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Are no photo gear review websites profitable?

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John Koch

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DPReview doomed? Exactly why? Doesn't the website garner more visits than most of its contenders?

Multiple Internet sources allow one to measure the volumes of activity that various websites generate. I find it difficult to explain why the DPReview site, whose daily visits exceed 250,000, and employs fewer than 20 people, can't make money, while similar websites, with fewer visitors, and sometimes a lot more overhead, manage to survive?

Or do most of them simply "run on fumes," requiring a continuous subsidy from outside? Most of the sites' visitors buy little, infrequently, or not at all.

My guess is that the DPR traffic count is disproportionately skewed by forum posters who seldom use sponsored links to vendor websites to buy anything. Or what they buy at Amazon is not camera-related and not credited to DPR.

Apples-to-apples comparisons can be elusive: a camera review site, a photography site, a camera store, and a store that sells cameras and other stuff too have a blurred affinity that confounds any strict ranking. However, monthly visit counts should translate to revenues, at least vaguely.

According to SimilarWeb , the monthly visits received by sample photography / camera websites compare as follows:

Site Affinity Visits / Mo. Peer Rank

DPReview 100% 7,100K #23

Fstoppers 100% 2,300K #58

digitalcameraworld 76% 4,800K #50

KenRockwell 100% 980K #204

The-Digital-Picture 90% 633K #276

Photographylife 72% 1,100K #219

Cameralabs 91% 385K #509

Photographyblog 95% 624.6K #314

photo.net 92% 566.5K #345

TheCameraStore 100% 432K #522

SLRlounge 77% 439K #526

Imaging-Resource 91% 737.9K #282

FredMiranda 91% 804.3K #203

TheDigitalPicture 90% 632.6K #276

Petapixel 88% 4,800K #51

Flickr 85% 49,500K #1

Northrup.Photo 74% 38K #1,152

Froknowsphoto 100% 60.4K #2,891

MattGranger 100% 26K #2,298

DXOmark 83% 2,500K #60

NikonUSA 81% 1,100K #194

B&H Photo 70% 16,500K N/A

Adorama 75% 3,200K N/A

Canon USA 80% 3,600K N/A
 
Exactly, this was totally unexpected for me.
I remember like 8 years ago or so, checking numbers like yours, and DPR was the #1 Photo gear website back then and apparently still is.
Then came the personality driven video reviews, the rumor sites and things changed, so much so that DPR decided to hire the Canadian duo for DPR TV, but it was too little, too late. Humans being humans prefer videos presented by someone they like than reading and frankly, a few of them make more compelling reviews although not as deep or rigorous.
Despite all that, and not knowing the numbers (website vs youtube) is hard to understand how they couldn't make it profitable or at least a break-even business, especially considering that this site is hosted on Amazon Web Services ! which is their most profitable division, so their overhead should be small.
 
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First, I'm skeptical of these numbers. How many are hits by bots?

Second, I would think that ad revenue more than direct links to Amazon would be the key to keeping the site afloat.

And the problem with the latter should be obvious on multiple fronts. One of which is the rather large staff of DPR, in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
 
DPR was killed by Amazon. It’s like adopting then sacrificing a pet because you can’t care to feed it. My issue isn’t Amazon adopting the returning it to the shelter, but the sacrifice part. There are hundreds of groups that would like to evolve DPR. DPR acted more like a news site, like Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post than a commercial operation, but for the camera division.
 
fferreres said:
DPR was killed by Amazon. It’s like adopting then sacrificing a pet because you can’t care to feed it.
Click to expand...
Or...it's like adopting a website you think you can profit from, hiring more and more people to run it, and realizing you aren't profiting.

I don't know why people want to vilify Amazon. They aren't in business to lose money. If losing some camera review site is the cost of hopefully keeping the price of items on Amazon from rising....I'm more than okay with it.

There are plenty of other web sites I can get the same exact info from, if I ever need it in the future.
 
Jonsi said:
fferreres said:
DPR was killed by Amazon. It’s like adopting then sacrificing a pet because you can’t care to feed it.
Click to expand...
Or...it's like adopting a website you think you can profit from, hiring more and more people to run it, and realizing you aren't profiting.

I don't know why people want to vilify Amazon. They aren't in business to lose money. If losing some camera review site is the cost of hopefully keeping the price of items on Amazon from rising....I'm more than okay with it.

There are plenty of other web sites I can get the same exact info from, if I ever need it in the future.
Click to expand...
Any photo review site that makes money is likely biased. Once money is involved (with anything) the truth goes out the window.

I suspect the last few days have been emotional for many users. The hysteria reminds me of the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Perhaps you and I are further along in the five stages of grief.
 
