DPReview Closing – Amazon, Don’t Take it Offline!

Opinion

by Nino LeitnerMarch 23^rd, 2023

Tuesday’s news caught us – like many of you – by surprise. The leading digital photography technology site DPReview.com, a mainstay of the Internet since the 90s, is closing. There will be no new content after April 10, and after a “limited time” it will be taken offline completely. Here’s my opinion on that move (I guess you can tell where this is going… ).

DPReview has been on top of my bookmark list for as long as I can remember. Founded in 1998, when I was just a teenager interested in cameras, without a trajectory or a plan to become a professional director of photography, DPReview was one of the first to take the nascent digital cameras category seriously. And this at a time when a 1 Megapixel camera with JPEG compression was the best you could get.

Amazon acquired DPReview 16 years ago and then forgot about it

Back in 2007, when Amazon was already a Fortune 500 company, though not nearly as ubiquitous as in 2023, DPReview was acquired by Amazon. You could tell when the founder and CEO, Phil Askey commented on the acquisition saying that he was simply happy to focus on what he and his team did best: making some of the most extensive and detailed written camera reviews in the world. No frills content, fact-based, and minus the “ego” from reviewers that we often find from self-proclaimed camera testers on YouTube these days.

Amazon acquired DPReview 16 years ago and then forgot about it.

Nino Leitner, AAC

Amazon never used DPReview’s full potential for its other properties

You would think with Amazon owning arguably the most reliable photography tech review site in the world, they would find a way of smartly integrating their editorial content into other Amazon properties- the most obvious one being to integrate at least the summaries of DPReview’s camera tests on Amazon product pages for cameras, lenses, and so on, with a “read more” link somewhere. But nope, instead, we continued to get an endless stream of amateur reviews on the product pages, many of which continue to be fake anyway.

What we did get were Amazon affiliate links all over DPReview, which is a smart move – Amazon sells everything from anyone, not caring whose camera you buy, as long as you buy it through them. Using a large retailer like Amazon guarantees that reviews remain unbiased. Affiliate links mean that there’s no extra cost to the buyer, but the retailer gives a small commission (typically around 2 or 3%) to the publisher. (We do the same with our affiliate partners B&H for the Americas and CVP for Europe.) Amazon owning DPReview probably meant they didn’t actually send money to their subsidiary for affiliate sales, but they were able to track their “performance” in finding out how many sales of gear DPReview was sending to Amazon on a regular basis. So with that plus Amazon’s lack of integration of DPReview’s gear tests on Amazon.com’s product pages and any other forms of tighter integration, they proved that they would treat DPReview like a subordinate, never really giving them a fighting chance to leverage their archive and especially the experience and brainpower of their amazing editorial team. And I’m sure it was the penny pinchers in Amazon HQ who looked at those sale referral numbers, and then decided: It’s not growing, maybe even shrinking, it’s not helping our main business, let’s close it down. It’s an incredibly short-sighted move.

Amazon is only interested in satisfying shareholders

What happens now is typical for large corporations, who mostly want to satisfy shareholders and bump the stock price up: after a first round of cuts, Amazon is laying off a further 9,000 people. The irony here is that most tech companies, including Amazon, over-hired during the Covid-19 pandemic when demand for online services and online orders surged. Now that things are pretty much back to “normal” and we’re entering a recession, they are trying to get rid of people across all divisions as fast as they hired them.

DPReview became a victim of Amazon HQ’s penny pinchers, only interested in short-sighted profits to satisfy shareholders.

Nino Leitner, AAC

But DPReview wasn’t part of that “over-hiring”, (heck!!,) they were acquired before the financial crisis of 2008, so they shouldn’t be affected by this. It’s simply unfair in my eyes. And surely it’s a small team. It couldn’t cost much to keep the company running, at least compared to other divisons of Amazon. For a long time Amazon has been saying, “you don’t have to make money” until they compared themselves to all their other business divisions solely under the profit magnification glass, and decided that now, they must. All of this is my own speculation, of course.

DPReview was an example for us to become the best filmmaking tech review site in the world

Unlike many other outlets, DPReview focused only on producing content that reported on digital cameras. They were accurate and detailed, and based their findings on science and experience, period.

