> Even without staff, DPReview‘s server costs are likely quite high given the huge amount of image data that has been accumulated over the years.
That's a matter of perspective. If I had to pay them out of pocket at retail prices, I imagine I'd consider them high. If I was a multinational corporation that owned the world's largest cloud computing service, I probably wouldn't.
For storage, maybe, but I would think the bandwidth is the actual cost not the storage, and cloud is definitely not in a race to the bottom on bandwidth pricing.
Bandwidth went the same way, AWS/Azure/GCP don't translate it to the customers purely for commercial reasons[1]. Also, Amazon.com (or whatever is the division owning DPReview) doesn't pay the retail price for traffic-out, for sure. The discounts for very big customers are very important.
That doesn’t really change anything. The opportunity cost would be the same, which is what matters for companies. Those resources could be sold for market value rates to a customer if they weren’t being allocated to DPReview.
Opportunity cost implies that there is an alternative that AWS forgoes if they allocate resources to DPReview. Can’t they just provision more hardware?
Hardware cost money? The rate at which AWS buys more hardware is consistent with their income from their cloud rental business. If they're not going to buy the hardware otherwise, then evidently at cloud market rates the marginal income isn't worth it.
Hardware, rackspace are all resources. If something is using up hardware and rackspace, there is opportunity cost.
If they cared about saving money they would try to sell it. Something which doesn't bring many millions is to small for Amazon to care even if it cost rounding error on a balance sheet to run it.
The problem is that at a big/huge company, every little project imposes some share of costs and distraction all the way up the line and on supporting groups. And, yes, that means something could be reasonable as at least lifestyle business for someone. But unless it more than incidentally supports more central parts of Amazon's business, a million dollar side business isn't really very interesting to a company like Amazon. And have more than a few of those and people start to reasonably ask what Amazon is actually focused on.
It’s a bummer, but can you really sell a small company to a tech giant and then be any sort of surprised when this happens?
Could Amazon with its giant cloud infrastructure keep a cache of this website live forever, as an immeasurably tiny drop in the bucket of their operating costs? Sure. Does Amazon care? No. What Amazon cares about is making money and apparently selling fancy cameras and lenses isn’t doing it anymore.
apparently selling fancy cameras and lenses isn’t doing it anymore
Perhaps they can make more money by not providing consumers with as much educational/historical information. I used to use DPreview regularly when I worked in the movie biz, because you could get information anything from bleeding edge forthcoming products to 50-year old stuff you found on eBay for peanuts and wanted to get functional.
Educated hobbyists become discerning. Uninformed enthusiasts make better consumers.
It's not even selling fancy cameras. It's reviews of digital cameras that are all either obsolete or about to be. Much of the data is only of historical interest.
Amazon is not running a charity or a public library. It's foolish to expect them to run a site like this forever. If the original owners wanted this to be preserved they should have sold it to someone who contractually agreed to preserve it, or donated it to the Internet Archive or something.
Besides, the old stuff should all be free from archive.org, right?
The Wayback Machine seems to be well-populated with content from the site. (And one suspects Amazon knew that the site was already being preserved in this manner.)
True that a lot of the content is only of historical value, but wouldn't it potentially be in amazon's interest to keep the site going to keep covering new things that amazon is actively selling? They could have just killed off old content after a certain date.
I definitely spent thousands on Amazon after reading reviews on dpreview. The affiliate money alone should’ve been more than enough to keep the site running.
After this I am firmly determined never to spend a cent on cameras at Amazon.
Oh, cameras are not that dead yet. And many people said they would order new stuff not from Amazon because of it. Good that there are other shops. Because removal of DPReview pissed off the whole camera community.
What does the instantaneous per stock price have to do with the instantaneous market cap or gross earnings or % market share or % household name recognition of a company?
APPL is $162/share. BRK.A is $470,000/share. Which company is more giant?
Ah that's true, I wasn't thinking of how long ago it was sold.
My one good camera lens was bought based on dpreview's coverage, back in 2004. Sad to see it go, but seems reflective of the camera market in general. Phones ate the consumer camera market, and now they're eating the prosumer market too.
right - and they used that five dollars to effectively end the used book business across the USA, with eyes to be Walmart. Is the world really a better place to live with Walmart/Amazon, abandoned shopping malls and freeways ? Yes, they are related.
>Is the world really a better place to live with Walmart/Amazon, abandoned shopping malls and freeways ?