Jonsi said:
fferreres said:
DPR was killed by Amazon. It’s like adopting then sacrificing a pet because you can’t care to feed it.
Click to expand...
Or...it's like adopting a website you think you can profit from, hiring more and more people to run it, and realizing you aren't profiting.

I don't know why people want to vilify Amazon. They aren't in business to lose money. If losing some camera review site is the cost of hopefully keeping the price of items on Amazon from rising....I'm more than okay with it.

There are plenty of other web sites I can get the same exact info from, if I ever need it in the future.
Click to expand...
This is very true: we should expect corporations to seek profits, not to act in the public interest. That's something to think about.
 
Gary Martin said:
Jonsi said:
fferreres said:
DPR was killed by Amazon. It’s like adopting then sacrificing a pet because you can’t care to feed it.
Click to expand...
Or...it's like adopting a website you think you can profit from, hiring more and more people to run it, and realizing you aren't profiting.

I don't know why people want to vilify Amazon. They aren't in business to lose money. If losing some camera review site is the cost of hopefully keeping the price of items on Amazon from rising....I'm more than okay with it.

There are plenty of other web sites I can get the same exact info from, if I ever need it in the future.
Click to expand...
This is very true: we should expect corporations to seek profits, not to act in the public interest. That's something to think about.
Click to expand...
 
Not just photography. The dilemma right now is that there are 2 primary means to generate income from content: show ads or charge for subscription. But the whole online ad industry is in flux right now, with people running ad blockers and the apparently diminishing effectiveness of online advertising. And people are reluctant to add yet another monthly bill in an era where it seems like we already have too many subscriptions. We can't even own software anymore! I'm not really sure what the solution is, but the age of "free" internet content is rapidly coming to an end.
 
Jonsi said:
Gary Martin said:
Jonsi said:
fferreres said:
DPR was killed by Amazon. It’s like adopting then sacrificing a pet because you can’t care to feed it.
Click to expand...
Or...it's like adopting a website you think you can profit from, hiring more and more people to run it, and realizing you aren't profiting.

I don't know why people want to vilify Amazon. They aren't in business to lose money. If losing some camera review site is the cost of hopefully keeping the price of items on Amazon from rising....I'm more than okay with it.

There are plenty of other web sites I can get the same exact info from, if I ever need it in the future.
Click to expand...
This is very true: we should expect corporations to seek profits, not to act in the public interest. That's something to think about.
Click to expand...
I'd say they are acting in the public's interest. Low prices, large selection, same day delivery.

Is there a public who would prefer otherwise?
Click to expand...
Hmm, maybe all the former employees of bookstores that are no longer around, or all of the myriad of other brick-and-mortar businesses that have been wiped out. But if all the public wants is cheap goods: then yes, they are definitely acting in the Public Interest. Until there are no more consumers left to buy anything. Maybe the robots can fill in then?
 
IMHO, no gear review site is without profit... If the folks there love what they do.

For example, I was a reviewer on a well-visited site which shall remain unnamed here.

There was a small but techniclaly competent team which produced sincere and honest tech reports garnered with personal feel about the variegated units we've tested. The devices ranged from the first robotic dust collectors thru action cameras , 3D printers, early drones, and everything inbetween, including real underwater tests for several specialized things...

We produced detailed reviews based on the units we were receiving for such tests. Some test samples were faulty, and then our reviews reflected the facts, and then the maunfacturers wouldn;t be happy with the reviews, and at times they'd re-send the working replacements so we could do it again. And so we did - with, again, our honest appraisal of the thing. Others weren't happy and had closed the co-operation. In all, we did well, since we reported upon the reality, and not upon what it should have been,

And then the site was sold to another company, which decided to "influence" the latent buyers solely by tweaking the ad texts that would come with such gear. They actually did no real testing of the units; just parrotted the ads in another way.

So "my" original team rebelled against the manner in which the reviews were being made, and we left, one by one. The site and its name which once meant dependable and sincere reviewing undersigned by the original team members was left to "influencers" which couldn't've been bothered with proper testing.

After one year or so I went there to look at the content they dished out, and found almost no new reviews. Seems like their followers have learned what they were dealing with, and have left. Thus the popularity of once successful site was done and gone.

Hope the folks used to DPR site will have enough experience to differentiate between what we've had here, and something I just tried to describe. Good luck!
 
MacedonianPhotog said:
IMHO, no gear review site is without profit... If the folks there love what they do.

For example, I was a reviewer on a well-visited site which shall remain unnamed here.

