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DPReview’s Founder Blasts Amazon’s CEO: ‘What a Waste’

209 points by ValentineC 4y ago

soulbadguy 4y ago
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 4y ago
  except it's frozen in time. so not super future-proof.
  - octacat 4y ago
    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.
berkle4455 4y ago
If only there was an easy way to backup and republish historical website content.
- noobermin 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Phil hasn’t been involved for for 13 years. What does he know about the team or their goals or their positioning?
shapefrog 4y ago
DPReview’s Founder drys tears with a handful of (undisclosed purchase price) Amazon $$$'s.
- umeshunni 4y ago
  Person who ran site for 12 years and sold it complains about it being shut down after 13 years.
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    Person who ran site for 9 years and sold it complains about it being shut down 16 years after they sold it ...
- pupppet 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - OrvalWintermute 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
  - 4y ago
AlexandrB 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    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.
  - graeme 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      yes I meant if they let DPR free they would have to pay fees to third party
Zak 4y ago
> 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.
- stu2b50 4y ago
  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.
  - manmal 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        The richer we are the less we can afford.
      - citrin_ru 4y ago
        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.
wlesieutre 4y ago
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.
- Kye 4y ago
  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.
  - wlesieutre 4y ago
    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.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    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.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      >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.
skilled 4y ago
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.
- last_responder 4y ago
  >I guarantee you they would have recouped the costs Do you know the costs. Please share
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    For a static version? I am willing to bet a single server with 10 Gb connection can do it
  - skilled 4y ago
    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.
    - sklargh 4y ago
      One of the more useful comments I've read in weeks. Thanks.
    - c2h5oh 4y ago
      Or $3.36 if your put it on Cloudflare R2 (s3 compatible) and host it there
gennarro 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
CamouflagedKiwi 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    It's not like there won't be somewhere else to read camera reviews. Someone else will fill the gap.
    - greedo 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Wrong thread?
        kevingadd 4y ago
        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"
throwaway290 4y ago
I researched how to convert my camera for IR after reading a recent HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35432206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35432206). I was in DPReview forum territory immediately. There's nowhere else, really.
solarkraft 4y ago
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.
jmyeet 4y ago
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).
woeirua 4y ago
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.
WalterBright 4y ago
A 20T drive can be bought (from Amazon) for $270 now. It should be dirt cheap to archive this material.
Incipient 4y ago
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?
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  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
- donmcronald 4y ago
  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.
yuuuuyu 4y ago
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.)
- perardi 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
- t-writescode 4y ago
  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.
- xur17 4y ago
  > 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.
gkoberger 4y ago
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.
- antisthenes 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    [deleted]
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  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.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  It's sad to see Dpreview go the same way as Photo.net
TheGoodBarn 4y ago
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.
jbverschoor 4y ago
Can’t/doesn’t he want to re-acquire?
lallysingh 4y ago
In some ways they're dying a hero instead of becoming the villain. They could have turned into some in-house spammy affiliate site.
ulnarkressty 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
octacat 4y ago
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.
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: Show HN: DigicamFinder – open-sourced DPReview camera data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35394758 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263635 - March 2023 (71 comments) DPReview.com to close - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296 - March 2023 (374 comments)
octacat 4y ago
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.
mort96 4y ago
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 4y ago
I'm sad. I love Dpreview as a photography enthusiast and it has an amazing community. I wish they would change their mind.
999900000999 4y ago
Okay, so are there any solid alternatives? It's easy to complain, but where's the community's DPReview?
- t-writescode 4y ago
  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.
t-writescode 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
  - radicality 4y ago
    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!
arduinomancer 4y ago
Can we have a HN rule that any article headline containing "blasts" or "slams" is automatically removed?
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
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
ksec 4y ago
DPRreview and Book Depository. I wish I had the money to acquire the two.
wellthisisgreat 4y ago
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?
dbg31415 4y ago
Has anyone made Amazon an offer to buy it back?
listenallyall 4y ago
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.
noonething 4y ago
so start another one
nacs 4y ago
They could very easily convert the whole thing to a static site and throw it up on S3. Ridiculous to take the site and content down.
themagician 4y ago
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.
protastus 4y ago
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.

