dpreview: letter from the CEO

[deleted]

Also, the CEO is an amateur photographer himself and a DPR Forum long-time lurker.

I wonder how it will go long term , if the biggest online retailer in the world could not generate sufficient income to make it viable gear patrol looking at their info are a small company. I suppose as ever time will tell

Amazon’s definition of worth the effort might differ from viable by an order of magnitude.

"Grand Opening, Grand Closing" - Jay Z

Frankly, I am more interested in hearing of concrete plans for this site. I know that at least one of the management team is convalescing from illness and wish him a speedy recovery. But annual vacations must surely be over soon. I see logins at a low level and notice that, according to the Users page, many of the most frequent users are staying away. We cannot afford to let the grass grow under our feet in implementing build-out of the site. Who knows, DPR may still not be viable, and if that happens we need to be ready!

David

When Amazon owned DPR, all advertisement was from Amazon, wasn't it? I do not think Amazon paid anything for adds placed on DPR. So any revenue could come from sales generated by adds. Now advertisers are from all over the place and I think they pay for adds. Of course they will pay if they see sales coming from adds placed on DPR.

He suggests it will be incumbent on users to make purchases through eventual retail links from the site to aid in solvency. We don’t know his definition of sufficient revenue. We do know it was not enough to satisfy Amazon. I was always very reticent about purchasing any gear through Amazon. And, I never purchased through Amazon links on DPR and thus never actually contributed to the bottom line as gauged by the purchases Amazon could track to DPR.

I want to say I read something about the cost to Amazon was something like $100,000 a year, which would seem like an insignificant amount to them. I don't understand how a business model built around convincing people to pay more for products is a sustainable idea either. Like you, I don't click affiliate links to buy things 99.99% of the time. If the owners are that "desperate" for it to turn a profit, why not do sponsorships with camera companies to blast their products all over the pages? I go there right now and I'm not immediately hit with a pop-up ad about a camera product I don't want. They can totally make that happen for money.

The other thing he wrote was to ask people not to use ad blockers. I use one all the time, and if sites refuse me entry with that in place, I just click away and dont visit.

David

they had a dozen of FTE - the salary + benefits + whatever else employer bears for W2s alone will be close to $1mil / year ( those were not remote workers toiling from some obscure 3rd world country... they were all in USA )

So what do you reckon the current running costs are?

David

Right, I am more interested in what happens here, and I hope thre is some way that it can be made to grow, with new approaches such as the "journalistic" front page, which is I believe is planned.

I cannot be bothered to post much on DPR, where I am always looking over my shoulder to see if what I write will get me banned, because some true technical fact, upsets the horses.

Quite frankly if they prosper or wither on the vine is of no interest to me anymore. It is much more pleasant posting here.

No, not quite correct.

What he actually said was -

"Improving the quality and increasing the quantity of ads on the site – to help our business, please consider turning off ad blockers. It will take some time for us to improve the quality and experience, so please bear with us.".

He asks everyone to consider turning off ad blockers, which makes sense because he stated clearly that they are not planning to ask for donations or put up a paywall.

He also made it clear that advertising and hopefully sales from them is the way they plan to generate revenue to keep DPReview going.

In any case, it all sounds encouraging and time will tell if DPReview will survive in the long term but having an enthusiast photographer as the driver behind it is a very good start.

Someone has been sharing their DPReview account with me for a while now and so I will be staying there from hereon🙂.

Good luck to DPRevived but it is very clear to me that it is sinking fast at the moment and I doubt the forum "model" Bob and his team have chosen is sustainable in the long term.

I have put on my floaties and am abandoning ship.

Adios DPRevived 🙂🙂😎 and good luck for the future😎

(... decided not to post my slightly more frustrated reply about the site and its future, but rather...)

agree, that the health of @bobn2 is significantly more important than the fate of a struggling forum, so I really wish him a good recovery as well!

We'll see what happens otherwise... For now I'm still stubbornly sticking to my opinion that it's partly in our hands as regular users to create interesting content and think about unique and creative ideas to make this place different from the rest of forums out there... but it doesn't look like there's a lot of agreement on that front as well.

[deleted]

9 people it seems = www.dpreview.com/about

assuming all of them are still @ dpreview and even some of them are not full time and some might be ( now ) contractors w/o benefits I 'd not put the cost of operation @ less than $500K / year ( even when HR/accounting/etc are done by the parent company )

post more, 404 is not enough !

I was about leaving quietly, as watching 4 similar forums ( DPR, DPRForum, DPRevived, micro43.org) is too much for 1 person. But still pop up here from time to time.
My 2 cents:
- Due to DPR survival/revival limited traffic here (and other similar places) is unavoidable in future
- I don't know all keys to survive in this situation, but the one crucial seems to me is simplyfying forum structure; too much to complicated to view in short time was the main reason for me to leave from here in favour of competiton (stay mostly at DPR and DPRForum, micro43.org is dying definitely); some, but still very little, has been done here in this direction
Regards,
-J.

Not that I don't bemoan the lack of traffic or fail to understand some criticism aimed at this site... but to be fair: It has been massively simplified recently and you (as anyone else) would have had the possibility to add your thoughts and suggestions. I think you actually still have, as @AlanSh always seems open to suggestions and changes, as long as they seem to be well-reasoned.

I know that certain subforums (mine is no exception there) will probably not take off in any significant way in the near future, maybe ever... But I would absolutely invite you to participate in the more active Image Discussions, critiques and challenges part of the forum where a majority of the threads is platform agnostic and some really nice people around! 👍

The new tactic of advertising on DPR is incredibly annoying as well. Probably driving peeps away that don't use blockers.

Fortunately the Forum that I post on there (Sigma Cameras) is pretty easy-going and always has been. The equivalent forum here is pretty much dead

More pleasant now that the trolls have quietened down, eh?

Cemetery lane stuff really....