The rumors sites derive income from primarily two sources: kickstarter programs (for which they can get as much as 15% of the price), and affiliate programs, particularly for things like software and third-party lenses/accessories (which I've seen run as high as 10% of the price). The problem with this is that it introduces 100% bias: you don't get paid if you don't promote. The first thing the rumors sites would ask is "how much do they get?" Considering that dprevived has far lower traffic than them, it's not likely that links alone would interest them.
Long term, pay to play fails as a quality content mechanism.
Dead on point, Iliah. Anyone reasonably sophisticated can scrape a few dozen sites and review what they're publishing daily. What was written before is correct: dpreview was a community: people came to it because the content was high quality, but the forums thrived because it felt like you were part of the conversation.
All the rumor sites would want conversation to take place in their Discus comments, because it serves up more ads for them.
Which gets me back to what I wrote on my site: what the heck, then, was Amazon's goal in buying dpreview? If it was that they thought digital cameras were some huge growth potential, I had predicted (successfully) that the peak would be reached about 2011. Why would Amazon buy something with a four year growth run?
Amazon has proven themselves time and again really bad at content, really bad at curation, and really bad at community. To this day they're still using Internet 2.0 (pre-2000) constructs of disruption without any clear goal as to what the long-term reason for being a company is.
Moreover, the dpreview community was key influencers. How many of those dpreview forum users were asked (both on the forums and off) by others "what to buy?" Guess what? Most of the long-term contributors will probably pipe in and say they were. All the time. This is no different than the reason why camera companies have Ambassadors: people buy things on the recommendations of others.
I will continue to say that Amazon did a complete fail with dpreview. Dpreview had built a model of how to do something in just one small side of tech. It could have been expanded into all of tech and been a huge success. Instead, it wasn't managed in any useful way, nor was there much thought given to anything they hadn't already started doing.
I'll give an example of that. Very early on Phil Askey and I had a(nother) big argument: I insisted that dpreview needed something to sell. He was of the Internet 2.0 persuasion that you just built something that disrupted something (in this case magazines) and everything would work out fine. I suggested that they bundle the full test results for a camera, including all the raw/jpeg files, along with perhaps somewhat more coverage than the site provided (e.g. take out the menu page by page thing from online and reserve that for the for-sale package). It would have been an easy thing to do. Had they sold that for US$9.99 each, they would have taken in a lot of money that could be used for...making everything better.
They are highly sustainable if you price them correctly. A classic example is the tear-down reports by industry experts. Sure, only a few hundred tend to be sold of any given tear-down, but they also are priced in the tens of thousands of dollars (or more).
Moreover, there's another hidden construct in your statement: that readerships in the tens or hundreds of thousands ARE sustainable. That also, is not necessarily true, and there's a long history in the media of folk that believed it was true without knowing how to actually make it so.
Its very hard to get people to pay for content online. Heck, its very hard to sell thorough and curated print content because of all the free non-curated content online. Most print magazines that went 100% online and were a pay model failed within a year, at least within my niche.
I guess we need to ask ourselves, what is the goal for this site? Just have it be a friendly place to meet and chat and maybe have a few ads so costs are covered? Or become a full blown DPR only better? I have not seen any sort of goals or mission statement posted (tbh, I wasn't looking). Maybe something in the middle?
I feel like this place was a life raft quickly tossed into the water for us so we don't all lose our community, but I am clueless how much thought and discussion have gone into any sort of long term goals.
For me, the primary aim was to keep the community together. At the time this site was created, we assumed we would have to offer more than just forums. I still think we do, but what we offer is still up in the air. All ideas can be considered (we are a community forum) - some may take longer to implement than others.
IMHO a side benefit to having a community is that the community can develop something and sell it. It can be test results, it can be running gphoto2 on a server with handed down USB port to read shutter counter, it can be PCBs for exposure meter or remote control, or something else.
Hey, I am all for additional content, but have we even determined we want to be for profit? Many posts in this thread seem to share general web principles for sites looking to make money, which may not be applicable here.
if forum works the next step will be to provide a landing page with reviews / articles & news ( because NOW you go directly to forums - if you want to be something more then it can't be so ) - but that must be curated : so some editor / editorial board must be established naturally and given the luck of funds that can only be a donated content / volunteer effort to post news or at least that editor / editorial board shall pick most valuable posts from the forum and convert them to articles to post over there ... and of course unfortunately I subjectively don't see anything like camera raw files collections @ dpreview / imaging-resource with multitude of standard scenes shots ( and in case of dpreview software presenting visual comparison between cameras) ... that was a good attraction by itself
PS: btw - did Amazon ultimately decide to keep DPreview in a zombie state by reducing stuff but otherwise supporting the existence
I gotta say, I was always perturbed by the lack of focus consistency in those comparisons, which lead to a lot of misconceptions about the resolution of particular lenses and cameras. DPR seemed a bit worse than IR in that regard, and the problem was compounded by issues with some of the lens copies that were used over and over again.