209 points by ValentineC 4y ago

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 4y ago
except it's frozen in time. so not super future-proof.
- octacat 4y ago
  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.

berkle4455 4y ago

If only there was an easy way to backup and republish historical website content.

noobermin 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Phil hasn’t been involved for for 13 years. What does he know about the team or their goals or their positioning?

shapefrog 4y ago

DPReview’s Founder drys tears with a handful of (undisclosed purchase price) Amazon $$$'s.

umeshunni 4y ago
Person who ran site for 12 years and sold it complains about it being shut down after 13 years.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  Person who ran site for 9 years and sold it complains about it being shut down 16 years after they sold it ...
pupppet 4y ago
[flagged]
- OrvalWintermute 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
- 4y ago

AlexandrB 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  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.
- graeme 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    yes I meant if they let DPR free they would have to pay fees to third party

Zak 4y ago

> 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.

stu2b50 4y ago
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.
- manmal 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      The richer we are the less we can afford.
    - citrin_ru 4y ago
      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.

wlesieutre 4y ago

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.

Kye 4y ago
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.
- wlesieutre 4y ago
  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.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  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.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    >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.

skilled 4y ago

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.

last_responder 4y ago
>I guarantee you they would have recouped the costs Do you know the costs. Please share
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  For a static version? I am willing to bet a single server with 10 Gb connection can do it
- skilled 4y ago
  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.
  - sklargh 4y ago
    One of the more useful comments I've read in weeks. Thanks.
  - c2h5oh 4y ago
    Or $3.36 if your put it on Cloudflare R2 (s3 compatible) and host it there

gennarro 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

CamouflagedKiwi 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  It's not like there won't be somewhere else to read camera reviews. Someone else will fill the gap.
  - greedo 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Wrong thread?
      - kevingadd 4y ago
        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"

throwaway290 4y ago

I researched how to convert my camera for IR after reading a recent HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35432206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35432206). I was in DPReview forum territory immediately. There's nowhere else, really.

solarkraft 4y ago

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.

jmyeet 4y ago

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).

woeirua 4y ago

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.

WalterBright 4y ago

A 20T drive can be bought (from Amazon) for $270 now. It should be dirt cheap to archive this material.

Incipient 4y ago

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?

readthenotes1 4y ago
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
donmcronald 4y ago
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.

yuuuuyu 4y ago

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.)

perardi 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
t-writescode 4y ago
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.
xur17 4y ago
> 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.

gkoberger 4y ago

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.

antisthenes 4y ago
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 4y ago
  [deleted]
anigbrowl 4y ago
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.
steveBK123 4y ago
It's sad to see Dpreview go the same way as Photo.net

TheGoodBarn 4y ago

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.

jbverschoor 4y ago

Can’t/doesn’t he want to re-acquire?

lallysingh 4y ago

In some ways they're dying a hero instead of becoming the villain. They could have turned into some in-house spammy affiliate site.

ulnarkressty 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

octacat 4y ago

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.

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: Show HN: DigicamFinder – open-sourced DPReview camera data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35394758 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263635 - March 2023 (71 comments) DPReview.com to close - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296 - March 2023 (374 comments)

octacat 4y ago

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.

mort96 4y ago

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 4y ago

I'm sad. I love Dpreview as a photography enthusiast and it has an amazing community. I wish they would change their mind.

999900000999 4y ago

Okay, so are there any solid alternatives? It's easy to complain, but where's the community's DPReview?

t-writescode 4y ago
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.

t-writescode 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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.
- radicality 4y ago
  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!

arduinomancer 4y ago

Can we have a HN rule that any article headline containing "blasts" or "slams" is automatically removed?

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

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

ksec 4y ago

DPRreview and Book Depository. I wish I had the money to acquire the two.

wellthisisgreat 4y ago

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?

dbg31415 4y ago

Has anyone made Amazon an offer to buy it back?

listenallyall 4y ago

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.

noonething 4y ago

so start another one

nacs 4y ago

They could very easily convert the whole thing to a static site and throw it up on S3. Ridiculous to take the site and content down.

themagician 4y ago

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.

protastus 4y ago

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.