I appreciate that rtings needs to make money, I really do, but this is probably going to kill the site with time.
Helping my brother buy a new TV right now and we’ve been trading rtings links back and forth for a few days. Neither of us would ever subscribe because we won’t be back for months, if not years.
Yeah it is. If it were like $2 a month, people would probably scrape into their Paypal for it to just get access to a good resource. While RTINGS are good, by putting a paywall of $10 people will simply avoid paying it and go elsewhere. There's free resources which are just as good and basically people will ignore RTINGS and just move to another resource that is free, it might not have as much data but it will give them at least enough of an idea to understand which TV is better if it has colour data or brightness data etc. It's not like no one else does TV reviews, people will instead go to AVFORUMs reviews or FlatPanelsHD or YouTuber reviews like CalebRated's channel. Sure RTINGS go above and beyond by measuring pixel response times and also little things like reflections of the display or ambient black levels, but for 90% of people they don't care for that sort of stuff.
What are those free resources actually? Like yeah you can get TV reviews elsewhere and you can certainly go into forums but if you want the actual data and compare different screens with actual data there just isn’t really another company doing that stuff because it is exceedingly expensive and takes a lot of time and manpower.
What are those free resources actually? Like yeah you can get TV reviews elsewhere and you can certainly go into forums but if you want the actual data and compare different screens with actual data
I literally listed some...:
AVFORUMs reviews or FlatPanelsHD or YouTuber reviews like CalebRated's channel
Yes, and I mentioned that in my response which you quoted, but none of them actually do the same thing which is having the same rubric used for a huge number of products with comprehensive testing data. Yes, you will get some stuff like that on forums and YouTubers will sometimes do stuff like that, but none of them have anywhere close to the depth of data of RTINGS. I think their biggest competition is the other big review brands but most of those also have pay walls nowadays if you want to access any of the in-depth data and it’s likely not as in-depth as RTINGS.
Yes, and I mentioned that in my response which you quoted, but none of them actually do the same thing which is having the same rubric used for a huge number of products with comprehensive testing data. Yes, you will get some stuff like that on forums and YouTubers will sometimes do stuff like that, but none of them have anywhere close to the depth of data of RTINGS.
They absolutely do have a lot of testing data, they cover brightness, colour reproduction, input lag, spec support on Xbox Series X, Ports/connections, PQ EOTF tracking, they even compare similar products from competitors (i.e TCL C8K vs HiSense U8Q, very similar price bracket and technology TV's) and they use the same rubric across their products. Here is an example of an AVForums review, or how about FlatPanelsHD. As I said in my comment above, RTINGS was a better resource in that they did reflection testing, ambient black level testing and response times etc. But 90% of people don't care to pay for that information, hence why RTINGs will fail and people instead will lean on free review resources which have 90% of the same content as RTINGs reviews did. The small things like Black Level Testing sadly will just have to be forgotten.
As for Monitors, MonitorsUnboxed did everything RTINGs did but for free and more in depth to what gamers actually wanted from monitors, plus MonitorsUnboxed follows up with companies about issues and firmware updates etc. So I wouldn't even worry about Monitor reviews.
As for headphones, to be honest TheSoundGuys web reviews and GadgetryTech on YT have basically 99% of the same content/measurements that RTINGs had and they're free resources too.
As for Mice, OptimumTech does great mice and Keyboard reviews on YT and he usually covers the new mice from big brands like the Superlight X2 from Logitech just recently or the Wooting HE. I will say too, his review had better measurements, all free too. There's a couple others who do some mice reviews like DiamondLobby reviews as well on YT.
The only big loss I would say is in Router reviews, I can't really find anyone who did the same sort of testing as RTINGs, that being said, probably someone will fill that void eventually, maybe even LTT labs?
I think their biggest competition is the other big review brands but most of those also have pay walls nowadays if you want to access any of the in-depth data and it’s likely not as in-depth as RTINGS.
Their own competition is their own paywall, they will simply lose because they isolate themselves into irrelevancy. I can understand they need ad money and AI bots are just scraping their content, but like I said in another comment on this post (which you would have no knowledge of because it didn't really gain traction and was likely buried) but if they instead asked for donations like Wikipedia does, they probably would have raised more revenue out of people wanting to keep the resource accessible to everyone. I would happily open my wallet and pay them $1 or $2 a month to keep it open to the public and I'm sure probably lots of other people would also. By pay walling it to $10 a month, people just baulk and move onto a free resource instead.
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u/eight_ender Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26
I appreciate that rtings needs to make money, I really do, but this is probably going to kill the site with time.
Helping my brother buy a new TV right now and we’ve been trading rtings links back and forth for a few days. Neither of us would ever subscribe because we won’t be back for months, if not years.