Amazon Buys dpreview.com
1:29 pm May 14th, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
Barron’s is reporting that internet retail giant Amazon just bought dpreview.com. In case you are not familiar with dpreview.com, it is a wildly popular digital photography review site that does an excellent job with it’s reviews, but is not nearly as approachable as something like Cnet.
Over that dpreview they are saying that the site pulls down something like 120 million pages a month so this must have been a huge deal. That number sounds really high, but in order to interest Amazon you have to be doing something right.
It will be interesting to see how this partnership progresses. Up to this point Amazon was not in the content business, but there are a lot of ways that they can use the content from a site like dpreview, such as when selling their digital cameras and they don’t want to rely on user reviews. Buying the site just for this would have been an extreme measure, so there is surely more, such as replacing dpreviews retailer affiliate banners (like Shopping.com or Pricegrabber) with their own.
Anyway, it’s a big thing for a content producer like dpreview to get bought, especially by Amazon. I think it’s especially interesting considering how Tom’s Hardware was sold just a month or two ago… not that the two are directly related, but we are seeing some really interesting things in the industry right now…
