Amazon layoffs will shut down camera review site DPReview.com after 25 years :(

[usonian]

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/amazon-layoffs-will-shut-down-camera-review-site-dpreview-com-after-25-years/

Amazon has plans to lay off at least 27,000 workers this year, including 9,000 that were announced in an internal email Monday morning. One unexpected casualty: Digital Photography Review, also known as DPReview, is losing its entire editorial staff, and the site will stop publishing on April 10.

Founded in November 1998, DPReview is one of the few active review sites as old as Ars Technica. Amazon purchased it in 2007, and the site's team has been located in Amazon's hometown of Seattle since 2010.

The announcement post, written by DPReview General Manager Scott Everett, says that new pieces will continue to be posted through April 10, and "the site will be locked" afterward. It's unclear what will happen to the site's content afterward—the post promises only that the site's articles "will be available in read-only mode for a limited period afterwards." Any photos and text that readers have uploaded to their accounts can be requested and downloaded until April 6, "after which we will not be able to complete the request."

Former site editor Gannon Burgett said on Twitter that the decision to lay off the staff was announced in January and that "Amazon hasn't yet come up with an archival plan" for the site. Cameras, even digital ones, tend to have a pretty long shelf life, and there's an active used market for lenses and camera bodies—if DPReview.com goes offline entirely, that would be a huge blow to anyone trying to research older products.

There have been some impressive articles at DPReview.
Fortunately, the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive has captured its pages:
Saved 377,500 times between November 28, 1999 and March 21, 2023.

Went up to 378,404 as I was typing this.

[consider_this]

1. NO!!!!!

[bucolic_frolic]

2. That's a short-archiving window

quick decision when money motivates

[jimfields33]

3. I've had an Amazon account for decades and never heard of this.

I wonder if marketing failed this.

[regnaD kciN]

4. This is absolutely infuriating...

I didn’t always agree with DPR’s reviews, and spent less time there than at FredMiranda.com, but this still was a source of enormous resources for the photographic community, and it seems incredible to me that it can be discarded that easily.

I guess it’s just another example of the adage that, when an innovative, useful business gets bought up by a megacorporation, be prepared to say goodbye.

[usonian]

5. Layoffs are a horror.

Having worked in aerospace, layoffs were regular events, and one thing we all noted was that the "strategy" varied every time. Sometimes, lay off the high-paid; sometimes, clear out the junior staff.

I found little published on how to downsize, and who's to say that most of it isn't just a short-term boost to "the numbers" with little analysis of the real effect.

This is interesting: From HBR.
https://hbr.org/2018/05/layoffs-that-dont-break-your-company
Layoffs That Don’t Break Your Company
Better approaches to workforce transitions

Why Layoffs Are Ineffective

Today layoffs have become a default response to an uncertain future marked by rapid advances in technology, tumultuous markets, and intense competition.Yet other data on layoffs should give companies pause. In a 2012 review of 20 studies of companies that had gone through layoffs, Deepak Datta at the University of Texas at Arlington found that layoffs had a neutral to negative effect on stock prices in the days following their announcement. Datta also discovered that after layoffs a majority of companies suffered declines in profitability, and a related study showed that the drop in profits persisted for three years. And a team of researchers from Auburn University, Baylor University, and the University of Tennessee found that companies that have layoffs are twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as companies that don’t have them.

After a layoff, survivors experienced a 20% decline in job performance. All too frequently, senior managers dismiss such findings. Some argue that since companies do layoffs because they’re already in bad shape, it’s no surprise that their financial performance may not improve. Layoffs are so embedded in business as a short-term solution for lowering costs that managers ignore the fact that they create more problems than they solve.

Companies that shed workers lose the time invested in training them as well as their networks of relationships and knowledge about how to get work done. Even more significant are the blighting effects on survivors. Charlie Trevor of University of Wisconsin–Madison and Anthony Nyberg of University of South Carolina found that downsizing a workforce by 1% leads to a 31% increase in voluntary turnover the next year. Meanwhile, low morale weakens engagement. Layoffs can cause employees to feel they’ve lost control: The fate of their peers sends a message that hard work and good performance do not guarantee their jobs. A 2002 study by Magnus Sverke and Johnny Hellgren of Stockholm University and Katharina Näswall of University of Canterbury found that after a layoff, survivors experienced a 41% decline in job satisfaction, a 36% decline in organizational commitment, and a 20% decline in job performance.

While short-term productivity may rise because fewer workers have to cover the same amount of work, that increase comes with costs—and not only to the workers. Quality and safety suffer, according to research by Michael Quinlan at the University of New South Wales, who also found higher rates of employee burnout and turnover. Meanwhile, innovation declines. For instance, a study of one Fortune 500 tech firm done by Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School discovered that after the firm cut its staff by 15%, the number of new inventions it produced fell 24%. In addition, layoffs can rupture ties between salespeople and customers. Researchers Paul Williams, M. Sajid Khan, and Earl Naumann have found that customers are more likely to defect after a company conducts layoffs. Then there’s the effect on a company’s reputation: E. Geoffrey Love and Matthew S. Kraatz of University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found that companies that did layoffs saw a decline in their ranking on Fortune’s list of most admired companies.

[alfredo]

6. That sucks

[Grumpy Old Guy]

7. Pisses me off!

I never bought anything without reading their review first.

[Gato Moteado]

8. is there not enough readership....

...leading to adequate ad revenue to keep it in business?

i would think somebody would buy it from amazon if it was still viable.