There was a small but techniclaly competent team which produced sincere and honest tech reports garnered with personal feel about the variegated units we've tested. The devices ranged from the first robotic dust collectors thru action cameras , 3D printers, early drones, and everything inbetween, including real underwater tests for several specialized things...

We produced detailed reviews based on the units we were receiving for such tests. Some test samples were faulty, and then our reviews reflected the facts, and then the maunfacturers wouldn;t be happy with the reviews, and at times they'd re-send the working replacements so we could do it again. And so we did - with, again, our honest appraisal of the thing. Others weren't happy and had closed the co-operation. In all, we did well, since we reported upon the reality, and not upon what it should have been,

And then the site was sold to another company, which decided to "influence" the latent buyers solely by tweaking the ad texts that would come with such gear. They actually did no real testing of the units; just parrotted the ads in another way.

So "my" original team rebelled against the manner in which the reviews were being made, and we left, one by one. The site and its name which once meant dependable and sincere reviewing undersigned by the original team members was left to "influencers" which couldn't've been bothered with proper testing.

After one year or so I went there to look at the content they dished out, and found almost no new reviews. Seems like their followers have learned what they were dealing with, and have left. Thus the popularity of once successful site was done and gone.

Hope the folks used to DPR site will have enough experience to differentiate between what we've had here, and something I just tried to describe. Good luck!
Click to expand...
Profit and greed derail a lot of good intentions, always.
 
John Koch said:
DPReview doomed? Exactly why? Doesn't the website garner more visits than most of its contenders?

Multiple Internet sources allow one to measure the volumes of activity that various websites generate. I find it difficult to explain why the DPReview site, whose daily visits exceed 250,000, and employs fewer than 20 people, can't make money, while similar websites, with fewer visitors, and sometimes a lot more overhead, manage to survive?

Or do most of them simply "run on fumes," requiring a continuous subsidy from outside? Most of the sites' visitors buy little, infrequently, or not at all.

My guess is that the DPR traffic count is disproportionately skewed by forum posters who seldom use sponsored links to vendor websites to buy anything. Or what they buy at Amazon is not camera-related and not credited to DPR.

Apples-to-apples comparisons can be elusive: a camera review site, a photography site, a camera store, and a store that sells cameras and other stuff too have a blurred affinity that confounds any strict ranking. However, monthly visit counts should translate to revenues, at least vaguely.

According to SimilarWeb , the monthly visits received by sample photography / camera websites compare as follows:

Site Affinity Visits / Mo. Peer Rank

DPReview 100% 7,100K #23

Fstoppers 100% 2,300K #58

digitalcameraworld 76% 4,800K #50

KenRockwell 100% 980K #204

The-Digital-Picture 90% 633K #276

Photographylife 72% 1,100K #219

Cameralabs 91% 385K #509

Photographyblog 95% 624.6K #314

photo.net 92% 566.5K #345

TheCameraStore 100% 432K #522

SLRlounge 77% 439K #526

Imaging-Resource 91% 737.9K #282

FredMiranda 91% 804.3K #203

TheDigitalPicture 90% 632.6K #276

Petapixel 88% 4,800K #51

Flickr 85% 49,500K #1

Northrup.Photo 74% 38K #1,152

Froknowsphoto 100% 60.4K #2,891

MattGranger 100% 26K #2,298

DXOmark 83% 2,500K #60

NikonUSA 81% 1,100K #194

B&H Photo 70% 16,500K N/A

Adorama 75% 3,200K N/A

Canon USA 80% 3,600K N/A
Click to expand...
I would guess that whether a review site is profitable depends on the type.

And these days I expect that this means that the way to making a living at reviewing is best done on YouTube. Hence the number of reviewers there. And before the usual howls of protest note that some reviewers there aren't sponsored by the companies whose products they review, and some don't even accept review loaners to test. Up to the consumer to do their due diligence on each. But some reviewers, of all kinds of gear, do make a living there.
 
robgendreau said:
John Koch said:
DPReview doomed? Exactly why? Doesn't the website garner more visits than most of its contenders?

Multiple Internet sources allow one to measure the volumes of activity that various websites generate. I find it difficult to explain why the DPReview site, whose daily visits exceed 250,000, and employs fewer than 20 people, can't make money, while similar websites, with fewer visitors, and sometimes a lot more overhead, manage to survive?

Or do most of them simply "run on fumes," requiring a continuous subsidy from outside? Most of the sites' visitors buy little, infrequently, or not at all.

My guess is that the DPR traffic count is disproportionately skewed by forum posters who seldom use sponsored links to vendor websites to buy anything. Or what they buy at Amazon is not camera-related and not credited to DPR.

