Gadgetory

everyone pretty much posts their reviews at the same time and the same day and this is because of review embargoes or what folks commonly referred to as NBA is not necessarily the same thing but the same general idea behind each so today for the Sunday topic we will be explaining what a review embargo is and why for the most part is something that we actually like in the media the very basics of it a review embargo is a statement official or otherwise and an agreement between the media outlet and the manufacturer that says you will not release information on this product that you have obtained under these conditions until the specific date and time August 8 9 a.m. Eastern would normally be an example of an embargo so for an example a product under embargo would be something like I've been informed I'm not allowed to show that yet before we're getting to this discussion this is brought to you by our patreon backers at patreon.com slash gamers Nexus we had a goal there that was met not too long ago where I said if you guys can help us reach this will do more Sunday topics where it's talking about industry or things that drive me crazy or whatever that would hopefully be entertaining to watch so that's what this is part of go to patreon.com/scishow and razaaq's is to contribute thanks to those of you who have done so already so examples of things under embargo would include pretty much everything we've reviewed at least in the more technical side of things video cards CPUs very occasionally cases not too commonly an embargo at its core is supposed to give us time to adequately test review and form an opinion on something so that we can post content that actually has substance and depth and value as opposed to the alternative which is all the media racing to be first that says that very recently had their sort of controversial policy where they said we're eliminated review copies reviewers get it on the same day as a consumer and it was under the guise of saying well it's only fair that reviewers have to wait to play it until the same day of consumers that was plainly bullshit and just trying to move more copies of things by eliminating critical reviews prior to launch not going to go into that today all topic but the idea is well first of all speaking as a reviewer or I should say speaking for myself as a reviewer I don't care about getting the thing early for the status of having it early I care about getting it early so I could work on it it's not the world is a lot different when you're not in the sense of games like what that does is trying to get a game early to play it but you're trying to get it early so you can start developing content it doesn't have the same meaning there's a big disconnect there so ignoring that has the core moment that would be an example of when embargoes are not present and they probably should be because something like a game you need a long time to play it beat it form an opinion but what happens without that embargo there well what happens is all the reviewers go out they buy the game or acquire it as immediately as possible and then start working on content so you might have one or two hours in the game and you're already looking at this like okay how do I turn this into an article into a video maybe they skip the review and instead do something like funny faces you can make in test six or whatever where the content is just kind of low depth but it gets high views because its first and that's what matters a lot of the time when you're fighting for traffic which drives money the alternative is of course trying to pump out a review and doing it in a couple of hours which is just going to overlook all kinds of things that could be bad with hardware it doesn't work quite so easily because if you try to force a review without any time put into it it will show benchmarking takes a while video card benchmarks take quite a few days at the least depend on how in-depth we go so that's the other question is how long are these embargoes normally and do they benefit us or the consumer or manufacturer from manufacturers perspective they might want an embargo in place and theory they'll say it's for more in-depth reviews I would have to imagine well a lot of that is also just to align with specific launches release dates with competition things like that how do we release this product so that it best competes in the market against whatever the other people are making but generally with video cards we are given something like one week to review them maybe two if we're really lucky but it tends to be about a week if you count the weekend and we always work on the weekends or any day really that needs to work so tends to be about a week cpu's varies a lot of the time just recently with Katy Lake I think we had Katie Lee excused in December or November with the early motherboards so that was a really long review time especially for something that ultimately was kind of boring as a product so 7700 K didn't drive a lot of excitement I think our review video for the 7700 K has fewer views than our brand new AMD risin news video so I should tell you about how popular the Intel SKUs were for the last generation that's just because they have somewhat stagnated which is again not as we talked about that but that was an exceptionally long time to review a product and it's great because you can do things like in our case finds the V core issues on some of the motherboards or look at temperatures and more depth than normally or run different types of CT benchmarks like adding blender into the benchmarking routine maybe you add h.264 265 encoding stuff like that that time is very valuable now companies will want to limit the amount of time they give you depending on how confident they are in the product so if you are concerned that there are going to be more issues with launch then you might want to give less time for reviewers to look at the product why would that be well as a reviewer it would be I suppose irresponsible would be best word to publish a review or criticism of something that contains