Amazon.com acquires dpreview.com: Digital Photography Review

So Amazon’s getting ahead of the Yahoos and Googles in acquiring content-community sites…

We’re proud and excited to announce that Dpreview has been acquired by the worlds leading online retailer, Amazon.com. Started as hobby site in 1998, dpreview.com has grown to be the number one destination for anyone interested in digital cameras and digital photography. Each month dpreview.com has seven million unique visitors (over 22 million sessions) who read over 120 million pages. “We’ve worked very hard over the last eight years to deliver consistently high quality content to our readers”, founder Phil Askey said. “It will be fantastic to be able to expand and build on that without compromising our quality or independence. With the support and resources of Amazon we can achieve this.”

Phil: Today marks an exciting milestone in the history of dpreview.com, everyone here is very much looking forward to being able to do more with Amazon’s help. We’re aiming to expand our product coverage and deliver new site features for our readers and our daily community.

Interesting. I’m a massive fan of DPReview and find that their combination of news and excellent reviews is persuasive and compelling. I never feed my obsessive compulsion for digital cameras without checking with them and their RSS feed has a prominent and much-visited place in my reader.

From Amazon’s perspective it’s also interesting. Now that they “own” shopping on the web (in some categories, at least 😉 ) and also pioneering on-site recommendations, it’s interesting to see them moving “outside their brand” into an ‘acquisition’ model.

In buying DPReview Amazon is buying the rights to the ‘watering hole’: the place that all animals big and small gather. This will add to Amazon’s rather patchy and price-led digicam credibility, but could also form a model for ‘perimeter expertise’ – niche, expert, deep sites that focus on contents and reviews and lead to a later purchase.

The business model for DPReview (affiliate sales commission on the models they review) will morph easily into the “buy this on Amazon now” approach. There will also likely be room for specialist photography retailers to advertise as now or – goodness! – get a Marketplace@Amazon retailer account, even at Amazon’s high commission rates.

I wish the DPR team all the best and will continue to read with interest for as long as the editorial remains excellent and unbiased. We can now start scanning the horizon for other possible targets for Amazon, while adding them to the club of purchasers of niche businesses.