Travel, Hotels, & Events
GamersNexus travels for reporting, journalistic deep-dives, and educational factory tours. Here are our policies.
Where It Started vs. Where It Is Now
GamersNexus started in about 2008 in my mom’s old house. A long time ago, if a company offered to pay for the flight and hotel for their launch event, we’d allow them to pay for the transit (but never for coverage, we’d also not let them advertise in relation to the trip). We’ve always paid for conventions on our own, but one-off events used to be covered by companies. For context, my first year of business grossed $180 of revenue — so that should give you an idea as to why. Yes, one hundred and eighty. But we stopped accepting travel support a long time ago now.
That changed as soon as I got the business out of her house (thanks, mom) and we had enough money to pay for all our own event flights/transit.
A photo taken by industry analyst Anshel Sag while we were filming a news report from a convention show floor.
From our video detailing the multi-floor, massive, sprawling SEG E-Market in Shenzhen.
Intrinsically, we strongly believe that media outlets acting in good faith can accept travel, hotels, and simple meals without being influenced in coverage. Even though we believe it is possible to maintain this balance, we find it is easier to go the path of no question: We simply do not accept any travel assistance these days. We used to — we had to, as we had no money (and ‘we’ was basically me freshly dropping out of school) — but we no longer have to. Although we’d profit a lot more money if we continued to accept travel, we felt uneasy with how some companies use it almost as an implicit carrot and stick. Most act in good faith, but not all do. Rather than try and identify the good actors, we just cut them all from the opportunity to pay for flights to their announcement events. Removing that lever from the companies allows us complete autonomy and control over our itineraries and schedules. We view these as work events, not vacations. Frankly, this also removes annoyances like conveying flight preferences, rebooking delays, and eliminates mistakes that agencies make. We handle all of that. It means there’s no assumption from the company that we’ll attend their group dinner or their bowling outing or whatever it may be. When they don’t pay for the trip, it’s hard for them to go “you’re not coming to the movie? Huh, ok.”
I believe firmly that when the team travels, it stays together as a team. We do our own small team events — often just GN — as a means to decompress from the day. We don’t want to “network” or do “fun” (in the eye of the event organizer) activities because that’s not why we’re at events. We’re there to work. Not to play. Any non-work we do is typically just whatever my team wants to do as a unit. It took me many years to muster the basic courage to say “no, I don’t want to do your extracurricular activities. Just give me the news.” It wasn’t until I wasted some time at various manufacturer events they thought would be “fun” for me to finally learn to just reject those invites — but it was made easier by self-funding flights and hotels.
These policies have become rigid over time. We used to take the ‘free’ plane tickets and housing. It’s not like they were lavish or first class. The first events that pushed me away from that mostly involved one company stranding us in China because they got the passport details wrong, then their competing company (of that first one) not telling us where we were flying until 2 weeks before an international event. I found both of these to be offensively inconsiderate of the personal lives of my team, as it’s unreasonable for me to tell a camera operator “you’re flying internationally, but we don’t know exactly when, how long, or where, because the GPU manufacturer won’t tell us.” It also shows what the companies sometimes think of media outlets. We don’t work for them. We’re not their marketing department, so we’re not on their itineraries.
Those two events changed my handling of these matters. We now have extremely strict requirements. The companies have all been on-board with it, because I think the reps understand that we’re trying to maintain both a level of undeniable independence and of mutual respect between outlet and manufacturer. It’s not a one-way street anymore. Besides, it saves them money.
We take the journalism side extremely seriously, and that means maintaining a professional separation of money as much as possible. I have no illusions that I’m more of a ‘hard-ass’ about this than other media outlets and that it is maybe unnecessarily strict with regard to what we accept, but remember that it’s all about how the outlet positions itself. For us, we are focused on reviews and consumer perspective. You can definitely let someone pay for your chicken nuggets without compromising integrity, of course, but it’s just easier to treat this as black-and-white, not a gradient. I manage a team, and that means it would be unfair to ask my team (when operating independently of me) to uphold an ambiguous, undefined gradient of a ‘standard.’ It’s easier for us all to go into something knowing what we accept and what we decline and for me to give team members a credit card to just self-fund if we’re separated.
You can find our policies below.
- Steve
The GamersNexus team with Cooler Master’s team during a tour of a cardboard factory.
Travel
Although it is common within the technical press to accept paid flights and hotels, GamersNexus pays for 100% of its flights and hotels associated with travel coverage. We also DO NOT ACCEPT PAYMENT TO GO TO EVENTS OR TO BOOTHS FOR COVERAGE. If we cover a product, it’s because it was interesting enough to cover. We sell normal ads to other vendors against those videos, but we never sell coverage to the company hosting the event, as that’d be a major conflict.
