I completely forgot to comment this with you. This story happened a while ago, but today I’ve got a new e-mail from them about the same subject. Right after I posted the Huntkey Green Star 450 W review Huntkey contacted me saying that they would like me to take down the review and that they would start advertising on Hardware Secrets.
But one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other. First we are completely unbiased: we do not accept any kind of financial compensation for writing our articles and our advertisement contracts aren’t bind to the publishing of any kind of article about the advertiser. This is so true that sometimes we publish negative reviews about products from our advertisers (e.g. OCZ ProXStream 1,000 W) and they know that our editorial content must be unbiased, otherwise our readers will never believe in us when we say that a given product is good. Our articles and reviews are completely spontaneous and the results do not have any sort of interference from the manufacturers.
Unfortunately we know several publications, both inside and outside the internet, that do all sorts of dirty business, like charging for publishing an article, charging for giving an award seal, publish an article only if the manufacturer advertises with them, and not publishing negative reviews in order “to keep a good relationship with the manufacturer”. These are just some examples of biasing that happens all around the world, a.k.a. “payola” (read this excellent article exposing this) – and you, our critic reader, should start paying attention to the websites you read. We don’t do anything like this and we repudiate publications that do it (we simply cannot respect this kind of publication). Start suspecting of any publication that only tells good things about all products they review and never writes a single negative line.
Apparently on this case maybe Huntkey thought we were one of these websites that accept removing bad articles in exchange of advertisement.
The funniest thing was that they said our results were very different from the results achieved by other publications. Well, besides what I already explained above, there is simply no way to compare our power supply reviews to these lousy reviews posted all over the web, where the guy gets a 450 W power supply installs on a PC that is pulling 150 W and says that the power supply is amazing. With the first Huntkey review we posted we bought a second unit and the results were absolutely the same. According to Jon Gerow, founder of JonnyGURU, Huntkey power supplies are known in the industry for having a real wattage of 100 W below their labeled wattage.
It is really funny how some companies instead of being worried about improving the quality from their products try to vanish with the reviews that tell the truth about them. All serious companies use negative reviews to fix their products.
