morgan MLGman]

I've seen this article right when it was posted. I was very confused as to what to think about it, it was biased, misleading and it was branded as an "Advertorial" by AMD... It was sad to even read and people in the comments said just that.

 

Now to the worst part...

 

See this chart?

That's the dumbest possible thing TPU has done in like ever.

Though I don't believe that their normal reviews are biased like that.

2 hours ago, zMeul said:

why should I even be surprised by this!?

I've been telling people AMD's PR is a bunch o shitheads, no one believed .. voila 

ever since ReadTeam+ was a thing, people should've raised the flag

Since there are three major companies in that business, Intel, Nvidia and AMD, I can wholeheartedly say that all those 3 companies  have a bunch of shitheads as PR.

For instance: Nvidia has specifically stated that a Titan is not a GeForce card. Yet, it has a GeForce logo on it. They also said that its name isn't GTX Titan, right? Why does it have 'GTX' on the cooler then? They're all morons. Not to mention the f*cking retarded Titan X naming with 3 cards being called essentially the same. It's just biased to say that it's only AMD's PR that's ridiculous.

[TOMPPIX]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

So you prefer deceptive and misleading ads where you will always have to second guess "is this review really trustworthy or is it really just an ad?" over the things you can obviously see are ads?

That is a very dangerous way of thinking.

if they put that in the title everything would be fine.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

Oh well, that makes it alright then,  After all, people will always read the headers and who the article was written by when they are looking for reviews in an e-magazine on the reviews page.  /s

 

[TOMPPIX]

11 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Oh well, that makes it alright then,  After all, people will always read the headers and who the article was written by when they are looking for reviews in an e-magazine on the reviews page.  /s

 

is this better?

[mr moose]

3 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

is this better?

nope.

[LAwLz]

39 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

if they put that in the title everything would be fine.

22 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

is this better?

 

 

I think it would have been better, but still not fine.

Dressing up misleading PR material and putting it in the review section will not be fine with me, ever.

[xAcid9]

I don't mind paid reviews but not this misleading.

 

AMD PR in their meeting room this week.

AMD PR 1: Ryzen is doing well, what should we do to fuck things up? 

AMD PR 2: I will Tweet that Intel paid reviewer to exclude 1080p result on X299 review.
AMD PR 3: I will pay TechPowerUp to include our misleading review in their review section to mislead noobs. 
AMD PR 1: Alright cool! I think we're done here.
*rub their butts together*

[FratStar]

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

Oh well, that makes it alright then,  After all, people will always read the headers and who the article was written by when they are looking for reviews in an e-magazine on the reviews page.  /s

 

 

How do you know you're interested in the article if you don't read the title? Do you really just click random articles? Dead serious question.

[NumLock21]

What I didn't like is how they tried to make it seems to be like a legit review, with their reviewer's name, Advertorial. This throw readers off into confusion. Is Advertorial a actual staff or just a name they made up for sponsor articles. If the reviewer's name was one of their regulars like Ravenlord, w1zzard, or btaruna and on the side says advertorial by amd, that would have been fine, since users can easily identify it's a ad.

[goodtofufriday]

 

Lol what.

[Ekin]

My biggest problem is: If you visit the site the article is listed under "Latest Reviews" without any indication that it could be an ad.

[AshleyAshes]

7 hours ago, leadeater said:

Most of the time I just skip straight down to the graphs to get the info I'm looking for, doesn't matter what is stated at the top I'm not looking at it and if it's structured like a review then that's what it is to me until I see otherwise.

Same.  I literally just skip to the benchmarks, power measurements, ect.  I don't want 'opinions' or 'impressions' I want numbers.

[Energycore]

When I looked at it by myself and without anyone else's opinion it struck me as being placed in the wrong section, and definitely threw me off TPU because I was expecting a review.

[FratStar]

1 hour ago, Ekin said:

-snip-

I can definitely agree that's pretty scummy, you should know it's an ad before you click on it. TPU should just put a policy in place to notify the reader that it's an ad before they click on it by calling it out in the title at least, or creating a section for sponsored content.

[mr moose]

8 hours ago, FratStar said:

 

How do you know you're interested in the article if you don't read the title? Do you really just click random articles? Dead serious question.

Because you don't get to the headline until you are already at the so called "REVIEW".   See below:

6 hours ago, Ekin said:

My biggest problem is: If you visit the site the article is listed under "Latest Reviews" without any indication that it could be an ad.

 

If anyone thinks the above link to RX560 is in any way a paid ad before clicking on it they are either Psychic or full of shit. 

 

 

It is my experience that a lot of people, when reading reviews, do not bother with the headline or the first couple of paragraphs (sometimes they don't even bother with the first page), they simply skip to the graphs and conclusion.  They don't care about the test bench specs, or where the cards came from  or even the price range etc.  This is why we have a lot of people asking "which is better" even though there is a plethora of reviews already available.  People just look at the graphs then come to forums hoping the enthusiasts who know the products better can confirm what the graph says or maybe point out something important that is not FPS related.

 

And that is why this type of advertising is dodgy, it is not a review, it should not be on the review section.  I can see TPU loosing quite a lot of credibility over this.

 

 

[mr moose]

5 hours ago, FratStar said:

I can definitely agree that's pretty scummy, you should know it's an ad before you click on it. TPU should just put a policy in place to notify the reader that it's an ad before they click on it by calling it out in the title at least, or creating a section for sponsored content.

 

Exactly, like they do on tv or on the radio where they announce "now a word from our sponsors".

 

And I haven't even started on the graph!

[VSG]

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

 

Exactly, like they do on tv or on the radio where they announce "now a word from our sponsors".

 

And I haven't even started on the graph!

So the graph is a stupidly scaled one. I think there are two scales for the AMD and NVIDIA bars allowing them to look like that, and it is being fixed from what I know. As far as TPU goes, this was definitely a learning experience on how not to go about things lol and it's not going to happen again.

 

17 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Linustechtips yet again proving that they are totally OK with companies kicking them in the face. 

Even some users on TPU are saying "they need to do this in order to make money!", the same reason people here use to justify basically anything bad Linus does. 

 

Yeah, it's "clearly" labeled an "advertorial" (which sounds like a made up word to me) since it has a really small text saying advertorial in the top right corner. This is totally not shady or misleading at all...

/Sarcasm

 

I am willing to bet that a lot of reactions here would have been different if it was the i9 the article was about. But since it's AMD this horrible practice needs to be defended. 

 

Fuck TPU for doing this. I used to like that site but this really is a fucked up thing to do and it completely breaks the trust I had for them. 

 

This type of behavior should not be accepted. It is for crying out loud borderline illegal because it harms consumers.

An advertorial is actually standard practice, not that I like it myself but it is definitely not a new or made up word.