As travel media coverage is rarely profitable, there too was a time when GN also had to accept paid flights or hotels for events; however, many years ago, we fully established our independence in this regard from manufacturers and fund our own trips. This is largely thanks to viewer support and donations via Patreon. We spent approximately $50,000 of our own money on travel for event coverage, factory tours, and traveling reports, not including travel staff wages, in 2019. It’s not cheap, but it’s the only way we want to do things as it allows us total control and agency over our schedules — no implicit quid-pro-quo parties or coverage.
No bullshit time-wasting side quests.
Caveats & Details
Flight & Meal Caveats
Hotel Caveats
Believe it or not, so few people reject paid hotel stays that we have regularly run into instances where a manufacturer does not have a process for us to pay for our own room. In these instances, we normally just book directly through the hotel; however, in some rare cases, the manufacturer may have the room block pre-reserved and may prove difficult to work with to permit us to pay our own way. We had one instance where we had to fight with both the PR team and the hotel for about 3 hours to allow us to pay for our own room. As of writing, we have always been able to win that fight — but in instances in the future where we simply can’t get it through someone’s head that, yes, we will spend our own money, we pledge to donate an amount equivalent to the room value to one of the charities listed on our page about contributions. In such instances, we’ll tweet the amount or post it on YT Community.
We do not ever allow manufacturers to book our flights at this point under any circumstances. It’s just unreasonable on their end to maintain all that control. At least, not since the time in 2016 that a certain company accidentally misbooked a flight and stranded us in China. It’s fine - it forced us to formalize our policy rejecting ‘free’ flights. Fortunately, travel is complex enough that we’ve never had a company push back on this requirement. There are no caveats here. It’s an absolutist policy!
Although we don’t accept any form of extravagant meals, if there are catered chicken nuggets or snacks around so that we can stay sharp during an event, we have no policy against the team eating — obviously — to stay alive. But we don’t go to fancy company dinners unless allowed to pay for our own meals (and even then, most of us just aren’t that social, anyway; we’d rather hangout amongst ourselves).
Tradeshows & Conventions
There are a few major tradeshows within the industry that we attend, such as Computex, CES, and PAX. These are all brand-neutral (no one PC hardware brand controls these events). We pay our way to these events, as above. We sell and place normal advertisements within videos (as you see in all our other videos) with no change to our normal ads model. We do not ever charge to visit booths, considering that’s just our job (to find and report news), and will only cover an item at a booth if it is worth covering.
Gifts, Parties, & Alcohol
We do not attend parties unless there is a coverage opportunity there. I personally hate them in all walks of life, but especially in work. I fly to events and exhaust myself with travel to do work. If I wanted to do something fun, I’d do it not near a convention center surrounded with computers. It’d be on a bike somewhere. In some instances, a company will have early versions of its product off to the side at an industry party/event. In those cases, we may attend to get our video and go. Or maybe to interview someone. Otherwise, we avoid them outright as it is a waste of time we could be spending editing or, if my team wants to have fun, doing something actually fun in a unique location rather than something embedded obtusely and often conflictingly within the industry.
The team is not permitted to drink alcohol while working with representatives and agents of companies, as we view this as unprofessional and counter to our jobs as linebackers between manufacturers and consumers.
Gifts of cash are never accepted because that’s literally just a bribe. Gift cards, e.g. for Uber or restaurants, are normally thrown away but sometimes are burned on camera. We typically try to give them to someone (outside of GN) who can actually use them, though. Certainly these companies don’t need their $50 food voucher back, but someone less fortunate might want it.
Pens, tote bags, t-shirts, etc. are often included with an event badge. As such, to not be “those guys” all the time, we allow them. There’s no conflict to be handed a bag of what is effectively trash that we don’t want anyway. It just causes a lot of friction to pick through a bag when registering for an event and they have no value to us. USB keys or SSDs are always accepted as they often have press assets on them that we need to do our jobs, e.g. spec sheets. The general rule is “no item gifts of any meaningful value” where “gift” here is defined as anything that is not a review product, an evaluation sample, or something immediately required to do the job (such as a USB key with the digital assets for the event).
Factories
Our popular Factory Tour series has also been entirely self-funded other than the first few trips we did (again, when we were just starting out with major travel coverage). Although less common these days, we sometimes make exceptions to allow factories to help arrange cabs/transit to/from the facilities as there can often be both a language and geographic knowledge barrier. Ask us about the time we got lost in Shenzhen.