I just gotta chime in here. Mike Vapes, TVC, VapinFagan now and a few more reviewers are absolute pieces of schit! When I watch a product review on Youtube and I see the new boxes in the right corner that say "I do this for free, show your support" $ Donation button it really makes me mad. I mean really, you get free stuff before anybody else and you have countless mods and some how you need my money? What for? These guys have normal jobs and use their free time to do a review and have the nerve to ask the community for money to review a product. That just blows me away. If a reviewer wants money then the company that sends him the mod should pay them. I am sure Rip and Twisted get paid. PBusardo is the only one I watch because he takes his time to put up a review and doesn't try to do 4 or 5 a week. He actually studies the mod and test it. I am sure some of these guys are nice in person and that is great but only a low-life sleezebag asks for money when they are getting free products and doing things on their own time. I would rather donate my money or batteries to a guy like
@Mooch who actually uses it to educate the community then show me what a mod looks like.
My biggest problem with "throat hit, Throat Hit, THROAT HIT" Busardo is that I've outgrown his vaping style (actually, it was
never my vaping style, it was just the only style available back in the day, thank god the market has evolved). He's made it clear his reviews will be reverting back to stuff he likes to use...so more MTL tanks, Innokin products, etc, which I'm
not the demographic for. Mike reviews stuff I want to buy. TVC and Fagan the same.
Mike, TVC, VapnFagn, all spend a fair amount of time making videos and testing products (even if it's not to the pedantic degree of Busardo), and that includes a
lot of time off-camera. With their sub numbers and view counts, they might pull down $50/month from YouTube if they're having a
good month. Just for farts and giggles, why don't YOU make a 20 minute review video on a product...then note how much time it takes you to edit it, respond to the comments, how long you spend fiddling with the product before you were ready to review or even "first look" it, and then multiply that by three, which is about the average your three "hated" reviewers put out a week. Oh, and don't forget the cost of a camera and microphone, and the editing software, and the computer capable of rendering it in HD, and some portion of your broadband bill, etc.
Anyway, every reviewer out there with
any sort of subscriber base gets 99.9% of their products "free for the purposes of the review", either direct from the manufacturer or from a major vendor looking for some referrals. Ask Phil how much he paid for his beloved Kayfuns, Provaris, Vapor Flasks, or even tickets to China. Thing is, with Phil (or Rip, or Grimm), their viewer numbers net them well north of $1000 month from Youtube alone. And in the case of Grimm and Rip, there's the juice sales on top of that. They make some bank, to the point that it's their full time job now. The three folks you listed aren't there yet, might never be there.
Just to put it in perspective, Car and Driver doesn't buy many cars, most of their test units are from the factory. Motorcyclist Magazine doesn't buy many bikes. Laptop Magazine doesn't buy many laptops. Book and film reviewers rarely buy their media. And yet the writers/reviewers for all those publications
get paid for the review work in addition to the free use of cars/bikes/books/films, etc.