Imagine my surprise to be off the Internet for a month and to find…well, articles and forum posts are still being published on dpreview. That site that was supposed to go flatline on April 10th, here at the beginning of May it still has a pulse. Hmm…
First up, let me once again say what a brain-dead decision Amazon made in closing dpreview. Not that Amazon makes all that many brain-alive decisions. (Disclosure: I own Amazon stock.)
I long ago learned that goal, strategy, and tactics are three different things. Tactics support strategies which support goals.
Amazon seems mostly goalless since they became the defacto online buying source. Kindle seems goalless. Prime seems goalless. Even AWS seems goalless. But that also means that Amazon is mostly strategy-less, too. Which has reduced tactics to not much other than “save money.” At this point I fail to see what business Amazon is in, let alone how it expects to grow that business.
The thing about dpreview is that it was the hub of Internet information about cameras and photography: fundamental, subjective, and anecdotal. Given that Amazon wants (I think) to be the place people buy things online, just where does Amazon think their camera-buying patrons will come from? Amazon has made the common mistake of believing they’re big enough that people will just go to them to buy. Bed, Bath, and Beyond might have something to say about that ;~).
Amazon killed a key asset in “shutting down” dpreview. I wonder just what their camera sales are doing now?
Of course camera sales are just a drip in the bucket as far as Amazon goes. A small drip. But about to become a smaller drip. Just how many times can you make all those drips smaller before the bucket no longer fills?
Lucky for Amazon no one else is in the position to be the photography hub at the moment (possibly forever). Adorama and B&H both have pieces of the puzzle, but their articles are sales biased and not deep or broad, while their customer reviews/comments are buried and problematic. Say what you will of dpreview, but editorially it had about the most integrity of any photography related site.
In a perfect world, you have curators. Curators that are qualified, that are thoughtful, that are relatively unbiased, that promote the best information over the worst. Dpreview was a pretty decent curator. Better than the alternatives.
Curators are powerful, because over time they attract people who want a “good” answer over a fast (and possibly biased one). Curators also can point to the best sources to acquire things, and that’s the role that dpreview should have played in the Amazon world: here’s the information you need to know, and when you’ve made a buying decision, we can help you with that. That connection was never particularly good between dpreview and Amazon, and it got worse over time. It also didn’t help that the Amazon purchase of dpreview and its long-term ownership was glossed over, either.
At the moment, dpreview is probably still savable, but only if someone who knows what they’re doing with content feeding sales steps in and takes charge immediately, with some support from Amazon corporate (or whoever might take it over).
I doubt that will happen. Amazon isn’t known for managers that understand anything other than brute force and size. They also don’t appear to be interested in selling the asset. Meanwhile, the photo industry itself is built on behind-the-scenes spiffs, promotions, and other incentives, which has a tendency to spill over into any content side if no Editorial Wall is erected and maintained. It’s a very tricky space. My observation is that every time an edit/sales wall is breeched, the editorial side will die, and the whole creature will eventually die as well.
Good media always starts with good content. Which has to be defended constantly against erosion by other forces.
I had a whole article planned about what happens when dpreview disappears that I was going to run, but dpreview hasn’t disappeared yet. So I’ll just save my further comments for the eventual funeral.
Bonus Update #1: Someone asked me about what I’d do with dpreview. That led me to thinking that maybe it’s not digital photography review, but just digital review. Guess what? The dreview.com URL is for sale (asking US$6700). As is dtreview.com (US$2900). As you might guess from that data I’d have looked at expanding the dpreview idea into a broader digital review or digital technology review, of which the camera stuff would have been one portion. Obviously, Amazon bought and updated the technical side of running such a site. What they didn’t do is provide it any growth plan. What a shame.
Bonus Update #2: I was browsing through the Amazon-owned products and noticed something amusing. If you look at the Amazon logo, you’ll see that the arrow underneath goes from A to Z. Yep, Amazon as we know it provides everything from A to Z. Subtle, but excellent design.
However, look at how Amazon fumbled most of their other logos. Alexa provides everything from A to A (you can’t make this stuff up ;~). Blink gives you B to K. Prime gives you P to E, but Prime Now gives you I to O for some reason. Likewise, Amazon Publishing is Z to I and Prime Video is I to D.
All this just goes to prove my point: Amazon has no idea what they’re doing or what their business actually is. They can’t even get their logos right. Funny thing is, they did once in a while get it correct (put the sub-service name just to the right of the arrow swoosh, as they did in Amazon Home Services and Amazon Basics).
This kind of lack of clarity and coordination starts at the top of the company. Since I just got my Amazon stock voting document, I’ll be voting against the current management and board ;~).
