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About
Who we are
We Break Tech (WBT) is owned and operated by eGeek Consulting Ltd. We are dedicated to providing news, reviews and analysis of information technology hardware, software and services in as honest and objective a manner as we know how. If you want to contact us, skip ahead to the bottom of the page.
We’re human, so each of our writers have personal biases that we struggle daily to overcome; ultimately we try to apply a liberal dose of cynicism to products from all vendors we encounter. Periodically we will post opinion pieces alongside our reviews; we hope you find them worthwhile.
We believe that being as open and honest as possible about who pays us and why is important. You can’t trust reviews from us unless you can assess our motivations. With that in mind, let’s explore the intriguing world of blogging together.
Vendor Input
In most instances, we will send a draft of our reviews to vendors for fact-checking before publishing. This is because we are human and make mistakes; vendors have PR and technical people paid to catch errors. It is a courtesy to them and a service to our readers to ensure the information we provide is as accurate as possible. Blog posts are not sent to vendors, they are fact-checked entirely in-house.
The exception to the above is when an author reviews a product they have purchased personally. In this case we very frequently have no relationship with the vendor in question. In our experience, attempting to contact PR at most technology companies out of the blue is an excruciating and fruitless endeavor. Where an author purchases the product with their own funds they retain the right to review said product without contacting the vendor.
How we get paid
Reviews and blogs can occur in one of two ways basic ways: an author decides they have something they’d really like to write about or someone asks us to write a review. People asking us to write a review can get handled in many different ways. Here they are:
1) We get paid to do a review of a product. Sometimes vendors need reviews of a product up to meet a deadline or as part of a wider marketing campaign. Sometimes vendors want to push out reviews to keep a product or idea (such as cloud computing) front-of-mind in order to support a wider go-to-market strategy.
WBT is entirely happy to take on paid reviews. Paid reviews let us pay our writers, keep the servers lit and keep the coffee flowing. Paying for a review will bump a review to the front of the stack and/or ensure it is released on a required date. It will not ensure that the review is warm and fuzzy. We’ll tell the truth as we see it.
2) We get paid to write a blog post. Just as above, sometimes vendors want to have an opinion piece written up as part of a wider marketing campaign. WBT is adamant about not allowing vendors to dictate the content of any blog post. We welcome someone giving us a fistful of dollars and a topic, but we insist on taking it from there. A request for a blog about “10 gigabit Ethernet in the SME” is all good. A request that says “why $vendor’s 10 gigabit Ethernet is something everyone should buy” will not go through.
3) Someone sends us a widget and we get to keep said widget. There are all sorts of reasons reviewers get to keep the widget that’s reviewed. In some cases the value of the item is below the “customs hassle + return shipping” threshold. In others, getting a review item out the door means using refurbished or RMAed equipment that couldn’t be resold anyways. Software vendors especially are known to be liberal with NFR licences; a free licence to a reviewer isn’t exactly a lost sale.
WeBreakTech will treat such reviews no differently than a paid review. We will prioritise these reviews such that they are done as soon as possible, but we will not guarantee a positive review.
Any widgets we get to keep will go directly into our testlab to ensure that we have the best possible systems, software and services to provide reviews for our readers. These widgets may be used in comparative reviews in the future and more than likely will end up being discussed in blog posts due to the very human tendency to talk about the things we use everyday.
4) Someone sends us a widget but doesn’t pay us. Far more common than paid reviews is the veritable flood of requests from PR folks to review all manner of widgets for free. As you can imagine, it’s hard to meet demand, so these get done on a first-come, first-served basis. Because demand for reviews can be overwhelming at times – and due to the variable length of time reviews take – we ask that any widgets provided be provided for 30 days so that we have enough time to do a thorough job of reviewing them.
5) Someone advertises with us. The most obvious way we will see revenue is through advertising. Ideally, we’d like to stay away from third-party advertising networks as much as possible. We far prefer to host images and objects on our own servers.
This both helps advertisers by ensuring that advertisements are seen even by those using adblockers and it helps our readers by allowing WBT to scan any advertisement objects for malware before displaying them. As we are still a young site, we’re still feeling our way through this and we will work with companies on a case-by-case basis to set up advertising.