[HN Gopher] DPReview's Founder Blasts Amazon's CEO: 'What a Waste'
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DPReview's Founder Blasts Amazon's CEO: 'What a Waste'
Author : ValentineC
Score : 179 points
Date : 2023-04-05 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (petapixel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (petapixel.com)
| mort96 wrote:
| 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.
| jotjotzzz wrote:
| I'm sad. I love Dpreview as a photography enthusiast and it has
| an amazing community. I wish they would change their mind.
| TheGoodBarn wrote:
| 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.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| 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.
| NickBusey wrote:
| 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.
| twblalock wrote:
| It's not like there won't be somewhere else to read camera
| reviews. Someone else will fill the gap.
| greedo wrote:
| 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.
| twblalock wrote:
| Wrong thread?
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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"
| twblalock wrote:
| 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.
| greedo wrote:
| Handheld, dedicated digital cameras are most definitely a
| niche. Smartphone cameras have eaten up this photography
| segment.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| tssva wrote:
| > Digital cameras are not a niche.
|
| 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.
| qzw wrote:
| 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.
| gkoberger wrote:
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| It's sad to see Dpreview go the same way as Photo.net
| antisthenes wrote:
| They didn't have to "develop" it actively or even write content
| for it.
|
| Just keep hosting it on 0.00000001% of their cloud
| infrastructure. DPReview is a mostly static site, images, html
| & simple JS.
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _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.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I researched how to convert my camera for IR after reading a
| recent HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35432206).
|
| I was in DPReview forum territory immediately. There's nowhere
| else, really.
| shapefrog wrote:
| DPReview's Founder drys tears with a handful of (undisclosed
| purchase price) Amazon $$$'s.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Person who ran site for 12 years and sold it complains about it
| being shut down after 13 years.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Person who ran site for 9 years and sold it complains about
| it being shut down 16 years after they sold it ...
| pupppet wrote:
| This shouldn't be downvoted. You don't get to stay on your
| high-horse when you looked out for yourself with a cash-out,
| these people should get called-out.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| 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.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| 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.
| jstarfish wrote:
| 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.
| shapefrog wrote:
| If you sell your horse to the glue factory you can't pull
| the Shocked Pikachu face it when gets tuned into glue.
| belval wrote:
| 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.
| tedunangst wrote:
| 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."
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Can't/doesn't he want to re-acquire?
| lallysingh wrote:
| In some ways they're dying a hero instead of becoming the
| villain. They could have turned into some in-house spammy
| affiliate site.
| listenallyall wrote:
| 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.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Okay, so are there any solid alternatives?
|
| It's easy to complain, but where's the community's DPReview?
| t-writescode wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| 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?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| 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.
| graeme wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| yes I meant if they let DPR free they would have to pay
| fees to third party
| AlexandrB wrote:
| 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.
| Zak wrote:
| > _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.
| klodolph wrote:
| Retail costs for cloud storage have been in a race to the
| bottom for years, and the margins are not large.
| latchkey wrote:
| It really depends on the type of storage. Long term storage
| has great margins over time because capex is one time and the
| opex is relatively low.
|
| Wasabi gets $6/tb/mo... indefinitely.
| saurik wrote:
| 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.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| 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.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Why is it an either/or? Is Amazon bandwidth-constrained?
| manmal wrote:
| Opportunity cost implies that there is an alternative that
| AWS forgoes if they allocate resources to DPReview. Can't
| they just provision more hardware?
| stu2b50 wrote:
| 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.
| orangesite wrote:
| The richer we are the less we can afford.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| woeirua wrote:
| In a downturn all these little side projects at big companies get
| canceled and wound down.
|
| If you're upset about DPReview just wait till Amazon starts
| unwinding much bigger parts of its portfolio.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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.
| octacat wrote:
| 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.
| whyenot wrote:
| > 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?
|
| For most of DPReview's life, the site has been owned by Amazon,
| and at least from the outside, everything looked fine.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _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.
| duxup wrote:
| The amount of folks like John Carmack and others who play the
| "leopards are my face" game and also took the money is pretty
| disappointing.
|
| They're not wrong that it is a shame, but they made their call
| too...
| twblalock wrote:
| 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?
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| The Archive Team is planning to archive the site. It should
| end up on the Wayback Machine:
|
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/DPReview
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
|
| e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20230201053243/https://www.d
| prev...
| MDGeist wrote:
| 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.
| mullingitover wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| You could own Amazon stock for less than $5 in 2007. They were
| not a tech giant at the time. Big, but not giant. A speck next
| to Microsoft or IBM.
| runnerup wrote:
| 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?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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.
| re wrote:
| > You could own Amazon stock for less than $5 in 2007.
|
| That ignores the 2022 stock split. The price of AMZN ranged
| from $38 to $100 in 2007.
| hgsgm wrote:
| _You_ are ignoring the split. The split adjusted price was
| <$5 all year.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| skilled wrote:
| 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.
|
| What a stupid decision.
| renewiltord wrote:
| But that exists on archive.org right?
| ValentineC wrote:
| Archive.org doesn't have the best usability or speed.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| last_responder wrote:
| >I guarantee you they would have recouped the costs
|
| Do you know the costs. Please share
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| For a static version? I am willing to bet a single server
| with 10 Gb connection can do it
| skilled wrote:
| The very basic math on this is:
|
| 1,560,000 pages x 150 KB/page = 234 GB
|
| 234 GB x $0.023 per GB = $5.38
|
| this is just to host all the pages themselves.
|
| Data transfer per month: (Assuming 10 million pageviews)
|
| 10,000,000 x 150 KB = 1,500 GB
|
| 1,500 GB x $0.09 per GB = $135
|
| GET and all other Requests:
|
| $0.0004 per 1,000 requests
|
| 30,000,000 / 1,000 x $0.0004 = $12
|
| ---
|
| Storage cost: $5.38
|
| Data transfer cost: $135
|
| Requests cost: $12
|
| Total estimated cost per month: $5.38 + $135 + $12 = $152.38
|
| ---
|
| This is NOT considering images themselves, though you get a
| general idea of what I am implying.
|
| Enjoy the math. I was happy to share it with you.
| c2h5oh wrote:
| Or $3.36 if your put it on Cloudflare R2 (s3 compatible)
| and host it there
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| c2h5oh wrote:
| It's rate limited. A distributed effort to create a
| complete backup will be starting soon
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/DPReview
| sklargh wrote:
| One of the more useful comments I've read in weeks. Thanks.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| grogenaut wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> 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.
| hgsgm wrote:
| `wget -r` is free.
| troyvit wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Show HN: DigicamFinder - open-sourced DPReview camera data_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35394758 - March 2023 (29
| comments)
|
| _DPReview is being archived by the Archive Team_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263635 - March 2023 (71
| comments)
|
| _DPReview.com to close_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296 - March 2023 (374
| comments)
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| 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.
| octacat wrote:
| 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.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Has anyone made Amazon an offer to buy it back?
| Incipient wrote:
| 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?
| donmcronald wrote:
| 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.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| why did they buy imdb or goodreads?
|
| 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
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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
| yuuuuyu wrote:
| 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.)
| xur17 wrote:
| > 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.
| t-writescode wrote:
| The cost to Amazon is greater than the money they'd get out of
| it / the pennies they'd receive for the site aren't worth the
| paperwork.
|
| Yes, 50MM would be pennies to them.
| perardi wrote:
| 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.
| yuuuuyu wrote:
| 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.
| octacat wrote:
| 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.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Amazon has seemingly bought a lot of sites unrelated to its
| business during the early 2000s.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| If only there was an easy way to backup and republish historical
| website content.
| noobermin wrote:
| 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.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Phil hasn't been involved for for 13 years. What does he know
| about the team or their goals or their positioning?
| ksec wrote:
| DPRreview and Book Depository.
|
| I wish I had the money to acquire the two.
| noonething wrote:
| so start another one
| octacat wrote:
| 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.
| soulbadguy wrote:
| at the very least i would have hope to forum data to be made
| publicly available. Must be a gold mind for LLMs training for
| photography focus questions
| whiplash451 wrote:
| except it's frozen in time. so not super future-proof.
| octacat wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| A 20T drive can be bought (from Amazon) for $270 now. It should
| be dirt cheap to archive this material.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| Can we have a HN rule that any article headline containing
| "blasts" or "slams" is automatically removed?
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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).
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| The guy sells a community-content driven site to Amazon and
| complains that the new owner doesn't care about the community.
|
| Maybe shouldn't have sold?
| gennarro wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| t-writescode wrote:
| 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.
| WWLink wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
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