It’s a crying shame. The forums in particular I will miss dearly. DPReview was also just about the only big photo gear website where articles were usually trustworthy and not full of sponsored BS.
At least Jordan and Chris will continue. We’ll see where the forum community will migrate.
DP Review was one of those indispensible staples of this hobby/art form that one just took for granted for so long. I was not the most frequent visitor/poster on the site, but it was always good to know I could surf over there for the latest newest news, reviews, commentary, forum chatter, etc, Beginning with my first digital camera in 2007, several subsequent ones, to my upcoming purchase of a small travel camera, I have relied on the site heavily for informed, objective insights. Very sad indeed. As with so many forums I enjoyed in the past, it will likely just get sucked into the vortex of Facebook (of which I’m not even a member).
I don’t get it, why they close down? Should be possible to find a buyer for such a popular website.
I very much hope so. But I’m afraid Amazon wouldn’t have shut them down if the had been profitable. And I’m doubly afraid that profitability nowadays is only possible through advertising contracts with manufacturers, making the entire venture pointless.
Is this a good time to remind people to donate to Pixls.us.
Would hate for it not to be here.
To be fair, they shot themselves in the foot there. I’m fully in favor of their mission as we can’t leave media preservation to the conglomerates due to how they don’t care about half of it, and only really select what they wish to be preserved/remembered.
That said I still hope they win the case. They should be more careful in the future and leave book(at least to more than one person at a time) sharing to the popular book piracy sites (which are also under attack of course…). IMO books are the n1 justified piracy and going after projects like z-library only hurts poor who can’t afford them people or their knowledge.
Well, I get that, it’s not profitable for Amazon. Still, somebody else could try. (not Musk, pleeeeease!)
I don’t disagree with the implications of this post: DPR will die and for ‘sound’ economic reasons (within a certain Amazon-specified definition of ‘sound’). That’s nothing more than the life cycle of any technology system. The issue is that the Archive material within DPR is of huge value - probably irreplaceable in fact. And that value will decline only quite slowly over the next decade or so. But in the meantime we can all benefit from continued access to it.
Without wishing to discuss the ethics and business processes of Amazon (out of respect to the amount of text Pixls.us can economically store…), I do think we should be demanding of Amazon that they make the infinitesimally small (for Amazon) contribution for shifting and ‘freezing’’ the DPR web-site on to a long term, generally available, service - for 10 years. shall we say?
I take the point that YouTubers and other hardware reviewers will provide some form of comparative analyses in the years to come. Sadly, I doubt (based on what I observe of the skills of many YouTube contributors), that the quality, thoroughness and technical detail of DPR’s review material will be exceeded.
While I fully agree with the sentiment, the actual market reality is, Amazon has demonstrated that we (the photographic community) are less than a single fleeting pixel – no pun intended – on their radar. We don’t matter to them as a community / group. If we did DPR wouldn’t be going away. I’d be amazed if anyone of note in Amazon would even take notice of our biggest objection.
We don’t have the stroke to “demand” anything of Amazon and even if “we” collectively bought zero from them in the future, it probably wouldn’t bump their sales needle.
Not to be pessimistic, but that’s just reality IMO.
Yup. I suspect that the amount of money going into DPR was negligible, and the negative business impact of nuking it will be infintesimal. I suspect the total staffing at DPR is less than the number of fulltime engineers working at just one of Amazon’s vendors, yet they decided to cut it.
What’s sad is that they’re doing this in an extremely permanent way, despite the fact that Amazon is kinda notorious for changing their mind a LOT…
The website lists 11, I think, but there may be others in back-end support roles (admins, network, web, etc.). But when DPR goes away those support roles will just move elsewhere.
Are they getting enough ROI (return on investment) for those 11 employees? Think of the salary + vacation + healthcare times 11 against how much direct profit DPR generates from amazon. I’m guessing that they were spending more than what they were making.
Searches for dpreview peaked around 2007:
While the searches for camera and phone are steady (for phones, even increasing):
Interestingly, searches for dpreview were already on the decline when DSLRs were still going up, and not even the emergence of mirrorless could change that:
Searches don’t account for regular users who already know the web address
It may not be just ROI.
Perhaps Amazon plans to introduce a new photography/gearhead/techhead service (in order to sell more product, and harvest more consumer data). Perhaps the content of the planned service overlaps with the content of DPreview, but with a very different backend.
Amazon might:
(a) Keep DPreview and the new service, which would damage the traffic volumes to the new service.
(b) Re-write the DPreview backend, and change the content policies to align with new plans. This might not go down well with DPreview staff.
(c) Scrap DPreview, leaving an open field for the new service.
I have no inside information, but it wouldn’t be the first time a very big business has swallowed a minnow to remove competition.
You may be wrong about that. Many people just type into the browser’s address/search bar, and hit enter, then click the first link. You may not do it, I don’t do it, but many do.
Also I don’t often search for dpreview but I frequently click on links to dpreview from search results
I assume my 2nd diagram takes that into account, but I’m not sure. Note that there I don’t compare keywords, but the site and device categories.
I dont think it is any of these scenarios. They are trying to control costs.
As our internal businesses evaluated what customers most care about, they made re-prioritization decisions that sometimes led to role reductions, sometimes led to moving people from one initiative to another, and sometimes led to new openings where we don’t have the right skills match from our existing team members. This initially led us to eliminate 18,000 positions (which we shared in January); and, as we completed the second phase of our planning this month, it led us to these additional 9,000 role reductions (though you will see limited hiring in some of our businesses in strategic areas where we’ve prioritized allocating more resources).
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