Advertising Policies
Our revenue primarily comes from these avenues: The GN Store, Patreon, Memberships & YT Premium on YouTube, direct donations (bottom of store page), Google Ads, and direct ads.
We have a few primary forms of advertising that appear on the channel. The main one is Google AdSense via YouTube, which includes skippable, unskippable, and banner ads on YouTube itself. We enable these via YouTube; however, we have very little control over what is shown. As such, it’s possible a manufacturer advertises a product we don’t approve of using Google’s YouTube AdSense. These ads can also be totally unrelated to hardware — for example, during political season, it is likely that political ads will run. We cannot control these as they are platform-wide. We would have no way of knowing they’re doing so (we don’t get a ‘list’ of people who’ve advertised with AdSense) and have no real control over blocking them. YouTube Premium would allow you to avoid them.
The other primary form is direct ad sales. Those are the ads you see with our own voice over (and typically our own footage, or a mix of the manufacturer’s and ours) that normally last about 30 +/- 10 seconds and are within the beginning of the video.
Although we have been reducing our reliance on advertisers for many years now (and can largely self-fund with first-party GN store ads in special pieces), we still need them to keep the constant projects going. There is a fine balance that has existed for at least a couple centuries at this point between even the earliest media publications and their advertisers, and that balance is one that needs to favor editorial freedom.
Editorial Separation & Freedom
One of our methods of maintaining that editorial separation is to work with an ads manager to help firewall some of the communications. Another is to charge low enough that we can just cancel the entire campaign without concern, which helps when we suddenly lose faith in a product — like how we canceled an MSI campaign years ago. Our biggest goal is to sell to more companies outside of PC hardware, such as website building tools, video games (not Raid Shadow Legends, thank you very much!), web hosts, etc. This creates further separation between the brands whose products we review and us.
The above video illustrates one of our internal validation tests on a product that was sent for evaluation as a potential advertisement. It passed.
Vetting
For advertisements, we test or use every product that is up for a potential ad. Typically, we identify which products we liked in the review process and then contact those companies to ask if they’re interested in ads. This is backwards from what’s typical: We like to review the products, then if we thought they were good or performed well, we go talk to the manufacturer and tell them we think it’d advertise well since it’s something we can actually recommend. This allows us to fully get through our thought process and analysis prior to selling an ad, which is ideal as it fully eliminates monetary influence. In instances where we have already sold a campaign and the advertiser informs us of a new product it wishes to advertise, we ask them to send us evaluation units. We then internally test the product. If it wasn’t going to be reviewed anyway, we at least run it through some of our standard review processes to see if it’d hit a baseline requirement of quality. If it does, we run it. If it doesn’t, we tell the advertiser to pick something else and then repeat the process. We regularly turn down products from our ads pool for failing to meet our standards.
We can cancel a campaign at any time, and we have canceled 5-figure campaigns last-minute in the past when we tested the product and found we didn’t believe in it. We are strict in any contract reviews and enforce specific clauses that enable us to walk away.
Blocked Vendors
Ad Selection
In 2020 when events slowed down, we decided to internally formalize some advertising policies. One of those was an internal (formal) ‘block list’ to disallow directly purchased advertising from the following major vendors (listed alphabetically):
AMD
Intel
NVIDIA
None of these companies have done anything specifically ‘wrong’ to land on the list, we just decided that they have become too core to our coverage and so we want financial separation from any direct ads from these companies. But remember: We can’t control YouTube’s own AdSense ads. Additionally, these vendors have their hands in everything - it’s possible that some of their MDF (Marketing Development Fund) is funding a board partner’s decision to purchase motherboard advertising, for instance, but we don’t have visibility into that, so it doesn’t really change how we interact with the maker of that motherboard (in this example).
We do not update this list for temporarily blocked advertisers. Only for permabans!
Our ads are placed semi-randomly. Our editors or ads manager will choose a pre-rendered ad from the pool and place it in videos that are the lowest possible conflict. For example, if we’re reviewing a CPU cooler, we work to avoid running another cooler ad in that same video. Manufacturers do not get to choose which of our videos they run in and are blind to our process of placement; however, they can ask to be placed within a certain time range (e.g. “April”).
We currently only run one directly sold advertisement per video — you’ll see that in the beginning of the video. Other than AdSense or our own GN Store / Patreon promotions, we do not run directly sold ads at the end of the video. They are clearly disclaimed as ads.
We also write our own ad scripts. We allow an advertiser to tell us points they may want to focus on, but they don’t provide the script. They sometimes provide a bullet list, but frankly, we basically ignore those and just do our own thing once we get hands-on with it. You’ll notice that a lot of our ad scripts stick to language like “[Company name] claims that the product does [XYZ],” which is normally used when a certain phrase can’t necessarily be “tested” as it may be more subjective. We stick to this careful phrasing to make it clear to our audience when a statement is ours, as an independent statement, as opposed to the advertiser’s own claim.
Blocked Categories
These are sweeping, entire categories that we have broadly blocked. Absence of a particular category from this list does not mean that we explicitly allow it - it may be the case that we just didn’t list it. This list is primarily focused on explicitly blocking some common types of advertising seen on YouTube, rather than blatantly illegal or disallowed ads on the platform.
Gambling websites
Financial investment platforms
Cryptocurrency platforms or coins
Prescription medication, drugs, alcohol
Gray market CD key selling websites and services
Banking services
Insurance services
Medical services
“Sponsored” Videos
We do not allow any form of paid booth visit or news coverage funded by the subject at events. That’s just our job (learn about our Travel & Event Policies here), and it’s not editorially or journalistically isolated enough to accept payment to cover someone’s product at a news event. Although advertisers can run ads against our other coverage from the event, they cannot pay for us to cover their own product in a news post. It is a massive conflict to report “news” but take first-party money for that news item & report. Someone else may advertise against that video, of course, including AdSense and Direct Sales (possibly from a competitor, even), and the news subject may even have active ads against videos unrelated to them, but the subject of the news/booth video may not pay for its creation. You won’t find us shoehorning a vacuum into paid content.
If we’re covering something, it’s because we think it’s worth covering. We also don’t currently do any form of fully, independently paid-for video. In YouTuber terminology, these are referred to as “sponsored videos.” That doesn’t mean “there is a sponsor somewhere in the video,” it explicitly refers to the idea that an entire video’s existence was paid for and bought by the sponsor (e.g. a paid unboxing). We do not do infomercials or QVC-esque videos. In the past, we had 2 educational videos that I (Steve, here) can recall that were ‘sponsored,’ and they were c. 2015 or so when we ran purely educational pieces that otherwise couldn’t be paid for. We’ve earned enough support from our audience and store that we’ve never had to do them again, and that’s what we wanted.
The below video is old, but provides some fun and useful insight to our hard stances: