This is the ninth in a series of articles about the practice of toy reviewers being given free samples for review, and whether that represents a problem for readers looking for honest assessments to make purchase decisions. You can find the other articles in the series here.

In addition to interviewing toy reviewers, I also asked readers what they thought of the practice of reviewing samples. Here’s a sampling of some of their responses. (I tried to get as many quotes as I could; some readers wrote thoughtful but very long pieces that simply couldn’t be broken down into bite-size chunks. If there’s enough interest I’d consider posting them as editorials.)

In reading over all the responses (and I got over thirty of them), I noticed some common themes. On the whole, readers said they did think that reviewers who received samples softened their reviews. However, for the last question, most said this was not a concern for them, because either they were aware of the bias and altered their assessment of the review accordingly; or  because they only cared about the pictures/videos of the toys anyway.

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