information that is highly critical if we haven't had enough time to thoroughly research and investigate whatever we think is wrong with the product so if you don't have enough time to research it generally what happens is you say ok we're going to just have to shelve this and come back to in a week or something when we've got more time to really dig into it and figure out if this is actually a problem or if this is a problem with our bench or problem with our methodology or whatever you have to wait till you're confident and with a shorter embargo that's going to happen more often as opposed to with a longer embargo period with more time to work on it we have more time to figure out oh this is actually a very valid concern we should probably publish this and explain what's going on so that would be one reason you'd have a shorter embargo other than the most common reason which is just the products not ready okay so let's cut away from some of the basic stuff this is all very unstructured as usually for these types of videos but and instead talk about the behind the scenes of what happens generally agreeing to an embargo or an NDA goes like this the manufacturer emails us and says hey we have some cool news for you can you agree to an embargo of this date and time and I'll reply to them and say I guess so I'd really like to know more about what this news is but sure let's let's agree to that date and time and see what you have to say so they'll give us the information and then we sit on it until the date and time expires and then what happens is generally a video an article or nothing will get published at that date and time the case of nothing that's because it was inconsequential news no one really has the time to look into it so we've skipped it but for the most part that's the transaction you'll notice there I didn't say the one thing that seems to be a very common misconception among folks outside of the industry looking in is that there's no generally agreements there's no physical will send you a contract and you sign this contract and it has all these clauses in it that's really rare there are a few times where I've gotten contracts that I've had to fill in a signature and email it back and those are normally it's a tendency based on company more than product so some companies will do that whereas most of them that we work with just have an email simple agreement yes or no and it's built on trust the whole industry for the most part with regard to this topic is built on trust if you really screw up and disrespect the embargo they probably just won't work with you again it's not like they're going to drag you through court or something so there's not normally a contract but embargo is generally the term that's used to refer to news embargoes news a ban on posting news until it's the embargo is lifted whereas MDA more specifically would be disclosure agreement generally an actual contract is involved but people kind of mix and match them it doesn't really there's no really specific difference between them so that's mostly semantics but yeah generally the process is they ask us to hold the news and we do now there are times when I'll say no for example I've been asked to sign back dated embargoes before NDA's where someone will want to talk to us about a product and they filled in the date and it goes back in time which is absolutely not ok because it's a good chance we've seen the product or talked about it or whatever maybe visited a factory and saw one and it's in the background of a photo somewhere I'm not going to agree to that because that who knows what we've already done in the last few months so back dated things I definitely don't agree to there are other times where maybe we've already acquired the information elsewhere and I don't need their primary source of information in that case I might not agree either if I feel like it would be more beneficial to use our stores to go ahead and publish what we have as opposed to potentially limiting myself to what I can say based on whatever this embargoed information is which is very often not that technical of us it's really that you've gotten fortunate enough to talk to an engineer or someone but or it's review as opposed to news here's another good topic about this I was thinking about is what happens if you break an embargo there are two types of breaking an NDA or an embargo one is unintentional the other one is intentional both of them happen I think intentional pradhans a whole lot more and there are plenty of sites out there that post leaks and information that a lot of the time beliefs are not we've already seen but we can't comment on or talk about because we're under an embargo or an NDA and that site might not be they've obtained the information some other way almost definitely not directly through the company they're not breaking an embargo or an NDA they're probably in no legal trouble they're just posting a leak that they've obtained externally and that sucks because we're not allowed to comment on it or talk about it while all these thousands or millions of people are reading about this item this news item before the embargo has lifted and so we're sitting here with weeks of work into something sometimes looking at sites postings way in advance and you could imagine that would be pretty fresh like we're putting hundreds of hours into this in some cases again the longer embargoes or dozens in the very easiest cases and every time an article goes up that breaks embargo you're basically losing money because you're losing the potential to gain traffic because as a news topic ages it loses views very rapidly the longer a news items a new item generally dies in about a day that's kind of when when people stop caring so to see embargoes broken by sites that are less scrupulous or don't provide actual testing of their own and just are leaking things is very frustrating and people in media we all do talk to each other and generally agree that those sites are not fun to work in the industry with but nothing happens to them because they've never agreed to