The Decline Continues

Reading Tom Hogans site, he writes, that "Imaging-resource com" is down, most probably shuttered.

Another general review site joins DPR in the decline of the big photography resource sites, as our dedicated camera world continues to shrink.

The website was working okay on 03 May 2023
web.archive.org/web/20230503191115/www.imaging-resource.com/

The Wayback Machines’ archived pages…
Saved 7,382 times between December 20, 1996 and May 5, 2023

hope not . one of my favourite sites.

As I note in my article, IR changed hands twice since that original dpreview news article. The most recent time was in February, and the most recently published article on IR was April 18th. The site appears to have shut down completely on May 2nd.

As for editorial content, if the intent of dprevived is to try to take the place of a central site for all of digital photography, yes, you should move fast. Wicked fast. But at the same time, without high-level content that is unbiased, it simply won't work. Without regular content (and that means daily), it won't work. Without a wall between editorial and the money side, it won't work.

When sites with high levels of traffic close down, it tells you that you don't have a lot of wiggle room to get things right.

Access to new models, publishing tests and galleries - IMHO impossible without that.

It seems to me that the raison d'être for this site is the Community, especially the discussion forums... though adding editorial content would be nice. That said, I don't see why such content has to be ALL original content (though some should be). There are plenty of successful sites of various genres that act as trusted editorial intermediaries to content published all over the web. And there's already loads of editorial photographic content out there (including some by photographically erudite people that are already members of this site) - why not leverage that, as well as add some of one's own. That could be started straightaway, and relatively inexpensively. The Community could help by identifying content that to be posted on DpRevived intermediary page. We could have intermediary pages for news, beginner questions, technical articles, etc, etc. THEN add original content, as time, resource and money allow. My 2 cents.

The issue is one I've written an article about, but haven't published yet.

Yes, "community" is important. The reason why a community forms is that's the place that everyone goes every day. With dpreview, I-R, Steve's, and other conglomerate sites gone, is there a place everyone still goes for news, commentary, articles, reviews, comparisons (the dpreview or I-R image archives), inspiration (galleries, photo of the day, etc.), and more? No, there isn't.

One thing that old time media folk like myself know is this: it's the long-term retention that makes the big difference. For example, in the 1990's the typical "gear" (audio, car, computer, etc.) magazine had a 2-year retention rate of under 50%. That meant that just to stay even in audience, they had to attract new readers at as much as half of their historic reader base just to stay even. I'm amused that the online sites have just now started to discover that. They get a viral bump that makes them seem to grow fast, then suddenly find they can't hold the same levels of participation later. Grow fast, die fast. By contrast, the two-year retention rate at Backpacker when I left in 2001 was 83%. That meant most people who subscribed was still subscribing three years later. You can grow with that sort of retention.

I have no idea how dpreview.com was managed. I suspect that reader retention rates weren't really paid attention to. Yet, as we all know, digital camera sales went from a high in 2011 to a low in 2020. You wouldn't have been retaining readers much by concentrating solely on gear, as dpreview did, as once that reader had bought, they didn't really buy again quickly (and perhaps they got cloberred in the fora when they posted naive questions ;~).

So the questions for anyone trying to build a "new" central hub are simple: who are you targeting as readers, and how are you going to retain them?

(Before you say "forums", you might want to do an analysis of how many "active" posters there were in each forum. I'll be that would have been measured in the hundreds in most of the fora. Hundreds is not sustainable. Which gets me back to my earlier point: you need high-end content, you need a lot of it, and you need it today, not tomorrow.

Interesting reply Thom. I’m sure you’re correct. That said,your reply didn’t directly address the notion of original AND linked-to (site serves as intermediary) content. I’m suggesting both types - and getting started with the later. As I said, there are a number of successful sites whose role is “trusted editorial intermediary”. Don’t see why we couldn’t follow that model here, while also working towards original content. Eg, articles on your site would certainly fall in the class of those that IMHO select dprevived intermediary pages could point to.

As a complete aside (after 8 years and some 3000 posts), I never read any of the articles or reviews. That aspect of the site was of 0 importance to me.

To a degree it was mostly "community" as since retiring 3 years ago and finding myself with "nothing to do" I suspect it was my primary way of dealing with the isolation of the pandemic.

Got the same idea after second response to the topic.
In the age of feeds, there certainly could be a department for this. Concentrated hub, so one would not need to do the wide round around the web, but would have it served at one place. I am all for that. Rumor sites came to mind in no time. I wonder what ChatGPT could do for beginners. There is quite a lot stuff going on, and concentrating it is not a bad idea. User UI can allow for customizing the feed, so everybody would get what he wants.

I have even seen some camera platform slip in some car stuff too, and it was quite succesful for its size and potential customer base. It might be too much, I know. Just saying. Anything is possible.

Invite Kai with Lok. :-D I cannot see this platform failing with these.

I use RSS as a rumour aggregator. Works quite well.
Rumours often channel what manufacturers want them to publish.