All media is pay to play like this. We have had the number 1 product in our niche for a decade and a half and the trade press has never even mentioned it even when doing profiles on big customers of ours. And they wouldn’t dream of doing a profile on our product the way they did with our competitor’s product.

We have never attempted to bribe the trade press the way our competitor did. Our competitor also had a multinational corporate benefactor who spends obscene amounts of money in the trade rags. Even if nobody at that multinational never explicitly threatened people at the trade press, people understand how their bread is buttered.

Still, five years after our competitor abandoned this niche, the trade press won’t utter our product’s name.

Turns out customers don’t give a shit if every one of their friends in the niche rave about our product.

The shills are useful to the grifters for a while, but no amount of good press can fool a market for long when that market actually uses the products and cares about what the products do.