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airship

\"Shilling\" goes all the way back to the carnival days, and unfortunately there's not anything illegal about it. In fact, you're lucky if you get any actual honest product information anywhere. There are many print reviewers who are notorious for being easily bought off. Some go as cheaply as a free product sample or two. Others demand free trips, actual cash money, or even hookers at trade shows. In the pages of many magazines, it's as simple a formula as \"the bigger the ad, the better the review\". As a former magazine editor, I know - we were one of the few honest ones. In fact, you might want to watch these pages, just to see if a discouraging word is ever said about The Consumerists' advertisers. ;)

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sixtoe

Yeah, I mean, as a frequent and trusted commenter on this blog, you can trust me when I say that NVIDIA(tm) is clearly the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies. Did you know the NVIDIA(tm) GeForce 7300 GPUs are now available from OEMs and System Builders worldwide? I got two!

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fizzer fits

Well, traditional or not, it's nice to know who is 'Shilling' and who isn't. Watching a company get caught doing it warms the cockles of my ice-cold heart.

I wonder how wide-spread this is? I'm always a little weary when doing research on a product I'm going to buy but this puts the fear of God in me. For stuff like Nvidia/ATI I'm not worried about it as there are enough professional reviews out that all the bribe money in the world won't skew the results. Still, I rely on forums for figuring out if I should buy obscure products...

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Paul D

I seem to remember some story on TV about a kid who was \"paid\" (in merch and swag) to promote the Cowboy Bebop movie in various online forums. The TV show made it sound like this was the most natural thing in the world and the kid was having fun (and the promo company should be rewarded for such \"out of the box\" thinking).

ugh.

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mazer rackham

Little does AEG know that all web forum users are just one guy who endlessly sets up shill accounts to lure companies into trying to advertise to him.

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L_Emmerdeur

You know they are up to no good when they refer you to PR. They are essentially saying that they need to either lie to you or stonewall you.

I'm not so sure such activity is legal. If said actors were paid to advertise Nvidia products, there are laws governing what they can and cannot do, regardless of medium.

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mattbr

Are you trying to say that nVidia's new powercord and ultraspeedium sli interconnect won't give me higher framerates despite what k1llz0r said on the ultramegapcpimptuning forum ?