My point about videos was not whether video is superior or inferior to print.
Instead it's this: there is a changing of the guard.
The problem of loaners still comes up (see my earlier mention of Guttenberg) with videos.
The new guard, those who have a following on Youtube such as Darko or Andrew Robinson, have huge ethical problems of their own. So many of the Youtube reviewers do, as they have affiliate links for their videos on top of getting loaners.
Still, the emergence of a new guard is underway. You can demean them and claim they only do "mid-fi", but the point is the audio industry is now transitioning away from the baby boomers into younger generations.
And with that will come new wrinkles on the way of manufacturers doing marketing, which is what I consider "reviews" to be, at least these days.
When Gordon Holt started his efforts to be a reviewer outside of the advertising-influenced print media of his day... perhaps it was different then for him.
Yet to repeat myself: today I consider TAS, Stereophile, etc. to be trade press (aka "industry rag" though that term seems to rub some people the wrong way.) Much like Popular Photography and similar camera gear mags became quite quickly after they started. In the beginning the photo gear magazines were perhaps reservoirs of higher ambitions, but after awhile they just became a compilation of marketing.
Youtube allows for much easier entry into the field of being a "reviewer", than the old way of printing a magazine, which is costly.
So Youtube now has a great many channels, in many languages, covering audio gear.
Whatever you think of the quality of said channels, there are simply too many channels for a company to place loaners.
The large corporations who make "mid-fi" (and I find that term more obnoxious than "industry rag") stock up the highest-subscriber channels (like the two I mentioned above) with a constant stream of gear.
Yet the irony is there are so many audio channels on Youtube that one can easily skip the big channels to get information, and from my casual observation that is already happening (check out the video view counts of audio-gear Youtube channels.)
And again I want to point out the forums, such as this one. I would rather check out a forum like WBF and see what people write about their experiences with a product, than pay for a print magazine review.
I do not intend malice on the old-guard who still write magazine reviews, but I think that print industry is passing away so I am not concerned about them getting loaners. I find more troubling (because it is influencing a new generation of audio gear buyers) the video channels covering audio with their affiliate links and product placements pretending to be reviews.