Obituaries

The demise of DPR is all over the web as you've probably seen.
www.google.com/search?q=dpreviews&tbm=nws

This one puts it well, I think.
techcrunch.com/2023/03/21/amazon-kills-dpreview-the-best-camera-review-site-on-the-web/

I played with a few of those sites that try to estimate what a site or a domain is worth. WorthOfWeb says it's worth $69,250,000 .
www.worthofweb.com/website-value/dpreview.com/ (you need to scroll down a bit).

On the other hand another service thought it was worth a mere 10 grand. The truth? Probably somewhere in-between. But I'd say a whole lot more than 10 grand.

At the end of the day, I guess it is "worth" whatever someone pays for it. So... $0.

Since Amazon don't appear to have even been interested in putting it on the market, the point is moot, maybe.

Presumably (rightly or wrongly) they came to their own conclusions that it was worth less than whatever it would cost to negotiate the sale and transfer the site to new ownership. That's assuming they thought about it at all...

Just the domain should be worth a bit. If Amazon lets it go we'll soon see a pesky spam site there.

From a mere business point of view, what Amazon's doing is mind-boggling. Operating a site costs money, sure. Killing it off allows them to seemingly "save" money and to repurpose the servers and not pay the staff etc. but they're not even getting a single payout from doing that, which they would if they'd negotiate a deal with someone. Simply put, making money > not making money; for whatever reason Amazon opted for the latter option and that's just bad business, for a wide variety of reasons (like bad press and such, for example).

Of course lawyer time and everything is not free, but I assume it wouldn't be much of a cost if they'd have any willingness to sell off the site/domain/both; surely the lawyers have some boilerplate contracts and such they could merely pull up and have both parties sign, but alas.

With that user base and reputation I dare say it would have been very easy to sell. If the creator could let go of it, why couldn't they? It's not like it's their flagship. I didn't even know they owned it until a year or two ago.

Yes, it's pretty strange.

The best explanation is that they've put zero thought into it and just issued edicts from a board room somewhere without looking into the details. That's just a guess - but it's hard to see what would otherwise motivate them to just throw the whole of DPR to the wind.

That's what I think. They hardly know they own it.

It's never that simple. When I was working at Fairchild, our parent bought an another small electronics company and rolled it under us. It had one division that was losing money. It had a product and a good staff but it was still losing money. Our GM asked the head bean counter to look at the financials and the legal council to look at the effort to sell it and me to look at the value of their technology. By the time everything was thrown into a pot, stirred and simmered it would cost more to sell it than we would recover from the sale plus it would take some of our technical people away from productive jobs. The decision was identify people to offer to transfer either to our facility on Long Island or in Florida, offer them positions and moving expenses and close the operation down.

The reason was this division was not in our standard business area nor did they deal with our normal customers so there was no real fit. However, they did have some talented engineers which we could use elsewhere on other programs. This sort of thing happens all the time. So I'm really not surprised in the decision by Amazon. I never really understood what Amazon got out of DPR to make it worth the expense. Finally they didn't either it seems.

Our son used to work for Stubhub, which was purchased by Ebay, who ultimately decided it really was not part of their "business model" and sold it off. Shame some of these companies couldn't do their "due diligence" BEFORE making the purchases.