Gaming journalism is a tough gig to keep things balanced. On the one hand I totally understand why you'd want such a site to never be paid advertising dollars by a gaming company because that could taint their judgement. But then again people need to be paid for their work and the companies that are going to be most interested in advertising on a gaming website are going to be by and large gaming companies.
In a large site like IGN I'm sure the department that deals with these advertising decisions is well separated from those that actually write the articles so I don't think it's going to have any appreciable affect, but personally if I could pay my writers what they deserve without getting money from the gaming companies we're meant to critique that would be best, and I'd really love if I could, but I don't think it's possible.
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