In March, DPReview announced that parent company Amazon was shutting it down, and the photography world entered a dual state of shock and disbelief.
For 25 years, DPReview had served as a consistently reliable and authoritative voice on photography gear. But photography enthusiasts didn’t just go to DPReview to drool over Canon’s newest lens or compare Sony and Nikon’s face-detection autofocusing capabilities. It was an active forum where we (yes, I’m one of those photography people) could hang out and geek out.
That such an extensive archive of photography knowledge and the strong community it had fostered was being banished to the abyss — the plan wasn’t even to archive it but to switch it off completely — was a blow to many. The announcement on DPReview garnered over 5,000 comments, and people took to social media to share their thoughts about Amazon’s decision.
But that soon changed when Gear Patrol — which offers advice, how-tos and product reviews, but not specific to cameras — came to the rescue. It finalized a deal to purchase DPReview from Amazon for an undisclosed sum in June 2023. I was excited to speak to Eric Yang, Gear Patrol’s founder and CEO, to find out what motivated the purchase and what he learned from the process.
Authority and community
Yang was driven to bring DPReview under the Gear Patrol aegis for several reasons, and while it made business sense, there was a personal motivation there, too.
“It’s a business, so it’s not a totally altruistic endeavor,” Yang told me. “But DPReview is very meaningful to me. It’s meaningful to a lot of people, I think, who have grown up on the internet.”
DPReview is home to an extraordinary knowledge base that Yang was reluctant to see disappear. But this knowledge base doesn’t reside just in its vast archive of reviews, buying guides, editorials and advice; it’s also in the strong community that this expertise fostered. For so many people, DPReview was a safe place to express opinions, ask for advice, or just be photography geeks. All of this, together, was valuable to Yang.
A natural fit
Yang describes Gear Patrol as a place that empowers people to pursue their interests and passions with confidence, which is why he believes that Gear Patrol and DPReview are a natural fit. “We want to help people have the knowledge that they need to pursue their particular passions in the best possible way,” Yang said.
Gear Patrol loves to call what it does “product journalism,” but in more general terms, it’s a review site. The result is, of course, a site full of enduring, evergreen content. As long as a certain product is sold, people will be looking for reviews of it. In the case of photography equipment, that sales period — if you include the secondhand market — is very long indeed.
For Yang, DPReview and Gear Patrol are different boats, rowing in the same direction toward better products and product knowledge for enthusiasts. “We imagine there will be a culture shift only in that we’re excited to all learn from each other,” Yang said. “DPReview is excited to be part of a media entity that’s really focused on product journalism. We all speak the same language.”
Apart from this being Gear Patrol’s first acquisition, it was dealing with a corporate behemoth and a limited time frame to make things work. It was an intense period for Yang and his team.
Buying a site from a company that had already announced it was shutting it down rather than selling it? Yeah, that sounds challenging. The timing had to work out, and the financing had to come together; and ultimately, it’s a strange situation to try to convince a seller that wasn’t going to sell to part ways with a property.
What happens next?
Acquisitions and mergers usually mean change, and they can be hard to pull off, even in the best of times. Yang says that 10 members of the DPReview team will join the 50-odd existing staff at Gear Patrol. However, the site won’t be folded in with the GP brand for the foreseeable future: It will continue to exist as an independent property.
The hope is that the learning experience doesn’t just go one way. Yang is keen to learn from the DPReview team and bring their knowledge and experience to Gear Patrol. Among other things, the DPReview team has a software team that’s experienced in building tools focusing especially on understanding cameras and photography. That underlying technology may translate to other topics, too.
But beyond the industry knowledge, the DPReview community is a key area for Yang.
“We have the opportunity to grow that again, invest resources in it, and make it exciting, continue to make it a thriving environment that can bring people back, into a place that I feel like people will understand is safe,” Yang said. “Having these sort of enthusiast-minded, safe spaces, digital gathering places is really exciting. And I think that’s one of the biggest parts of DPReview that I think is really exciting.”
Yang also anticipates that DPReview can provide a template for expansion into other enthusiast categories within Gear Patrol. “The web continues to be a very powerful tool, and a powerful medium, and for reaching what we believe are really authentic, topically, authoritative niches where enthusiasts can be reached,” Yang said. “We think that DPReview presents what we hope is the first of several templates, several ideas in the future, as we expand into other areas of enthusiast categories.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean that Gear Patrol is looking to make other acquisitions right now. Rather, it is focused on doing the absolute best with what it has. It doesn’t want distractions and it wants DPReview to get settled in Seattle and find its feet again.
“We don’t make a lot of whiplash-y types of moves. There’s just a lot of things that we need to work through for DPReview first, but there’s lots of things ahead.”
Boring is good
A phrase that crops up a few times in my discussion with Yang is how boring is good. Does that feel a little bit disappointing? Maybe, but he has a serious point, and it’s worth paying attention to it.
The first time he mentions boring is with respect to how Gear Patrol raised the funds to buy DPReview. He was unable to go into too much detail, as you’d expect, but he did say that the company did not raise venture capital; instead it used a combination of cash flow and a little bit of debt to get together the money for the purchase.
For the Gear Patrol team, this unexciting route to raising funds is key to what it stands for. Sure, big equity deals can mean splashy headlines and lots of attention, but in giving away a bit of your company, you give away a bit of your authority, too. Raising funds the “boring” way enables Gear Patrol to retain its editorial independence, to remain focused on its core product and not have to chase growth at all costs, and to ensure resilience is built into the company. Boring in this context means authenticity and reliability, which is exactly what Gear Patrol’s readers expect from it.
“We feel like that allows us to continue to make independent editorial choices,” Yang said. “It allows us to make a more measured growth, which I think is very important to the characteristic of the way that we like to grow. . . . It’s important for many companies to build resiliency, and that resiliency, and not paper chasing and scale at all costs, allows brands to stay authentic to who they are. And it also allows them to, you know, weather future transient economic downturns like we’re in right now.”
Yang also talked about Gear Patrol being not only financially boring, but also having its focus as a company being boring. While I know precisely what he means, perhaps boring does a disservice to Gear Patrol’s aim to be consistent.
“Internally as a business, we’re a pretty boring company, but in a good way,” Yang said. “We just stay focused on not trying to be all things to everyone. We’re trying to focus on the audience that we’re trying to reach. And I think that if you can, if you can pursue these niches and do them really authentically, then there are good businesses to be had there.”
If boring means building a company with a clear product vision and a deep understanding of your core customer, then I think that DPReview should be in safe hands with Gear Patrol.