[photonius]

For a selfie you need a selfone (cellphone ist just wrong spelling... ) and apparently it's satisfying the needs of most of today's photo content producers. Come on, dave, even you use a mirror form time to time. The selfie is nothing else than a mobile mirror of myself, the confirmation of my existence in front of something interesting. Occasionally the selfie shooter diminish their numbers by killing themselves while selfieing.

My question only is: how many of them would have bought a "serious" camera with a couple of "serious" lenses, if there were no smartphones around? Maybe once an entry level DLSR with a kit lens on it for a special holiday occasion - if that's what creates the nowadays missed sales numbers, then it had affected the photomarket - by sales numbers, but not necessarily by visitors of a lens review site.

That's for the two owners of the site: Leaning back and keep reviewing lenses while hoping the continuously growing photo industry would flush in new readers might not do the trick. But there are still enough places in the WWW where interested photographers are going to, be it of entertaining reasons or getting more information than elsewhere. So, it is still possible to attract those who buy the reviewed lenses. That lenscore site has no forum and is dead - you have and at times an active one. It's your call to go on or leave it there after so many years - but decreasing sales numbers as excuse? I don't buy it. These numbers affect all other content producers as well.

This is an interesting point. I also doubt that most of the people who use smartphones exclusively would ever have used OL. People who use sites like OL are serious amateur photographers and "up". With the birth of the digital cameras, coinciding with the rise of the internet (i.e. being able to host web sites easily), the serious photographers could start to consult the internet (instead of print magazines) - this of course was a huge boom phase, and a lot of catch-up to do with tests for all the lenses from the film days. Now the market has really matured, no major break-throughs. I'm pretty much set with my lenses, I don't change every year (and I don't change phones every year, btw note that the phone market is slowing as well). New lenses start to be great, but also big and heavy, so not interesting for me - I'm only getting older, not stronger. Still it means that after the boom phase, a site like OL will drop to a lower steady state visitor level. Further to remain relevant, lens tests need to be coming in, the more the better. So, I think there is a market, but it is perhaps not as easy as it used to be.