This year, I'm really going to try to get back on the review grind again. I've reached out to numerous hardware vendors out there to attempt to create press relations with them, and I've also reached out to existing companies that I've had partnerships with such as System76 and have attempted to start up those press relations as well.
So far, the results have been very discouraging though, to say the last. Many of these companies either laugh at or straight up ignore small-town reviewers, always in favor of the much larger sites out on the internet. I think that inherent value is lost due to this, but I guess it's how the world works. Companies don't like taking chances on new people, and they definitely don't like giving the "nobodies" the time of day.
Even companies such as System76 have kinda shut me out. Even though they've grown a decent bit since I originally worked with them, I'm now on one of their low priority press lists, it seems. I remember when I used to have a good standing relationship with the folks at System76, back when they were still in very much a "startup" phase.
I can't really say that I'm not surprised by all of this, though. I really don't have a budget to buy products to review just for Techman's World, and I highly doubt that crowdfunding would work out really well on Techman's World for the time being, at least until I can gain some of my audience back that I've lost over the years. I really do wish that I had a budget to review interesting things like the upcoming video cards from AMD and NVIDIA, for example.
Although it probably wouldn't do me much good, I am considering creating a Patreon page for Techman's World, so that way I actually could attempt to gather some money to put towards buying products to review. I've always considered AdSense advertising as well, but being a tech site I highly doubt that it'll generate much revenue either.
If you folks have some ideas on how to generate some income so that this site can sustain its own review process, I'd love to hear it. Hardware reviews and some software reviews are one of the things I love to do here, but ultimately I either have to rely on a company shipping me review units, or just not reviewing products at all. I wish it didn't have to be this way, though.