Some of you may not know that Amazon went through a phase of buying the #1 site in every space. DPReview is the one for cameras. There were others (eg IMDB). Amazon's strategy seemed to be to drive traffic to their site by buying these sites.
Digital camera sales fell off a cliff. I think they peaked at about 2010-12. Now we're at less than 10% of those sales, possibly less than 5%. Of course because of phones. I still like specialist cameras that do things phone can't (eg 300x zoom, 1000fps recording). But these are now niche products.
it seems strange to shutter the site however. How much upkeep does it really require? You can pause actual reviews so all you have to do is add new cameras when they're released, which isn't that often these days. You can even close the forums if you don't want to moderate them.
it's similar to the Google Reader argument: it simply can't be that expensive to maintain.
Some of you may not know that Amazon went through a phase of buying the #1 site in every space. DPReview is the one for cameras. There were others (eg IMDB). Amazon's strategy seemed to be to drive traffic to their site by buying these sites.
Digital camera sales fell off a cliff. I think they peaked at about 2010-12. Now we're at less than 10% of those sales, possibly less than 5%. Of course because of phones. I still like specialist cameras that do things phone can't (eg 300x zoom, 1000fps recording). But these are now niche products.
it seems strange to shutter the site however. How much upkeep does it really require? You can pause actual reviews so all you have to do is add new cameras when they're released, which isn't that often these days. You can even close the forums if you don't want to moderate them.
it's similar to the Google Reader argument: it simply can't be that expensive to maintain.