I've watched many e-bike YouTube reports. FME, all seem to search for a positive aspect of the product and some test so many (one boasted of "testing" 100 bikes last year) they wouldn't know if a bike failed completely after 25 miles. The main goal seems to be to get more bikes to test since some are paid for the submission and many get to keep the test bikes. Some of the companies seem so sketchy, they make a crowd fund look solid. For me, it's name brands and DIY products with a proven track record. So far I haven't been disappointed in 11 years of fun.

It is true - with the exception of a very few reviewers, others always provide links below their posting to give you a “discount” and you know they’re getting something in return

it’s tough to figure out reviewers who are unbiased vs ones that are biased

I think they all start out with: "I got this eBike and it is fun, but I have some thoughts I'd like to share. Why don't I try a YouTube video?"

Monetized of course.

The guys who then spend the time to edit & polish their videos end up getting approached by mfrs, then quit their day job and before they know it, it IS their job to do polished, positive reviews, or at least minimize the negative aspects. It takes a lot of time to make a video that's not done in one take and to edit it properly. Enough that it would have to be one's hobby at first.

To me, the real problem is the reviews that are 100% honest and not as polished don't even get seen because people flock to the videos with the most views. The ones that are mostly shill videos.

The business model was seemingly perfected by Bicycling Magazine and Bicycle Guide several decades earlier.

One of the YouTube channels I subscribe to is Techmoan, hosted by an English fellow named Mat, whose videos mostly present his thoughts on various electronic products, including long-since-discontinued and/or esoteric and/or whimsical audio equipment. (Here's an example that covers all three categories.)

He recently posted a video that included an aside on the topic of being called a shill in comments under some of his videos. He explained his position on the topic and finished by saying, with reference to the product he was reviewing, something like "So ignore whatever else I said about this item. Whatever you do, do not buy it. Repeat, do not buy it."

This is how hobby media has always worked, it's only the medium that changes. Do you think your bike magazine writer being flown out to the Alps or the coast range for a road bike launch also had a clapped out Taiwan bike with ten thousand miles on it?

I need this.

Shill.

100%. The "enthusiast press" has always been access journalism - play nice or else you won't get invited to the next press intro and stay in a really nice hotel and eat some really nice food and ride in some pretty epic places. I've been part of the motorcycle enthusiast press for 20+ years, and for the longest time I begged off attending these press intros, instead choosing to do motorcycle travel stories arms length away from pr people. Not that they're bad folk - I count some of them as friends. But that's the problem, anything that compromises my objectivity impacts my responsibility to my readers.

I know motojournalists who have been blackballed from major motorcycle manufacturers that lacked a sense of humor. I'm pretty sure that I've been blackballed too. It's such a challenging space to exist in. To a person, we all got into business because we love motorcycles; we sure didn't get into it for the money. But working in the industry that we love makes it especially hard to be super critical of that very same industry, not only for the conflict of interest reasons described above, but also because we aren't always ready to give the industry the tough love that it needs sometimes. I'm certain that's the conundrum that competitive cycling journalists faced (and continue to face) during the PED scandals that have repeatedly shook the sport to its foundations; it's take a certain temerity to investigate the emperor when everyone else is writing feel-good zero-to-hero story arcs.

With regards to YouTube video - I always look for clear conflict on interest statements either in the video description or in the intro, i.e., Company A sent me this to review. That's the bare minimum for me. Without that, I assume it's an ad. And even with that statement, I know the industry well enough that a bad review = limited or no access to future products = loss of channel traffic = loss of revenue.

My preference is for long-term reviews (not, "I just bought this and it's awesome!" videos) from people that bought the product with their own nickels, put the product through its paces, and has experience with other products to have a real objective basis for comparison. Alas, those kinds of videos are rare as hen's teeth. If anything, I value real world reviews from folks here and other established online spaces more than YouTube. But I do appreciate YouTube videos that thoroughly go over the specs of a products.

Caveat YouTuber

That's why they pay me the big bucks.

