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Comment by omneity | Hacker News Reader

I work on [0] and we routinely get engaged by tech publications asking if we'd like to be featured in their upcoming article "Best Monitoring Software for 2023" (for example).

Some of them go as far as listing their prices for each position outright, or mention some bidding mechanism. And it's not your average obscure blogspam, no sir. There are household names in there as well.

In fact I'm suspecting that outside of a small minority of reporters with integrity, this shady practice is simply the default across industries.

We're taking a firm stand against this BS. But it does have impact on our marketing efforts.

[0]: https://monitoro.co

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Learned this years ago when trying to get a place in the Gartner magic quadrant for a small software shop. Was a pointless cash and resource drain.

The thing with a company like Gartner isn't that they're explicitly biasing their results based on how much you pay them but the whole game is rigged in general against small companies unless they've made a real name for themselves outside of the big analyst channels.

- If they're not Gartner clients, the relevant analyst may just not be very familiar with them. There are a zillion little software companies out there, many of which do a crap job of explaining what they do and what their unique value is. (Go to a big tradeshow sometime and talk to booth staff.)

- Gartner's MQ requirements are very biased towards their enterprise clients. They want customer references and have a very detailed questionnaire that may not align very well with what a small software company can respond to and, yes, is a big time sink to even try.

- Gartner does some other reports that highlight what they consider innovative small companies or up and comers but generally speaking none of those are going to be in the upper right of an MQ.

>In fact I'm suspecting that outside of a small minority of reporters with integrity

Having a boss and a mortgage usually trumps any integrity a journalist might have had.

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