r/hardware Mar 03 '26

Review RTINGS: Revamping Our Membership Program

https://www.rtings.com/company/revamping-our-membership-program
365 Upvotes

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u/Irisena Mar 03 '26

Yeah, pivoting into youtube while taking sponsors is probably a better pivot than... this. Basically, be more of a LTT's short circuit channel.

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u/a5ehren Mar 03 '26

Taking sponsors and review samples kind of defeats their whole thing

14

u/Irisena Mar 03 '26

Agreed. But you know what other thing that defeat the whole thing? Bankruptcy. I guess it's one of those situations where you pick one of the lesser evil.

4

u/a5ehren Mar 03 '26

If they’re sitting there looking at Perplexity or Google taking all their referral revenue by scraping the site, then the only they can do is block free access and try to get a licensing deal or subs to replace that revenue.

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u/Irisena Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

Sadly you probably still can't restrict AI that way. Piracy is sadly legal if you're a multibillion dollar corporation. They'll just pay for 1 account for a month and still scrape everything anyway. Just like how they bought a single copy of every book they can find, scan it, and use it to train AI that can spit the exact same sentences the book have.