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DPReview is closing... And no it's not April's joke
#11
If DPR wasn't profitable and if it didn't contribute to Amazon in terms of cross-sales (which they tried), they had to pull the plug.

They have a couple of hundred thousand employees, so firing 12 of them is probably not even a decision on the board level.

But I agree that a subscription plan should have been considered.

Speaking of subscription plan ... OL will go Patreon. ;-) But no panic, it'll be primarily about early access from my side ... and for Markus uploading his mountain of Nikon test charts.

BTW, who would have thought that Pentax and MFT will outlive DPR ;-)
Chief Editor - opticallimits.com

Doing all things Canon, MFT, Sony and Fuji
#12
Huh, I'm eagerly waiting for Nikon reviews over Canon now, who would've thought (since the EF system testing is over and RF is irrelevant to me).
Again I wish I could contribute, but it looks like even financial aid is out of question for me now because most avenues are severed. Should've done this earlier while it was still possible.
#13
I'd gladly pay a subscription if it meant to keep dpreview alive and the same with opticallimits. Too bad that dpreview never offered a subscription plan to keep accessing their website. I'd think that a large number of photographers would have subscribed.

I still cannot believe that dpreview is going to be gone for good. It's a huge amount of information that will be gone forever.
I'm actually planning on scraping the whole site and storing it locally for future references. The forums contains so much stuff that could be very very useful.
--Florent

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#14
(03-22-2023, 01:36 PM)thxbb12 Wrote: I'm actually planning on scraping the whole site and storing it locally for future references. The forums contains so much stuff that could be very very useful.

If you mange to do so, can I send you a HDD (or a bunch of HDDs) to get a copy? Wink
Editor
opticallimits.com

#15
About that... careful with the distribution, Amazon would likely consider it a copyright breach.
#16
It goes beyond just being profitable. A big corporation expects big margins. I was at a small mom and pop engineering firm when a big company bought us. So far so good, nice raise and better benefits. Eventually I move on and the company I'm with now does business with my old company. About 6 years later the mom and pop portion was shut down. I asked the CEO why. He said it made great money for single proprietor, but they weren't able to build it up to a corporate standard of profits. The margins, which directly relate to stock prices, weren't hig enough. So, they cut it.

It really makes me wonder what they saw when they bought it? It couldn't just be a cool website about cameras. My guess is there must have been some IP that they really wanted.
#17
I don't think publishers (including myself) have much IP to be harvested.

Technically, Amazon had the right timing - a couple of years before the hype really boosted it all.

But they didn't make anything of it. Maybe the responsible manager had an idea or two and then left the company. It wouldn't surprise me.

I already mentioned this here - our revenue isn't even 1/5th of what it was in 2013 (that was the peak). And that's surely similar across the publisher industry in this segment, I reckon.
There is money to be made on youtube but not from portals.

You can see it across conventional news sites as well - they are all moving to paywalls/subscriptions for a reason. Too many ad blockers, not sexy enough anymore for advertisers.

And so, dpreview wasn't sexy enough for Amazon either. Just some website with 12 headcounts to be fed and quite a bit of infrastructure costs. I reckon their traffic volume was quite insane.

Dpreview is also not the first site to go the way of the dodo.
Back in the days, photodo was big - still online - but long forgotten.
Then, of course, imaging resource.
DxO mark almost went bankrupt.

I'm somewhat puzzled how lenstip can make it - maybe a similar thing like us here.

I think the whole publishing thing will go video. I think most users can't be bothered to read and watching a video where you don't have to do anything is just more convenient.
Chief Editor - opticallimits.com

Doing all things Canon, MFT, Sony and Fuji
#18
I know I can't be bothered to watch a video. Smile Besides, how do I access samples from a video - by looking at thumbnails at youtube resolution and taking the reviewer's word for it? Smile
#19
Videos just take too much time, too much blabbering going on. I prefer articles. I used to read an occasional article on DPR, but the videos way less, even though they seem to be of good quality compared to most of the industry.
Gear: Canon EOS R with 3 primes and 2 zooms, 4 EF-R adapters, Canon EOS 5 (analog), 9 Canon EF primes, a lone Canon EF zoom, 2 extenders, 2 converters, tubes; Olympus OM-D 1 Mk II & Pen F with 12 primes, 6 zooms, and 3 Metabones EF-MFT adapters ....
#20
Totally agree.
I hate videos. The amount of time required to obtain a descent amount of information is huge compared to text.
Furthermore, you can't actually browse the content and are forced to watch all the useless blah blah blah to actually locate the interesting bits.
It seems to be generational though. Youngsters were raised on videos and are often unable to read anything longer than 5 lines long.
--Florent

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