funding firewall
I think a funding firewall, aka "Chinese wall", approach to funding product testing might work reasonably well. A middleman organization constituted to fund in-depth product testing and reviews could be chartered to direct no more than, say, 40% of its testing and review funding toward vendor-requested reviews. All review directives offered to testers would be given in the same format with the same requirements and rates according to a standard, vendor-neutral funding schedule. Funding sources could be kept confidential (including keeping them secret from testers/reviewers) for a period of eighteen months, then publicly declared, to maintain the funding firewall. Thus, vendors could fund the organization for the purpose of getting independent, in-depth testing and reviewing performed and published.
It might be worthwhile to the vendors for the simple fact that "there's no such thing as bad press," at least in cases where there's basically no mindshare for the product in question at all.
Someone should be paying me for advice on innovative business models.