In many ways, DPReview was a role model to cinema5D (relaunched as CineD in 2020) when it was founded in 2008. Ten years after DPReview was founded, we jumped onto the DSLR filmmaking revolution wave as we saw the need for an outlet to provide a platform for the exchange of likeminded filmmakers, who take “photo cameras” seriously enough and shoot cinematic video with them, despite all their shortcomings. And while building up our site, transforming it step-by-step into what it has become ,15 years later DPReview has always remained a guiding light of high-quality reviews on the web, much more focused on photography than on filmmaking, but nevertheless a site that set a huge example for our own work. Over the years, many DPReview editorial team members also became colleagues that we would run into at various events around the world. We also interviewed former DPReview senior editor Barney Britton three years ago on what was then happening with phone cameras.

If you haven’t already, I recommend taking the time to read Barney Britton’s thoughts on DPReview’s closing on Medium – Barney was senior editor until last year and can, of course, share some very unique insights into the site’s operation over the years. What struck me is how similar his experiences are to ours: the endless days and nights testing cameras to get it right, the press trips, the trade shows, and especially the incredible community surrounding our industry.

Most upsetting: DPReview will be taken offline, with all content lost forever

Even if we accept that DPReview will no longer continue to operate and produce new content after April 10, it’s hard to understand Amazon’s decision to shut down the site entirely after a “limited time”. Why on earth do you need to take 25 years of amazing content offline? The cost associated with keeping it running is absolutely negligible, especially for Amazon. Their most profitable business is AWS, Amazon Web Services, which is essentially an on-demand cloud computing and hosting service, providing services to millions of websites around the world. It would literally take one or two full-time employees to keep DPReview running in its current state if they just freeze the content and keep it online forever. And I am 100% sure that the affiliate links all over their site would provide more than enough funding to cover the cost for all hosting, traffic, and 1-2 people. I really hope someone at Amazon reconsiders this decision.

Ironic: Jeff Bezos saved the Washington Post because he considered it “an important institution”

Jeff Bezos famously bought the Washington Post almost 10 years ago, because, as he put it in this interview, he considered it an “important institution”. Well, guess what, DPReview is an equally important institution in a much more niche field: camera technology reporting. They’ve been doing this objectively forever, and they are part of ancient Internet history just like Amazon (which was founded in 1994, and DPReview in 1998), and they simply deserve to stay around for much longer.

Jeff Bezos saved the Washington Post because he considered it an “important institution”. DPReview deserves the same treatment. Don’t run something so great into the ground over some pocket change.

Nino Leitner, AAC

And yes, I am aware, Bezos himself owns the Washington Post and not Amazon, which means he doesn’t have to justify their financial performance to any shareholders, while DPReview is owned by Amazon directly, which of course is much more under direct shareholder scrutiny. Nevertheless, we are talking about a drop in the ocean if Amazon would decide to save DPReview after all, or at least preserve it in its current state indefinitely. Or allow a management take-over and sell it for a small amount. It doesn’t matter how, but every decision will be a better decision than taking it offline.

DPReview team is moving on

One can’t even argue that DPReview was stuck in the past – over the last few years, they put a huge emphasis on growing their YouTube channel with the Canadian duo Chris Niccolls and Jordan Drake releasing many useful camera gear reviews, that complemented their written reporting. We’ve been following suit and have considered video reviews at least as equally important as written reviews. Chris and Jordan already announced that they will move over to Petapixel, basically continuing the same style of videos they have been doing on DPReview.

CineD is open to grow the editorial team further

We hope that the rest of the DPReview team of editors and writers will find a new home where they can continue contributing their valuable knowledge. CineD’s doors are open to them, as we have recently added a number of new editors and writers to the team, because we are growing as a site and as a successful business, we are striving to give our audience even more detailed reporting about what’s happening in the filmmaking technology world.

In any case: a huge loss to our camera tech world

No matter where the DPReview staff ends up (and hopefully they will end up continuing what they do best elsewhere), losing DPReview will simply be a huge loss to our entire camera tech world. They are leaving a huge void, that needs to be filled, but nobody can fill 25 years of amazing reporting. Let’s simply not give up hope that Amazon will keep the site online. At least there are attempts to scrape the entire site and keep its content alive somewhere else. We for one are keeping our fingers crossed.