It's not "the world", but rather the US. The rest of the world does not have Walmart and freeways like America does. And yes, America really is better with Walmart/Amazon, abandoned shopping malls, and freeways, because Americans like it that way and it's a democratic society. Americans don't want walkable cities where they can go to shops in-person (perhaps after transiting to them conveniently by subway), and any time this topic comes up on HN, legions of Americans scream about how much they love driving everywhere in their big SUVs and how much they hate walkable cities and cyclists and anyplace that doesn't have acres of free parking. Americans are voting with their votes, dollars, and feet, and getting exactly the society they want.
I still can’t believe this even happened. They could have archived a static version of the site and served it from AWS and put a banner on top of the site saying it is hosted on AWS.
I guarantee you they would have recouped the costs of keeping the site alive in no time.
But they have a static version of the site which seems to be what a lot of people on this thread want Amazon to create. The contents are already not lost. (Though I can't speak for the forums.)
What's the engineering cost to move the dynamic site over to a static site and fix any issues there within when you have no engineers working on staff anyway. What's the ongoing price of dealing with things like legal threats take down notices etc. Especially when you have no engineer and no good way to just go remove individual pages or deal with those types of issues. What's the engineering cost to go deal with changing regulations like gdpr and right to be forgotten we need to go remove comments or other user posted information from someone. What is that giant mess going to look like and how do you get an engineer to spin up on it fix each of those things on a one to two year timer probably in between any given issue. How excited is that engineer going to be a 3 to 6 months break in something that's actually useful to their career to go patch someone else's tech debt. What level of quality of work does that lead you to get. Where do you even put the headcount for an engineer or who do you steal them from that is less important than a dead archived website that's been sitting around for years. All in I think a base level engineer at Amazon probably makes around 250 to 300 when you include all the support in for a and all of the benefits and everything else. That's for an entry-level engineer who probably will have trouble understanding the weird ass bespoke infrastructure that has been created for this one-time thing in a dead corner of the company. Well you may not agree with any of these things these are all considerations that would go into a decision like this and all the complications this is not some shit just running on your digital ocean droplets and it's all things that companies have to take into consideration when they are the size of Amazon and have a Target on their backs for regulators and lawsuits.
No I'm not saying either way if I support or don't support this decision all I'm saying is all these things would go into consideration into a decision like this from just a pure engineering level. I've sadly had some projects that I worked on in the past were they looked at it and they didn't want to do archival because there was just not worth the legal risk to deal with changing laws like gdpr so they just shut the feature down. This is often the calculus that happens how much revenue is it making what is the legal liability risk of keeping it up what is the ongoing engineering cost to maintain it or spin up an engineer and fix it in between. Given that 300K price and just assuming you got to do one year of fixes over the next 10 years that site better be bringing in multiples of $300,000 a year in revenue to even make it worth it to not just shut it off. Esp if you can't quantify community good will.
Personally one of the lessons I learned is if I build a system like I did for gaming again I will make it so that we can shut it into a top and list archival mode that can be run minimally from a CDN but sadly I didn't think of that when we built it and it was a little expensive to do it the right way after the fact since I was the only one that actually understood the tech.
> What's the engineering cost to move the dynamic site over to a static site and fix any issues there within when you have no engineers working on staff anyway. What's the ongoing price of dealing with things like legal threats take down notices etc. Especially when you have no engineer and no good way to just go remove individual pages or deal with those types of issues. What's the engineering cost to go deal with changing regulations like gdpr and right to be forgotten we need to go remove comments or other user posted information from someone.
archive.org seem to manage it on donations alone, for millions of websites. So presumably it can be done very cheaply, if you have a lean organisation.
It's possible that Amazon is not that lean organisation, of course.
Huh. Yeah. In fact anybody could do this and then re-host it statically (another thread has the costs for it and it's not bad). That would put Amazon in the interesting position of defending IP that it had previously deleted, but large corporations are pretty comfortable throwing lawyers at silly things like that.
Very affordable to keep online as an archive or infrequently updated blog.
If the founder really wanted it back, the correct response would have been asking Amazon in a public forum if they would like to pass on ownership. If done in a gracious and respectful tone, I have no doubt that would have engendered all around good feels. It could have even compelled Amazon to put one half quarter of engineering headcount into wrapping the site up in an AWS account to hand over.
The founder should have said they'd be happy to take on costs and future burden, host it on AWS, and continue to link to Amazon products and storefront. Should have said that they were grateful for Amazon's stewardship and that they'd like to continue carrying the torch. An easy all-around win.
The actual response from the founder was too negative and blame ridden if their intention was to resume operation.
Okay, well, in that case I will put down $500 to pay for that for ten years or whatever and one of you guys can wget -r it and put it on Cloudflare R2.
Reply to this post once you have set up the Cloudflare account and posted the content on it and I'll send you an email you can give me admin credentials on so I can put billing details in.