Apples-to-apples comparisons can be elusive: a camera review site, a photography site, a camera store, and a store that sells cameras and other stuff too have a blurred affinity that confounds any strict ranking. However, monthly visit counts should translate to revenues, at least vaguely.

According to SimilarWeb , the monthly visits received by sample photography / camera websites compare as follows:

Site Affinity Visits / Mo. Peer Rank

DPReview 100% 7,100K #23

Fstoppers 100% 2,300K #58

digitalcameraworld 76% 4,800K #50

KenRockwell 100% 980K #204

The-Digital-Picture 90% 633K #276

Photographylife 72% 1,100K #219

Cameralabs 91% 385K #509

Photographyblog 95% 624.6K #314

photo.net 92% 566.5K #345

TheCameraStore 100% 432K #522

SLRlounge 77% 439K #526

Imaging-Resource 91% 737.9K #282

FredMiranda 91% 804.3K #203

TheDigitalPicture 90% 632.6K #276

Petapixel 88% 4,800K #51

Flickr 85% 49,500K #1

Northrup.Photo 74% 38K #1,152

Froknowsphoto 100% 60.4K #2,891

MattGranger 100% 26K #2,298

DXOmark 83% 2,500K #60

NikonUSA 81% 1,100K #194

B&H Photo 70% 16,500K N/A

Adorama 75% 3,200K N/A

Canon USA 80% 3,600K N/A
Click to expand...
I would guess that whether a review site is profitable depends on the type.

And these days I expect that this means that the way to making a living at reviewing is best done on YouTube. Hence the number of reviewers there. And before the usual howls of protest note that some reviewers there aren't sponsored by the companies whose products they review, and some don't even accept review loaners to test. Up to the consumer to do their due diligence on each. But some reviewers, of all kinds of gear, do make a living there.
Click to expand...
YouTube is popular because it doesn't require much creativity to generate content.

It's hard for consumers to do their due diligence when there are dishonest people online.

Do you really think being a brand ambassador doesn't influence the ambassadors opinions? If it truly didn't, brand ambassadors wouldn't exist.
 
Then that is still Amazon's mistake. Even if that's the case they can revert their decisions, and irregardless they could effortlessly support a site like this without ever making a dime. Amazon is not some mom and pop store..
 
I think you're missing 4.58 pages per visit with an average visit duration of 00:03:19, with a 52.53% bounce rate (bailing out after one page). Granted that's averages, but that's not healthy.
 
Gary Martin said:
Jonsi said:
fferreres said:
DPR was killed by Amazon. It’s like adopting then sacrificing a pet because you can’t care to feed it.
Click to expand...
Or...it's like adopting a website you think you can profit from, hiring more and more people to run it, and realizing you aren't profiting.

I don't know why people want to vilify Amazon. They aren't in business to lose money. If losing some camera review site is the cost of hopefully keeping the price of items on Amazon from rising....I'm more than okay with it.

There are plenty of other web sites I can get the same exact info from, if I ever need it in the future.
Click to expand...
This is very true: we should expect corporations to seek profits, not to act in the public interest. That's something to think about.
Click to expand...
Historically, that wasn't the case. Before the late 1800s, a corporation couldn't be created until its promoters proved to the relevant legislature that the corporation would be in the public interest.

In the late 1800s, a few jurisdictions (starting with New Jersey and Delaware) decided that any profit-making enterprise was in the public interest. That started us on a journey where a few decades later people starting thinking that a corporation was supposed to be only for profit, never for the public interest.

Obviously that change has been associated with the massive amount of stuff - including photography gear and photography forums - that our economy produces, but I'm not sure that completely abandoning the public interest requirement that corporations operated under for centuries was an unqualified good.
 
I don't run ad blockers, mostly because if I'm reading a website I like, I would like it to remain around and that requires some form of revenue.

Regarding DPR, I don't recall seeing adds that were not from Amazon or one of it's subsidiaries. Even some adds that don't appear to be from Amazon, such as the recent "#Dadification" series, if you dig deep you find Amazon Studios as one of the involved parties in that campaign.

There may have been advertisements from other business, I just don't recall them.
 
Just like forms killed newsgrups/usenet social media killed off quite a bit of forum traffic and social media doesn't translate to direct sales much. Also were 20+ years in so were getting into a generational gap with how people use the internet. Seems most just want their 15 second fix of stupid video addiction instead of building up an account on different forums websites and becoming part of a community.

Or its just pure greed on port of a corporation that doesn't even want to spend a pittance of their income to keep the site or at least the forums goindg.
 
5782.jpeg


This is why.
 
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