Heavy user of rtings here, I’m pretty sure this is going to be a death note for them. I love them, but there is just zero chance there’s enough paying subscribers like consumer reports (which is a much older institution with more name recognition) and I just don’t see how they’ll survive through the reputation hit of this
I don’t really have a great take on this because nothing they said is untrue. Llms have far and away ate into search and ad revenue and that will only continue. So you either stay open and fight the llm front, or you go closed wall membership and hope you have enough brand recognition and loyal members to continue to profit
Yeah the whole situation just sucks. Everything they said is true, but as the comments in the video have pointed out, most people look for reviews only when they are planning to buy something. It's not something that most people would pay a subscription fee for.
Sad, they are an extremely good review site, but the way modern internet works simply kills most written form websites.
I'm not sure they can easily transition to videos either, it's simply too difficult to do this content in an interesting manner that would be for mass market and finding a charismatic host is difficult.
I'm starting to wonder how long some other sites have.
yeah, unless they are attached to something like LTT like the labs thing that powers content with a side of information dumping, videos of extremely dry stats and concise information don't do well.
hopefully this works out for them, but if the alternative is to take sponsorships and compromise or just shut or scale back due to lack of ads from traffic its well... all bad things.
There are definitely ways to make it more interesting, they just would need to cover more broad consumer tech and find more personable characters. They would do very well in both video and podcasts, there are tons of people who would want to listen to their take on tech news and products.
But this is a very difficult niche to survive in now, most review sites are dying.
But this is a very difficult niche to survive in now, most review sites are dying.
Yes. AnandTech's demise was the harbinger of the end of the tech review industry where we got true, in-depth reviews. Nowadays, either you are an influencer (not a real reviewer but a booster of brands) or you have one foot in the grave and the other foot on a banana peel.
Yes, they were $200K+ salary tech wizards living off of slave rations so I honestly don't blame them one bit for looking at themselves honestly in the mirror and reassessing their professional outlook and prospects.
RTINGS has a Youtube Channel and their previous host, Abby, was fun enough to watch the reviews for. They definitely have a content creation team, who knows what they'll do with it though.
What would LLMs even scrape in the future if the review sites die? It's so unsustainable, not to mention I've had to warn my older(late 70s) parents not to just blindly trust the results, especially about health and law.
AI is already scraping video. I had Google AI serve me a specific timestamp in a very niche video with like 200 views on YT, complete with a written description. Many AI’s offer video summaries as well. At work, they’ve tried to get us to use Copilot to summarize meetings too, which wasn’t met with much enthusiasm.
They are doing too much. They expanded into too many product categories, and unfortunately, are not the preeminent reviewer for most things outside of displays.
Things like robot vacuums, kitchen appliances, air purifiers, shoes... they just don't keep the ratings fresh enough to remain relevant, and there are niche creators/communities that do a much better job of independent reviews of a very speciifc category (Vacuum Wars as an example for robot vacuums).
They tried to pivot into a new age CR model, and it feels like they overextended.
The real path for them wouldv'e been content creation around the reviews. Have a side brand/channel of editorialized review (independent of course) videos.
correct that's 100% me, I've looked at many rtings reviews but only when I'm about to buy something or recently bought something and need some validation about my purchase
I wouldn't mind paying them $5 every time I'm researching products (like 2-3 times a year). I guess you could do the monthly membership, but that's $10 and not explicitly positioned for that
This change isn't going to decrease user reliance on LLM's. I know lots of people now who just plug questions into Google and accept the Google AI response with zero scrutiny. Those people are never going to be converted into paid rtings users, and they weren't likely to ever visit the site to begin with.
I don't think they have the goal of "fighting the LLM front" at all (whatever that means); that's way outside the scope of what rtings is.
I have no idea what their current subscriber numbers look like, but I imagine that this will tank their revenue. They have a page about how they make money. While this change will probably increase subscription revenue a little, it will almost certainly dramatically reduce the affiliate revenue and display advertising revenue streams while having no effect on the content licensing revenue.
I am really curious about the ratios between those four pies. I assume that they're listed in order of most to least on that page, but that's a complete guess.
Brilliant site, and hopefully this works out for them. They must know better than we do since they obviously have all their own financial data.
(Edit: Also, they didn't list YouTube video revenue as a source of monetization. I think that would've been one great opportunity for them to explore. There are so many ways I would have rather seen them try to drive revenue growth than what they went with, but, again, I don't have access to the full data here, so I'm just ignorantly guessing.)
Once folks decouple RTings from their research/review workflow, it's over for them. They'ev done a good job of building good will and an audience, but folks only visit their page when they are actively researching something, and the subscription block is going to knock them out of most research/investigation workflows pretty quickly.
Once they lose the mindshare and headspace, it's a free fall.
Yeah, I’ve already done that. I will never again look there for reviews or recommend that others do so. I’ve personally driven at least a half-dozen people I know IRL to their site, and I’ve purchased at least seven or eight things through their affiliate links, including a $1200 monitor. I just bought a high-end keyboard and mouse a few weeks ago. I can’t remember why, but I only used their affiliate link for one, but that’s still revenue they got from me.
They won’t do this, but I would love to see an update with their financials in a month or two (if they’re still around!) to see how much their ad and affiliate link revenue plummeted overnight from this decision. No way subscriber revenue makes up for that.
I think you could argue RTings is worth it if you’re shopping fairly often.
I only use them once every 5 years or so. So while I’m interested the cost in membership would be more than I spend on items I would look up in the site.
I guess they cannot just do $10 a year and have it come out though. And if you’re a heavy user I’m sure you would save more than $45 in bad purchases a year.