It's not about the costs of hosting or running the site, or what it's worth if Amazon sold it -- the existence of DPReview hurts Amazon's retail business.
People use DPReview to decide on the model they want -- at that point, they search the whole internet for prices, lowest wins. Amazon has to match B&H, NewEgg, etc.
Amazon wants you to be less informed, instead more reliant on its reviews and ability to steer you to higher-margin choices. DPReview mostly pays attention to solid,trusted top-tier brands, but these brands have significant power over retailers due to their built-in demand. Amazon, on the other hand, can make a $400 no name camera with a $250 margin look more attractive than a $600 Nikon where Amazon only makes $150 -- especially when they know your search history and what features you may have sought. Even just selling one item via Prime vs another can tilt the purchase decision.
DPReview can also give you confidence to buy a used camera, which you're likely to do on eBay.
DPReview earns a lot in affiliate bonuses, that Amazon would rather keep for itself (yes I know it's circular but even the depts fight with each other)
Bottom line, existence of DPReview does not benefit Amazon's retail business. Perhaps when it was smaller, or people were less willing to buy an expensive camera online, it did... But no longer.
I agree: this is penny pinching of the worst kind.
The retail cloud costs for storage and traffic are cents per GB. Media would largely be served via CDN. It would take relatively few servers to run a mothballed DPReview. We're probably talking mere thousands of dollars per year, at a guess. Give them the benefit of the doubt and say it's 5 figures. That's still nothing.
And whatever costs there are would be completely defrayed by ads anyway.
So this brings us to the one big cost: labor. If you disallow new posts then you basically have no content moderation costs. Other than that you're keeping up some static pages and a read-only forum. That's trivial. You'd roll that into any group who is responsible for maintaining a large number of sites with negligible overall cost.
Overall I'd say the total cost of running this is less than one employee. And if I'm wrong, it's because the site still generates a lot of traffic, which kind of defeats the argument that it needs to be shut down.
As for the storage, I'd reminded of the Geocities shutdown. What was once a lot of storage was described as "gigabytes". It would've quite literally been a case of someone going over there with a thumb drive. DPReview isn't dissimilar. A lot of content is very old (ie small resolution and file sizes).
I don't really care for this. He sold the company 16 years ago then left 3 years after - why should Amazon be under pressure from him to keep it going? It seems like they've given it an extremely good run, all things considered - they've owned it for longer than he had.
This is not about pressure to keep some company going, but about the vast amounts of photography and related-gear knowledge that DPReview.com contains.
I have been using DPReview to pick my camera gear for over 20 years. It would be an absolute tragedy for the photography community if it goes away.
Is that the case? I remember being a huge fan of flight sims back in the Falcon 4.0 and EF2000 days. I imagined that by the time I was 50 that it would look incredible and be super performant with realistic combat scenarios. Reality turned out differently. Sure Microsoft Flight is decent, but it's no combat sim.
What you’re looking for is DCS by Eagle Dynamics. Looks incredible and has very good realism. It does need a pretty beefy system to run well with all the eye candy turned on.
I think the implied argument is "you can't safely assume that any market niche will be filled when the big player(s) go away, sometimes the niche just stays empty"
Digital cameras are not a niche. They constitute almost the entire global camera market. There are other review sites, forums, print magazines, etc. One website going away is not going to obliterate the world's ability to review one of the most popular consumer products.
You seem to keep missing the point that many people consider DPreview to be the best site in its niche by far. There is no certainty for its users that the impending competitive opportunity will yield a new option of equal or better quality. Mediocrity often outperforms quality in the market.
Camera sales, which are overwhelming which is overwhelmingly digital cameras, fell 93% from 2010 to 2021. In 2022 8 million digital cameras with a value of $5 billion were shipped.
Based upon those numbers I would say digital cameras are a niche and no longer one of the most popular consumer products.
For everyone talking about "why didn't Amazon sell it?" or "why didn't anyone come and offer to buy it instead?"
This was talked about on a recent Linus Tech Tips WAN show.
The long and short of it is that they theorize Amazon is *so rich* that it's not worth the work to sell DPReview; so, the alternative routes that people are suggesting and recommending just aren't even on Amazon's radar or care.
That's.. a pretty good reason to not buy photography gear from Amazon in the future. There are a number of other good retailers to buy photography gear from on the internet that offer comparable (2-day) shipping for similar prices.
Heck, better prices. I bought a panasonic S5 body from B&H for the same price as Amazon - but B&H gave me a free 85mm lens and a bag. And that's pretty standard for the photography retailers (B&H, Adorama, sweetwater, samys, etc) AND I don't have to worry about whether or not the manufacturer considers them an authorized retailer and whether I'll be able to use the warranty if I need it.