There was a kefuffle 20 years ago now around an article by John Ford in Motorcycling magazine about how cheaper helmets designed to meet the DOT test would score better than ones designed to the Snell Foundation specifications. Snell certification was a major marketing component. Five years later in 2010 the same author published a piece in the NYTimes about how the latest 2010 Snell branding was deliberately obfuscating the remaining sales of helmets made to the problematic 2005 standard. This one got the author fired from Motorcyclist.

https://www.jalopnik.com/how-the-tru...alist-5582380/

I was fairly surprised to see the Consumer Reports logo in a Subaru ad recently. I missed that they changed their policy in 2022 to license their trademarks to advertising as long as there were sufficient disclaimers and explanations - which imo there were not https://www.consumerreports.org/brand-licensing/ The deliberate misleading in the advertising and conflict of interest for CR are obvious and I'm disappointed

I like your tag line! Disco Infiltrator! I agree, as I stopped paying attention to CR reviews a long time ago

i will say I subscribe to the YT channel for Scott Hardesty

he was the influence for me buying my Nomad 2 and by all accounts he seems to be honest and objective

I had subscribed to several other reviewers but in time dismissed them as having an agenda

That's a funny thing to say. You might have been misled by Consumers Digest, which was a shell magazine with no subscribers, set up for the sole purpose of selling a trademark for use in ads that looked like Consumer Reports.

CR used to never do this and they must have had quite an internal fight about it

Ah got it Darth - thanks for the clarification

I enjoy the heck out of techmoan's videos. He doesn't seem eager to promote anything to me. It feels like his schtick is: "I just got this [vintage electronic] that looked fun and here's what I found after playing with it for awhile."

I agree absolutely. An affable, unpretentious guy (as the British say, he has no "side" to him) and an enthusiastic amateur. And for a guy with zero background in electronics training, his perseverance in the repair jobs he plunges into is both inspiring and intimidating.

For most of those jobs, I'd have long since given up by the time he's halfway in. But he keeps going, even after meeting setback after setback. And he almost finally always gets the item to work, whatever it is.

I haven't seen any of techmoan's "work", but if there's an honest reviewer who spends more than thirty minutes testing a bike, good for the individual. For me, I haven't located anyone that doesn't have an agenda.

Techmoan doesn't do videos on bicycles, electric or otherwise - just consumer electronics such as retro and modern home entertainment equipment (A/V tech), video cameras, dashcams, etc.

Make no mistake, what he does is work. No need to put it in quotes. It's a hobby for him, but he's passionate enough to shoot and edit the video, in ADDITION to all the fiddling with the devices.

There is a link above to one of his videos that is pretty typical. Not about bikes though.

One of my favorites in that vein is AvE, aka arduinoversusevil

When I reviewed MTB's, e-bikes and bicycle-related products for a socal rag, the editor wouldn't allow anything negative, so if the item wasn't worthy of a positive report, I told the company about the problem and didn't write a review. Also, I discovered from comparing quick tests at expos to the same products delivered for a long term evaluation that some bikes at expos were "juiced" compared to the production models. .

For a moment I imagined it would be pretty great if a writer started an anonymous account to say the negative things. But I imagine it would be pretty easy to find them out.

Jeremy Clarkson had sufficient fame to keep making a go of it despite saying negative things a lot, but he had to get household famous first. And he did get blackballed, by Toyota at least for a while. For comparing them to kitchen appliances iirc

I dislike youtube reviews. Too much shill, not enough knowledge. I recently saw one where the reviewer mentioned how knowledge is important. and then he shows off his 2" bike rack wobbling on the end of a hitch adapter attached to his car's 1 -1/4" hitch, Maybe he will get sued when someone else does that and has the rack snap off the car hitch,

One "famous" shill called me a "so-called-expert" when I pointed out the inefficiency of pedaling a bike on a frame so small that his knees went about as high as his ears when he pedaled it..

I remember that story. I was just getting started around then.

That's unfortunate, but the stark reality of publishing is that the industry is being killed by free information on the Internet, and even once-stalward organizations are making compromises they would not have made 20+ years ago. You can't compete with free.

I know one guy who used to be in the business news publishing business. Fancy New York offices and everything. His Editor-in-Chief was an old school news guy. He would chase ad sales folks out of the editorial offices and would tell his staff not to get too comfy with members of the ad sales team at the annual holiday party. He eventually left and was replaced with someone who welcomed ad sales people and advertisers up to the editorial offices.

I gotta look for him on YT!