Amazon Kills DPReview: the best camera review site on the web
March 28, 2023
After Amazon’s latest downsizing shift, DPReview, the related digital camera opinion website, finally says goodbye. As part of its latest cut of 9,000 people, Amazon will shut down DPReview, a trusted photography website packed with digital camera tests and opinions after nearly 25 years online. After almost 25 years of performance, DPReview will be shutting down in the near future.
Problems
“This difficult choice is part of the annual operational project review that our parent organization shared earlier this year. The site will be active until April 10, and editorial accessories is still doing work on the reviews and hopes to deliver some of our own superior content”
they argue on the web.
It appears that Amazon is not planning to sell the site, but to shut it down completely. New content will be added until April 10, as they claim, but after that it will be locked and available in solo reading mode for a short time. Suggesting that the entire site may be removed. Thus, erasing an important part of our history. Founded in 1998 as Digital Photography Review by Phil Askey, the site’s first review was about the 2MP Canon PowerShot Pro70. The site quickly became popular for its incredibly detailed reviews of numerous pages. Which at its peak were read by tens of thousands of people.
Goodbye to DPReview
After 25 years of giant digital camera reviews, DPReview has long been under the powerful umbrella of Amazon, which acquired the web in 2007.
“DPReview is by far the most authoritative source for direct discussions of the latest digital cameras. We at Amazon ourselves have been fans of them for a long time.”
Bezos commented in a press release at the time.
However, this seems to be a thing of the past, and more recently, a lack of real alignment with Amazon’s broader business goals seems to have led to the site’s demise. It all started with the suppression of the personal editorial from the photography site that left DPReview shuddering and with only a few reviews on the page. Now it is finally being shut down completely and apparently Amazon has no plans to reactivate it and give it a second chance. According to DPReview’s “About Us” page, there are currently 11 staff members.
Conclusion
New layoffs at Amazon mainly affect Twitch, AWS Web Services, PXT, and the Advertising department. As Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explains on the Amazon blog. Jassy blames the macroeconomic case, and affirms that the layoffs are global, also in the European continent. He also explains why these layoffs were not announced last January:
“Some may wonder why we didn’t announce these feature reductions along with the ones we announced two months ago. The answer is that not all groups finished their studies by the end of the fall. Instead of rushing through these assessments without due diligence, I would need to share these choices as we were making them so that the public would have the information as soon as possible. The same goes for this note, since the damaged sets have not yet been finalized. Make final choices about the functionalities that will be damaged”.
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