The number of people who buy dedicated cameras these days is already quite small, and the percentage of those people who will stop buying their equipment from Amazon over this is even smaller. Tiny percentage of a tiny percentage. Probably undetectable for them.
If you’re ever in NYC definitely check out B&H in person. The amount of stuff they have in-stock right there in the shop is impressive. Many things you can get in the store within 30 min - the item will come via a ceiling-mounted conveyor belt system which is fun to watch!
I may never buy another interchangeable lens body anyway--at least not a full-frame one. But, for the most part, I find very little reason not to go with B&H. And if I want to check something out in person, I can drop in when I'm in NYC.
This smells a lot like how the WhatsApp people were surprised that Facebook would make bad changes to WhatsApp or when Carmack was surprised that Facebook would make bad changes to Oculus.
Don't sell your company to a tech giant if you don't want to see your life's work run into the ground. You don't have the right to be outraged if it is.
Stating the obvious that I don't see in this thread yet: If there really is an active community around it that wants to keep this alive, why don't those people get active, cut some deal with Amazon and then run the show on their own?
As the discussions here have shown, server space+traffic costs are expected to be low and could easily work with donations. Then you need some technically inclined people to put in the maintenance work in their free time, but that's the same as with basically every online non-profit community made by and for enthusiasts.
If that's not happening then clearly interest is just not big enough and shutting down the logical consequence. Web archive is still around (and we all should take a moment and consider a donation, whether you care abouy DPReviews or not.)
> Stating the obvious that I don't see in this thread yet: If there really is an active community around it that wants to keep this alive, why don't those people get active, cut some deal with Amazon and then run the show on their own?
As other commenters have noted, its likely not worth the effort to Amazon to transition it regardless of how much money someone might pay.
That said, I would happily take over ownership and hosting of the site. At a bare minimum, as a static snapshot of the site, and best case (assuming the infrastructure they have setup is manageable), as the full site. Email is in my profile if anyone at Amazon is listening.
Probably because the potential market of enthusiasts is quite small, and not enough to even cover the legal fees for disentangling whatever knot of copyright and legal issues that Amazon presumably spun out over the years.
Possible. But I'd have expected that at least a conversation take place. Involving the founder. Instead of having him lrarn about the decision publicly when it's too late.
Forums are pretty cool there, a lot of nice info for old camera equipment. That move is like a burning a library. Kinda dark irony to see it from a company that sells books.
I can't believe I'm kinda going to sorta defend Amazon, but... Amazon kept the site running for 16 years after the acquisition (and 13 years after the founder left)? That's genuinely amazing.
They could have garnered a lot of goodwill by finding a new home for it, but at the same time, Amazon keeping it running for 16 years is really impressive to me. That's a really good run.
Hopefully all these responses make them consider putting in the effort to preserving it.
They could have garnered a lot of goodwill by finding a new home for it
They could have made money by simply putting it up for auction or offering to sell to the user community. I don't feel so emotionally attached to DPreview as I haven't visited the site in years, but I'm offended that the logic of capital dictates the 'best' option here is to literally destroy something that has value for a lot of people. I presume some aspiring financial warrior is now able to burnish the 'terminator' badge on their resume.
TIL that someone not Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon.
I guess he is spending more time with his yachts, fair enough but I kind of missed the memo.
Honestly that surprises me more than Amazon high handedly shutting down a review site - it is probably not even a single line item on the spreadsheet at Not-Bezos' level
I wonder how much a site like DPReview costs to keep running (web hosting/administration only, no new reviews). Could they subsist on referral links alone for a while if they were spun off or do they need a corporate funder like Amazon?
Referral links, Amazon would have to pay them affiliate fees. Amazon don't want to pay.
But they could subsist. Limit resources, make site slower, turn off serving expensive media (not necessary for the forums which is the most important part). Problem is they are not being set free but intentionally shut down. Amazon can do what they want.
Yeah - it's too bad. While I'm daydreaming, a perfect partnership/merger could be DPReview + Flikr/Smugmug. The latter already has infrastructure to host a ton of high-res images and could make access to some DPReview features part of their subscription plans to justify the spend.
Seems like a false economy. Amazon will surely pay referral fees to somebody. If it goes to a business unit you own, you save the fees.
That's what I don't understand about shutting it down. The archives have got to be worth something in terms of making sure the affiliate fees go to an amazon property rather than someone they don't own.
Folks proposing alternatives with math around operating cost don't seem to understand big company culture and incentives.
No Amazon executive built this service. At a massive company, products that have no champion owner at the executive level are destined to die.
