A real sad day for photography buffs - thanks a lot Amazon
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A sad day. They are such a great and informative site, even though I’ve gone off photography.
That the post got over 1,000 comments in two hours shows just how popular it still is. I don’t see any reason why it should be shut down, at least not without trying for some sort of subscription first.
I still have beef with a forum member there.
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Wow, this is a shock. I would’ve thought they would be among the last to be shut down. It seems to be still popular so why wouldn’t it be sold instead?
Amazon making cuts isn’t surprising. Just about everyone everywhere is. I just don’t understand why DPReview is one of the cuts. Are they really losing money despite all the popularity?
Farewell, DPReview. You were one of the good ones.
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Here’s hoping that its vast assembled knowledge lives on in the mind of the various AIs that have absorbed its content. 
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Yeah great review site.I remember buying my first camera (Nikon d3200) based on the reviews of that site.
I did even know it was owned by Amazon, strange that they cannot make profit of it (eg by buy links to their shop).
I was surprised to learn Amazon bought DPReview around fifteen years ago - so they have been pretty hands off (especially advertising) all things considered.
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You honestly couldn’t tell apart from the disclosure at the bottom.
In some ways it really is puzzling why this is happening though. Yes, publications like this are hard to make a profit with, but it was Amazon. The storage for the site should have been costing peanuts at most, and it’s not like it had or needed much development.
Given the large job cuts though, perhaps it just got caught up in all that cost-cutting?
Tin foil hat time: Perhaps Amazon were getting push-back from their more dodgy sellers for bad reviews on there?
Ain’t tin foil if it’s true…
Just saw a comment on TWIT that archiveteam.org has announced plans to archive DPReview (4 MILLION pages?)
A little more info: Reddit - Dive into anything
This all raises another BIG issue - if we thought the loss of the Great Library at Alexandria was a cultural loss, what does the loss of valuable content on the internet mean for mankind (of course, losing all those early iOS fart apps…)
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Well, I hope they’re on the lookout for bounce pages, because as much as I appreciate what Waybackmachine The Internet Archive did for the old TPCR, the snapshots are littered with bounce pages.
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Seems a bit harsh. The Internet Archive don’t have to do any of this archiving (and also have some bigger issues - of their own making - to deal with right now), and how a site responds to bots scrapping a site, especially one shutting down, is beyond their control.
Amazon is in a terribly managed state of affairs these days. Virtually hundreds of brick-and-mortar third-party Amazon liquidators have been popping up across the country in the last year here in the United States. I have gone to them to see what they ate all cracked up to be and I kid you not: they are selling two-year-plus old returned merchandise by the truckload every single week. So what does this mean? Amazon has warehouses literally busting at the seams—literal landfills worth—of old merchandise they have accumulated that they have not figured out how to process. So when these liquidators receive it, it is unprocessed and in a total mess. Amazon claims their carbon pledge puts them ahead of the pack against traditional retailers but they are worst—the most wasteful company on the planet. All of this corporate rot represents lost profits they could have made money on if they actually knew how to smartly process returns for resale. And their company model has done nothing but decimated small businesses and speciality stores while ironically they themselves lack the vision and planning to make their model something that can work well in perpetuity. I so look forward to the day when that company collapses in on itself.
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All great points! I have, in fact, found Amazon to be higher priced and slower on most products in all realms than every competitor these days.
For electronics, Best Buy is easier to return products, has Open Box discounts (I just got a Asus Zephyrus G14 2021 RTX 3060 Ryzen 7 for $708 Open Box Certified for instance), and way faster shipping. Amazon was WAY more and it would have taken a week.
For almost everything else, Target is free 2-day shipping and 5% off with the Red card.
Also I have massively increased my eBay usage. It (sadly) gets here faster through USPS than Amazon.
The weirdest part of all is that it will take a week to get something, but they still have to pay a lot for shipping as they have to next day air it. It sits waiting in their warehouse for several days and then gets to me practically overnight.
It’s an absolute mess.
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I noticed this myself! Best Buy was at the brink only several years ago and now they are killing it with their pricing compared to Amazon. Even a 4K Blu-ray a family member recently purchased (The Magnificent Seven, 1960) was cheaper at Best Buy. Then I got a laptop backpack cheaper there as well! I honestly glad to see them having survived and now thriving after the casualties of RadioShack and Circuit City.
Don’t forget their routes. To say nothing of how inefficient that is. They will often deliver packages multiple times in a single day even when you try to combine orders. And their once gold standard same-day one-day three-day shipping is not even on par with the bottom-of-the-barrel USPS. At least the postman follows my delivery instructions. I have gotten my Amazon-fulfilled packages more often in the wrong spot or on the wrong side of my house.
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