an embargo or an NDA so they're just getting their info separately there's really nothing you can do to stop it but what about if you intentionally break an embargo and you actually were under one well generally hopefully you've got a damn good reason to do it but secondly of course the RISM from peers and potentially being at least temporarily blacklisted by the company where they might not work with that media outlet again for ever or for a certain amount of time so it depends on how much the company thinks they should be punished for it what about unintentionally we have I've done that once in recent history that I can remember and I know we have certainly seen it plenty of times so the company that makes Mirage torn banner studios they made chivalry previously we were at PAX maybe a year or two ago or GDC I think we were at GDC and they had a review embargo except for not review a news embargo except for the next day at I don't know I think 12 p.m. or something and this was a very simple thing of my system was set in Eastern time zone we worked on the content really wait late until 3:00 a.m. or something and we're waiting to post it when and scheduled it and scheduled it on Eastern time zone so pop up three hours ahead of one's embargo lifted no big deal they emailed us pretty immediately of course they see that and they're like hey embargo what's going on I was like oh sorry so you know if you catch it early enough you just set it back to private and publish it later or you apologize explain it and move on no one really cares if it's not a malicious intent now of course not a great thing to do regularly but a one-off you're not going to really get a whole bunch of trouble especially if you are going to work with them to either hide the content until embargo time or if it's only an hour away or whatever just apologize and kind of move on so it definitely happens now it doesn't happen a whole lot at least not for us I know that recently for the EVGA icx coverage Paul and Jay and I were making fun of Kyle because he accidentally released his icx video a day in advance the right time just the wrong day and he immediately hit it no big deal Jacob from EVGA called him one was like hey your reviews on my cat was like oops oh shut that the private so you know we make fun of them but I don't think no no hard feelings or anything - just a normal mistake so break and embargo happens regularly it's just a matter of was it intentional or unintentional and should there be any consequences that covers most the basics in general kind of recapping embargoes are good when they give us time to properly evaluate something bench market and form an opinion as opposed to racing to be first which is absolutely what would happen without an embargo and that is because be in first matters if you are not all going to be timed releases now when everything comes out at the same time I've seen a few comments that are occasionally like all the same information was just released by released by all the youtubers and all the tech reviewers why this is boring now I have to watch the same information from all these videos so hopefully an embargo gives everyone enough time to actually to develop some unique angle to their story for example our icx coverage was a very heavy in the thermals and talks not how the thermistors work how the power design was laid out so that gave us a bit of a unique angle other folks have their unique angles were they different types of testing on it so hopefully an embargo gives enough time to have at least one of those gems in there but otherwise you basically just me pick someone or a couple reviewers and consume the content and you know you don't need to watch every single one but yeah of course I'll release at the same time but the idea is it sets a fair playing field so rather than fight each other again to be first we can produce depth and this is kind of an issue you see with with most news media I think today but normally it's not in a scenario where there's a product I can have a fixed launch time Dayton and embargo its if you have just breaking news of course everyone's going to tear each other apart to get to it first so I think that kind of covers it I'm sure there are a million more things I could say about this I've been dealing with embargoes probably since 2008 so there are plenty of stories plenty of caveats things like that in general we like them there are very occasional times when I just flat-out refused because they're sometimes ridiculous like well at CES there were at least two instances where I had emails come in 12 hours before an embargo lift and say hey do you want to agree to this embargo and the you know you're sitting there at a convention center do you agree to this embargo I've probably already gotten that information from someone else and there's a very good chance we've already filmed something or they are in the process of writing and publishing something so that the response to that is kind of like I screw you know you didn't give me enough time for this like what is it what am I supposed to do with that 12 there's a period of embargoes or NDA's where they become so short that all they're doing is constraining you and forcing you to avoid publishing something or reducing the amount of information that can be published as opposed to providing time to analyze the information so the good and bad it just comes down to the outlet and their ability to look at it and figure out if it is favorable for their viewers and readers or not and at that point they can they can make decisions on whether to agree or to modify the terms which we also do quite regularly in the very few instances that there are written NDA is to agree to but for the most part it's just a simple do you agree yes or no here's a date and time so that pretty much wraps up the embarrass because I think that was those plenty of depth as always check the sites for more information gamer taxes on net patreon.com slash gamers access to help without directly subscribe for more thank you for watching I'll see you all next time you