We aren't "sponsored" by anyone. We do our own thing, whether the advertisers want to sell high-end cases, RAM, goat feed or hair product. We do have some advertisers who will sponsor content that is clearly not editorial or news, marked clearly as sponsored by them, and we are very, very careful and cognizant about maintaining a great wall of separation between sales and community/editorial/news. Tom's got its start speaking truth to power in the computer industry, taking several of the manufacturers to task for faults and issues where other sites would not. We still do this, amidst cries from usually both sides of any major brand war that we are taking sides, or leaving things out.
As a for instance, we report on Apple products that come out, and I don't think I've ever seen Apple advertise with us. A while back, I ran a count after one of our authors received some heavy criticism over what they called too much on Apple products, and that Tom's was on the take. It turned out that we posted almost 28% more articles about Samsung alone than we did about Apple, using precisely the same type of language. We take this stuff very seriously, and trust once lost is almost never regained.