I've been in this business a long time. Personally, I have been asked to take down negative reviews, but I have never been offered compensation of any kind to do so. I've had plenty of conversations concerning negative reviews with PR people from all of the various motherboard manufacturers. Plenty of them have expressed displeasure and attempted to rectify the situation by sending me replacement parts, assisting in the testing, attempting to duplicate my issues on their end and so on. All reasonable things. But never have I been offered money, or even free hardware to change my stance on a product.
Having said that, these people have known me and met me in person several times. While conjecture on my part, I believe that any PR people that have met me, **** well know I am not the type to be manipulated. Not only that, but they knew Kyle well enough to know that ultimately, control rested in his hands and not mine. Anytime I was asked to pull an article, I told them no and that they'd have to talk to Kyle, and frankly, told them that was a bad idea. It was in each case I am aware of. Precisely what I told them would happen, happened.
When you are a reviewer that's part of an organization, paying people off becomes a much bigger problem. You'd have to pay off everyone who had knowledge of the situation and that gets expensive and the risk of someone coming forward increases greatly. Most of us do this part time and don't do it for the money. Therefore, the kind of payoff that would test your integrity is beyond the scope of what some PR firm or PR department is likely to pay.
Single person operations like the Youtuber who's making the allegations here are a different matter. That's just one person. The younger, poorer, one person channels are much better targets for a pay off. Not only could it potentially get done cheap, but the total people involved in something like that is small enough, to make it possible. If you aren't a big name Youtuber or reviewer, the risk of the bribery attempt getting out may seem smaller. It takes someone with a lot of integrity to speak up in these cases. You offer someone who's doing well in their career and makes a decent living a grand or two, it means little. Offer a couple grand to someone who's struggling to make rent and get their channel off the ground and you've got pretty good odds of achieving the desired result.
That's just my opinion. As I said, no one has ever offered to bribe me into doing anything, so I can't say how frequently this happens. I've listened to a PR person crying on the phone, who called me from overseas and begged me to take an article down for fear of losing their job. Even then, I was never offered cash or free hardware do to it. However, this isn't the first time I've heard of this sort of thing happening. Though, it's certainly the first time I've heard of MSI doing it.
Publishing a bad review, isn't something anyone does lightly. There are a lot of reasons for that, which are practically enough material for a thread by themselves. If you publish a bad review, you have to make **** sure that you have hard data to show your readers, viewers and the manufacturer / PR department why you came to the conclusion you did.
I don't know the specifics here, as I didn't watch the review, nor do I know what the issues were. However, hardware failures aren't necessarily grounds for a bad review as David pointed out. Defective or DOA products can come from any manufacturer. It's important to recognize that and determine whether or not the fault is bad luck or something more serious, indicating design issues. I've seen both things over the years.