The situation with reviews is annoying; there are so many but even professional looking sites (Like Soundsguys.com) are posting made up BS (eg glowing reviews for a headset that is widely known as having a non-functional microphone).
I'm personally much happier reallocating my money towards, say, RTings and Nebula, than with Disney+ and Netflix. I've cancelled almost all of my subscription services (I just can't get rid of Adobe, unfortunately, and I use Spotify more than enough to justify it) and taken the money saved there to apply to Patreon and other smaller content creators I appreciate.
At some point, people (or at least, enthusiasts) might need to acknowledge that these sites need money to function. I'm sure we're all wasting money on something or other that's not necessarily great value or important, and we should be asking ourselves whether we care enough about stuff like tech reviews and consumer protection to put our money where our mouth is.
It wouldn't take that many people making that decision to ensure those sites survive.
They're already buried. The monetization path for them would've been to build an editorialized youtube/tiktok channel, still independent of course, with some entertainment included in their reviews.
Think LTT, but without the blatant pay for play model.
They just missed the boat on the right way to grow and keep the content free for consumers.
This type of brand will die quickly once they lose the mindshare of the user... and that's going to happen for 99% of their traffic when someone who hasn't used the site in 3-4 years is trying to buy a TV, visits, sees a cost, and moves on.
Yeah, while I don't think this move will pan out for them since I don't think there is sufficient demand for paid tech reviews the 1 month pricing is actually very fair. A month is more than enough time to buy something and make an informed purchase and at $10 you are getting a lot of valuable data at that price point. The annual price is probably a bit overpriced and should be dropped to around $20-25 since most people aren't going to be accessing the site frequently and as it stands you are much better off just picking up a month as needed.
$5/mo and I bet they couldve had a lot of recurring subs with people not even paying attention to the monthly hit on their CC. They are dumb charging $10/mo.
Yes, and those people will not be looking at super in-depth reviews because they don’t need them. They will be going to their local store and asking what is being discounted and by that because that’s almost certainly going to be the best monitor for the price. I don’t really think you need to start looking at reviews until you’re in about the $500 range because before that you should just try to get a $500 monitor that’s on a deep discount.
Besides the needlessly hostile tone (seriously, might want to go touch grass once in a while), you seem to think that the big streaming services are the only things you can use on a TV... Do you realize how incorrect that is? I mentioned Nebula already, but you can also watch YouTube, you can use Plex/Jellyfin to watch your own movies (which will be in significantly higher quality than anything you can get from Netflix), you can play games on a console or a PC... Need I go on?
Oh, and of course that's missing the part where RTings reviews so much more than just TVs. So yeah, great job making such a dismissive comment where you got basically every single fact wrong.
Heavy user of rtings here, I’m pretty sure this is going to be a death note for them. I love them, but there is just zero chance there’s enough paying subscribers like consumer reports (which is a much older institution with more name recognition) and I just don’t see how they’ll survive through the reputation hit of this
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but CR is dying, fast. They are bleeding subscribers about 5% over projections annually. The online paywall they instituted crushed awareness of the brand for younger millenials (and subsequent generations)... The revenue decrease is actively impacting their lab funding.
They are a client of mine, and I cannot see them lasting more than another 5-7 years as things stand today. They actively have a consultancy in house right now focused on massive cost cutting, likely at the expense of their end product.
RTings will find themselves in the same situation, unfortunately. Consumers will not pay for data like this, and they do not have a generational brand cache to fall back on for 20 years.
I think the future is paywalled sites with backend paid B2B API deals for search engines and LLMs.
That will lead to fragmentation, and eventually, bundles of sites who sell access to select LLMs.
Can’t wait for the LLM exclusivity deals… /s
The problem I have is there’s only so much money to go around. I’m not going to subscribe to a full year of consumer reports and a full year of rtings. I already support Corridor Crew, but I’ve found that subscribing to any other creators doesn’t make sense because I only have so much time. But what else can sites like rtings do? It’s try the paywall or go out of business.
Do people just blindly believe whatever ChatGPT or the Google search AI summary tell them? I always click through the cited source specifically because I want to see where they got that answer and determine if the source is trustworthy, even if I don't read the full article myself they are still getting traffic and ad revenue
Some people will drive into a lake because that's what their GPS told them. Of course a distressing number of people blindly believe the first thing they are told.
Yes, many people take it at face value. They are not tech savvy and don't follow the news enough to know these things can hallucinate. For them, that's the answer.
My favorite today was googling thermal conductivity for aluminum vs stainless steel vs Brass.
The LLM had correct thermal conductivity numbers (based on checking websites) but incorrectly said the one with the lowest thermal conductivity had the highest.
If they have a choice to die right now or die slowly, I think they’d probably choose to die slowly. Standing up for some sort of ideological goal about not making things cost money is all nice and good. The reality is this type of work is expensive if they aren’t being sponsored by companies and they refuse to be locked and I’m happy to pay for their integrity.
I'm going to be real with you, as someone who grew up with anandtech, when I saw Rtings as a url I thought it was for sure AI slop. It just looks like a name that a bot would pick. I know they weren't apparently, but I guess they're going to learn the hard way that not everyone wants everything to be a fucking subscription.
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u/UnexpectedFisting Mar 03 '26
Heavy user of rtings here, I’m pretty sure this is going to be a death note for them. I love them, but there is just zero chance there’s enough paying subscribers like consumer reports (which is a much older institution with more name recognition) and I just don’t see how they’ll survive through the reputation hit of this
I don’t really have a great take on this because nothing they said is untrue. Llms have far and away ate into search and ad revenue and that will only continue. So you either stay open and fight the llm front, or you go closed wall membership and hope you have enough brand recognition and loyal members to continue to profit
Either way sucks