Real, opinionated reviews are pretty hard to come by these days via search engines. Lots of people are looking to find some validation on certain products before finally pushing toward purchasing, but search engines are chock to the brim with fake reviews, money-grabbing affiliate websites, and ghost-written reviews based on product specs with speculation.
This is less true in some certain publications, such as CNET… but even CNET these days feels like a media company flying through reviews without actually experiencing much, and without any practical tips on things.
Smart homes, as an example of an industry and product offering type, are pretty diluted with early adopters deep in forum communities espousing opinions but without much knowledge toward common users.
This website is founded on the basis of trying to create true anecdotal reviews, meaning all we’re trying to do is provide a single data point of an experience with a product or service, and provide a lot of intelligent opinions on the pros/cons of certain products of services. We’re not claiming to know the goods and bads of every single product. Others can attempt to do this, but real anecdotal reviews are based on using a product in the way that it’s meant to be used, not based on marketing hype, speculation, specs, or trying to automatically pick the winner of a product category. We’re going for deep reviews about the pros and cons of a specific product. Unless we have specific knowledge of another product, we won’t be ragging on it (or, we’ll call out that we don’t have personal experience with it, so take that with a grain of salt).
“Anecdotes” are ragged on pretty good in the scientific community, but we’re attempting to embrace an anecdote—we’re looking for deep quality of insight into products and services based on experience, not breadth of experience across a large quantity of products and services.
This should be obvious to all our readers who know about the online review world, but we make money off of affiliates and referrals to products (Want to buy one of these products we recommend? Use our link so we can keep surviving). We don’t recommend products that we think are bad, not valuable, significantly broken, etc. We back products and services that deserve it, and we use our SEO abilities to target people who are very close to buying these products but need a little bit more info about what they’re getting into ahead of time.