In principle the editorial content might be firewalled, so somebody decided to use vacuum pumps, wrote the article and then the ad department goes huh, call the vacuum pump people and see if they want an advert next to the article.

Obviously you, the reader, cannot know if that's what happened, or whether in reality it was the opposite way around, but maybe you trust the reviewer and believe they wouldn't do the other thing, or at least they would feel morally unable to do the other thing without telling you.

And to some extent that same relationship matters to whether you trust the content anyway, irrespective of advertising. I believe Yahtzee Crosshaw did or did not like the video game, I reckon Yahtzee, for whatever it's worth, isn't lying if he said it was fun.

Or take a more obscure but perhaps more relevant example. "Techmoan" on Youtube says maybe this brand new Asda tape player is the best he's seen in years. It's not great, the equivalent product in the 1980s would have Dolby and it'd be smaller and lighter and generally better, but, it's 2026 and Asda can't buy a 1980s tape player, they would need to invest billions to make one and it makes no economic sense in the era of handheld super-computers to invest so much money to make better tape players. So this one is pretty good, considering. Well that's faint praise, but it is praise. If "Techmoan" says he just bought it to see if it's any good, and here's a link to Asda's website, I believe him. If Asda bought him the tape player or even just paid him to say it, why would he lie? He's an old curmudgeon who loves legacy music formats, he's not going to get rich lying to me, so that makes no sense.

There was some controversy in the music tech space on YouTube because Behringer attacked a YouTuber and reviewer after he gave a product a bad review.

In fact they seem to have tightened up on free review samples in general.

I did some reviewing in the 90s and the magazine had a solid reviews policy - tell the truth even if someone pulls their advertising. Which very much happened on a few occasions.

You can do that if you have no issues with selling ad pages, which Byte clearly didn't.

Whether that was ever generally true for the industry, or is true now with YouTube influencers, is a different question.