Started in 2008, this is sort of the story of what happens when chaos meets ambition. It’s not a commercial entity; it exists, and existed, as a reaction to the sheer hunger for content that was still very desktop-biased in the early 2000s; YouTube was just a few years old, the phrase ‘influencer’ was just a concept in some marketing department’s most evil plans, and the first signs of ‘SEO’ were beginning to denature how publishing worked.
What I reacted to was the inanity of ‘unboxing’ videos. So I used this to mess with more personal, silly reviews of stuff I reviewed in professional publications; except I ended up running a commercial site or two, then doing PR & marketing, moving house multiple times, etc. and it was completely neglected except for the few times I got to throw some content at an increasingly unfamiliar WordPress.
Inevitably, the evil Facebook also stole much of my content – the first impressions and pictures of a new camera getting more likes there than this ever had traffic!
I never expected much of it, but it allows me to write the reviews I can’t always print fully in the magazines, or even cover in our titles! Many of the products you see here will be ones I have bought, rather than items sent for me to review.
I’ll generally focus on how a device actually WORKS – what qualities it genuinely offers – with the occasional foray into “what happens if you hack it”.
Anything covered will be covered in as much depth as possible, and there will never, ever be an “unboxing” entry. You might see pictures of what’s in the box, but it’ll only be in the context of “this is what it comes with, and how it affects the usefulness of the object in question”.
One thing remains true. If you want to see a new product in a picture and learn nothing about it, go elsewhere :D. I write a lot and I ramble.
This is an ad-free site – and I hope it can stay that way
There’s unlikely to be advertising, there’ll be sod-all video, and there’ll never be a cohesive theme to all of it – other than, I’m enjoying doing this. Why is there no advertising? I hate it. I hate the sheer volume of spam, irrelevant ads that get shoved between humans and the information they want, I hate the miserable low value of CPM ads and the resulting screen garbage of pop-up, moving, hovering, auto-playing nonsense that desperately tries to hold your eyeballs for the number of seconds needed for the hundreds of trackers to register the impression.
I hate that it’s a waste of resources, of CPU power, and a waste of time for individuals who would probably be perfectly happy with a ‘content and audience’ targeted relevant ad campaign on the page, but have to resort to blockers just to be able to view a site. British local newspaper websites are built on such platforms and are absolutely unusable – they get the click from the BBC site, but they never get me staying long enough to read the article.
So this site’s never going to pay for its own hosting, let alone my time maintaining and making content for it. That’s okay. It’s here to give people something to read first and foremost.
However, I do have one form of monetisation on the site – as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Most links to products will mention Amazon if that’s where they are going, though I will link to other retailers, and not all of those links are affiliate.
It will also help me if you use links for promotions such as Amazon Baby Wishlists or Kindle Unlimited Free Trial. I’ve also found the TopCashBack website quite useful, getting discounts and cashback that has been real and not difficult to claim – so I’m happy to refer people there and yes, I get a referral fee if you use it.
