> <i>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.</i><p>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.
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?<p>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.
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.<p>I guarantee you they would have recouped the costs of keeping the site alive in no time.<p>What a stupid decision.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>DPReview can also give you confidence to buy a used camera, which you're likely to do on eBay.<p>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)<p>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.<p>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 <i>nothing</i>.<p>And whatever costs there are would be completely defrayed by ads anyway.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
For everyone talking about "why didn't Amazon sell it?" or "why didn't anyone come and offer to buy it instead?"<p>This was talked about on a recent Linus Tech Tips WAN show.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Recent and related:<p><i>Show HN: DigicamFinder – open-sourced DPReview camera data</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35394758" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35394758</a> - March 2023 (29 comments)<p><i>DPReview is being archived by the Archive Team</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263635" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263635</a> - March 2023 (71 comments)<p><i>DPReview.com to close</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296</a> - March 2023 (374 comments)
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?<p>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.<p>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.)
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.<p>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.<p>Hopefully all these responses make them consider putting in the effort to preserving it.
TIL that someone not Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon.<p>I guess he is spending more time with his yachts, fair enough but I kind of missed the memo.<p>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?
Folks proposing alternatives with math around operating cost don't seem to understand big company culture and incentives.<p>No Amazon executive built this service. At a massive company, products that have no champion owner at the executive level are destined to die.<p>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.
Amazon has seemingly bought a lot of sites unrelated to its business during the early 2000s.<p>Was it a gamble? I'm more surprised that they kept them running for that long. I also wonder why they didn't try to sell them, though.<p>Now at least they don't have to be the ones causing outrage by trying to squeeze the property with AI-generated listicles and an overload of ads.
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?
I researched how to convert my camera for IR after reading a recent HN post (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35432206" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35432206</a>).<p>I was in DPReview forum territory immediately. There's nowhere else, really.
All these comments about high horses and opportunity costs...<p>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.
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.
In a downturn all these little side projects at big companies get canceled and wound down.<p>If you’re upset about DPReview just wait till Amazon starts unwinding much bigger parts of its portfolio.
As someone who works for a company struggling for marketing SEO, I can't imagine just giving up that goldmine in the photography space. Small comment.
The guy sells a community-content driven site to Amazon and complains that the new owner doesn’t care about the community.<p>Maybe shouldn’t have sold?
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.