The Amazon CEO doesn't fund passion projects. If an asset doesn't translate to billions in revenue and a roadmap to take over the world, it's off the radar. No executive will dare even bring this up because everyone knows it doesn't run at Amazon scale. It's lost in the noise.
Honestly, I think Amazon may be killing it because they have evidence that it detracts from sales of camera items on Amazon.com. With DPReview gone more people will trust bogus Amazon reviews for expensive camera gear. A lot of comments and posts in the forums also suggest never buying camera gear on Amazon.com (which I agree with). There was a sort of DPReview to B&H/Adorama pipeline. I would not be surprised in the least if simply deleting DPReview entirely results in a boost of sales for camera gear on Amazon.com.
May be a silly question, but why on earth did Amazon want to buy a reviews site for a moderately niche industry (compared to selling millions of usb cables etc)? It feels like the effort of owning it would entirely outweigh any value it gave them, and has nothing to do with any part or their existing business?
Making sure it doesn’t grow into anything that could cause competition might be enough of a reason. Keeping it running helps ensure no one independent can get an easy foothold in the same space.
I imagine it was because they saw review sites as a vector to online stores. They could also have viewed review sites as competitors to Amazon's own reviews which drive sales on Amazon of course
All these comments about high horses and opportunity costs...
Simply put, hosting the site is a service to society. People's lives are enriched because of it. And businesses do these kinds of things all the time for various reasons, mostly as a matter of pride or principle.
They would keep info, so they could feed it into their AI someday. That one of the reasons they stop providing public access. And they still holding copyrights for it. So, to do nothing from their side is the smartest decision.
As the post relates from Phil Askey, the "waste" includes just shuttering the site which involves "tearing the team apart", not just the loss of the content itself which yes will be on the internet archive likely.
If you care so much about the business then why sell it? Sure this may be a loss but the founder is hardly the person to speak to this as he had more power than anyone to prevent it from happening.
I am absolutely unable to come up with a reason why someone might want to sell a company after running it for 10 years. Yup, just totally unable to come up with a single reason to justify the decision.
There isn't one. And there isn't one because there pragmatically and realistically can't be.
They had an encyclopedia of cameras, all rigorously tested and a backlog of something like 20 years worth of cameras.
That breadth and depth of data will never be duplicated for cameras.
And you may say "that's pointless"; but, as the DPReview speakers discussed in their interview on the WAN show (Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel), lots of people are upgrading "from their 7 year old camera"; so, it's very, very common to have someone looking at their very old camera (even decade's old, like my older camera) camera to a new one to see what the difference is.
A website is several orders of magnitude more useful for having its rigorously tested backlog than one that doesn't have it - so much more useful that it was the defacto with no competitors.
idk, it probably cost them more in reputation damage already.
For example, some programmers could have a photog hobby and would take it personal when choosing between platforms where to host a new project.
Except photography is not changing that much. Many creators are still using retro lenses. So, reviews for the current glass would be relevant the next 40 years.
HN just loves a good "another person thinks what I think" story. It would be more newsworthy if they said something like "I'm glad it's gone, good riddance."
While I normally agree with this sort of cynicism, any transfer of money does not make it hypocritical to create something and hope that its next owner treats it with the same reverence you did.
Imagine spending thousands of hours and dollars raising/training a dog/horse/whatever. You're passionate about your trade and fond of the animal. You're compensated for the time you invested in Spot.
The fistful of cash in your pocket isn't going to offset your disappointment when you hear the next owner shot Spot in the head for being inconvenient. It's hard not to take it personally if you actually care about something.
Amazon kept the website alive for 16 years after the purchase that's already pretty far out of "the next owner shot Spot in the head for being inconvenient".
Even more to your analogy, the average lifespan of a dog is something like 13 years.
When you create something of value, whether it is an app, a site, a community, a tool, a series, or something novel, and you sell it, it is no longer yours.
That does not mean you lose all your hopes and dreams for that thing to grow, flourish, and continue to be something of value for others, even if you have received compensation, even windfall compensation for it.
We could practice being just a little bit nicer to founders and plank owners.
You all have good points. It's important to separate the right to a decision from the right to an opinion. Obviously the founder no longer has any right to influence the decision here. But I don't think there's any reason to assume he no longer has a right to a personal opinion about it.
I think it's crazy to suggest that someone can't simultaneously 1) no longer want to run something themselves but also 2) not want to see that thing destroyed entirely.
That's a matter of perspective. If I had to pay them out of pocket at retail prices, I imagine I'd consider them high. If I was a multinational corporation that owned the world's largest cloud computing service, I probably wouldn't.