Thoughts

$26

My dad came to this country with something like $26 in his pocket; $26 and a scholarship to UMASS. I didn't know about that until I was around 14, our family went to another family's house for dinner and it came up in after dinner conversation. I was honestly floored - all of the sudden everything in life made sense to me, I was given the drive that I needed to go anywhere and do anything in life. My dad took essentially nothing and raised a family out of it; we all helped, but one man's ability to do that is what I truly define as successful. We weren't rich, but he (along with the help of my mom) made sure that we could live in comfort as a family. My dad is what sparked my drive; he's the reason that if I get a product to review on Friday, and the review has to go up on Monday, I bust my ass all weekend to make sure it gets done. He instilled in me a true understanding of what hard work is really about, and that's a major cornerstone of who I am today.

My mom gave me an understanding of how to do something with myself and an understanding of ethics. She showed me what truly caring about something really meant, about what being selfless meant and gave me the foundation that allowed me to develop my own perspectives on the world. She didn't teach me right from wrong, she taught me how to figure out what's right and what's wrong. And I'll never forget that which she's taught me to this day. It wasn't until college that I really understood what she had done for me; she dropped out of college to take care of me, to raise me. She gave up her dreams of being a doctor, to live her new dream of having a son. She cared for me more than anyone ever could, and seeing and understanding that also helped shaped who I am today.

I started AnandTech almost exactly 8 years ago: April 26, 1997. I was a freshman in high school, 14 at the time, and completely into this stuff. I started AnandTech not as a business, but as something that I thought would be cool to do. I started it humble, and to this day I will never forget my beginnings. There's no room for big egos in writing, I hate reading it and I'm sure you all do too.

I started the website with nothing, it was a free site on Geocities and I had no hardware other than the scraps of my system. But I worked hard these past 8 years, AnandTech grew from nothing to where it is today - with over 6 million monthly unique readers. I've had one basic principle when it comes to how to deal with those readers, and it goes something like this:

Regardless of how many people come to the site, I look at it as each person coming to me with their money in hand, wanting to know what to purchase. Let's say the average hardware upgrade costs $150, that's 6 million people x $150. I don't have to let you know that that's an absolutely ridiculous amount of money. To trade the trust that you all are placing in me and my staff for any amount of anything, is just unfathomable. While I'm sure there are folks that do it, I am not one of them.

At the same time, if we didn't value your trust so highly, we'd be gone in an instant. AnandTech readers make their buying decisions based, in part, on our articles. If we gave some bad advice that resulted in a poor purchase, do you think we're going to keep those readers for long? Nope, common sense right?

Next let's talk about this myth of articles and exclusivity. To a journalist, an exclusive on an article is a huge deal, because it means that you'll get all the attention about this one topic. Yet another reason why I hate journalists, they are far too short sighted. One thing I learned very early on (and you'll notice this in the work I do) is that being first to break a story gives you a large influx of short term traffic, but does nothing for you long term. You can have all the exclusives in the world, but if your content is crap then they mean nothing. At the same time, you can be 3 weeks late to review something, but if it's the most thorough review out there, that review's overall impact on reader perception of you and your site is much greater than having an exclusive. Now if you can get a review out first and make it as thorough as possible, then you're sitting pretty.

The next part of the myth of an exclusive is this idea that manufacturers have any desire to give one site an exclusive over another - that simply doesn't happen. Any of the "exclusive" articles we've done over the past 8 years have been made possible through going through third parties. I reviewed the K6-III about 3 months before AMD even shipped the review samples, did AMD work out a sweetheart deal with me? Of course not, I went around the manufacturer. It's what I did for the SLI preview from last year, it's what we do to get company roadmaps. We avoid dealing with the manufacturer at all costs, unless we need to talk to their engineers.

It's true that manufacturers try to bully a lot of sites out there, generally speaking the smaller you are, the more the manufacturer tries to influence you. I fought very hard to build AnandTech to where it is today, and it is at the point where manufacturers do not even *dare* try to even hint at trying to influence anything. All of the major manufacturers have done their own independent audits of AnandTech, they know how large we are and the type of influence we have - do you think they'd risk a story about how they are trying to strong arm the media into reviewing products a certain way?

"But what about the advertisers?" you say, well, I took care of that problem long ago. AnandTech as a company doesn't have a single sales person on staff, years ago I set things up so that we wouldn't have to deal with advertisers and to truly build a separation between editorial and advertising. The results of this are numerous, but the two major ones are:

1) I like my editors to be autonomous, they receive a little direction from me and help if they need it, otherwise they are on their own to do and review anything you ask for and they see as important to the areas of coverage. They are never told what to review or how to review it; honestly, if this weren't the case, you all would see right through it.

2) I rarely know about what ads are going live on the site unless I either see them while browsing the site, or in my CEO role someone from the sales side brings one up to discuss. Honestly I'm far too busy to even bother with that sort of stuff; you guys follow the blog, there's no time for me to be running around working on ad stuff. I've got people to handle that, they do their job and we do ours.

Advertisers will sometimes ask for preferential treatment, if they ask our sales folks directly - they are turned down on the spot. Sometimes they will go around them and talk directly to an editor, if they do, the editor makes it *very* clear that we don't work this way - case closed. I've got tons of emails of this kind of stuff, and as I mentioned before, by now about 99% of the manufacturers don't even try this sort of crap. They know where it's going to get them and that I take it very personally. The remaining 1% are folks that haven't dealt with us before, they'll learn soon enough. Do others have this separation? Most don't. Does that mean anything? I can't speak for them, but I can speak for us and this policy works for us. Do you have to be an advertiser to get a review? Of course not, anyone who reads this blog should know that if you all want to see us review something, we'll do it - all you have to do is ask :)

"But what about the free hardware?"

Manufacturers also know that we have no problems buying hardware, if they refuse to send us something, we'll just go out and buy it. I've had manufacturers refuse to send us products for a full year, but did you all notice? Nope...we just went out and bought everything. That's another philosophy of mine: you come here to read about technology, not about some soap opera and crap that goes on behind the scenes - so I keep things like that off the site. When there are problems with manufacturer relations, I don't post about them here, I deal with them maturely and in a way that doesn't affect the outcome of reviews. Manufacturers also know this, they can say whatever they want to me, about me, etc... but it still has no impact on our reviews. If company X calls me stupid, does it make sense for me to hurt *all of you* by giving an unfair/incorrect review of their product? A lot of these issues are just plain common sense :)

AnandTech is a business - we do make money, but regardless of how large we get and what our revenues are, it's still run like a family. And this family has morals, I can't speak for how other people were raised but this is how I was raised and it's how I run my family.