LEDE ON
It feels a bit like Back to the Future at the moment, as some Web sites are deciding to just talk about future products, such as Sony’s announcement that they’re working on the Rialto 65, a new medium format option for the Venice video camera. But that’s a next-year camera. Or perhaps “Why No Canon R7 II This Year?” Canon’s top crop sensor model is now apparently also a next-year camera. Several sites have even published a bizzare rumor that Viltrox will release a camera with the Z mount, accompanied by AI-slop photos. Fujifilm users meanwhile are busy speculating on what new image sensor they’ll see next year when new X bodies start regenerating again.
It appears that any drop in real news stories simply turns the talk forward to speculation and conspiracy theories about future products. Next up: re-evaluate the past products.
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News, Sort of
Photography for Sale
We now have CaptureOne being actively shopped to potential buyers, GoPro saying they’d be open to being purchased to avoid bankruptcy, plus Leica being potentially shopped to Chinese buyers. Mark Roberts appears to be headed to Australia after a brief trip home to the UK after Nikon jettisoned them. If you’re to believe the rumors, Nikon itself will be purchased by an eyeglass company. Sony users are currently wary of another Vaio-type jettison from the mothership and seem to talk about that prospect near constantly.
The camera industry built itself for well over a 100 million camera units a year. Reality these days is more like 7 million units, plus another 10+ million if you include action and small sensor vlogging cameras, though those are now dominated by DJI, Insta360, and the covert-DJI company Xtra. The general approach in Japan in recent years was to take the remaining volume upscale (e.g. many more dollars per unit sold), which kept everyone's coffers full for a time, but the industry is now faced with two critical questions:
- Is it possible to find entirely new customers (e.g. the young) and get them buying dedicated cameras in meaningful volume?
- How often will someone who spent US$2000+ on their last body upgrade purchase another?
The answer to the second question is starting to appear in the latest CIPA data: full frame mirrorless is running only about 90% in units and 97% in value for the first four months of the year. So the answer to #2 may be “not often enough.” Thus #1 is going to be the ride or die category the camera makers need to maximize. That bodes for less expensive crop sensor cameras, so that doesn’t solve the revenue/profit problem. So what’s problem #3? (Nikon seems to think that for them it’s more Cinema cameras.)
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Commentary
The Rise of the Adblocker Takedown Requests
Four photography sites I visit regularly now complain that I have adblockers on. I don’t, though I do use strict browser permissions and when I travel am on a VPN. One major site isn’t just using a dickover to protest my “adblocking” now, but forces me to click on the full-page dickover every time it appears (which is every time I visit) while claiming “we value your time here.” Yeah, not so much, fellas.
Dickover is a term invented by John Gruber (daringfireball.com), one of the earlier bloggers and inventor of Markdown, which many of us use in our Web production. It refers to things that pop-up over the content you actually want to see.
It seems that the whole world now wants to show you ads, and while doing so, collect information about you that will be sold to others so that you can be shown even more ads. As you’re aware, I’d been disengaging from participating in this for some time, culminating in me removing all ads and trackers at the start of this year from all my sites.
I worry that the whole trendline is also ageist, as well. Apparently the young have no trepidition about being tracked and promoted to at every opportunity, apparently because the only job that’s available to them now is “influencer." But we oldsters remember why that isn’t such a good idea and try to keep our browsing private. That has particularly heavy implications on photography sites, because the camera industry is highly weighted towards selling to the older crowd, particularly when some new cameras are over US$6000 in price and lenses sometimes top US$10,000. Thus, photography Web sites that think continuing the ad naseum ad parade is going to pay their costs are probably wrong. Unless, I suppose, they simply pivot to cover DJI Osmos and Insta360 cameras, which are being gobbled up faster than mirrorless ones these days.
It used to be that media had a Chinese Wall (firewall) between advertising and content. These days, it’s a Chinese Firehose, and it’s being shoved down users’ throats. Meanwhile AI (and search) is scraping the public data from those sites and serving up the same material, with confabulations, and claiming that it’s helping you.
We’re at a critical juncture with photography, it seems. The collapse of one thing leads to a collapse of another, which reinforces the collapse of the first thing. We need active, useful photography sites that aren’t just ad platforms or suckers for AI scraping. A few have gone hybrid: subscription removes ads or adds material the AI engines won’t see and serve up. But be careful, affiliate link relationships still abound on many of those sites, and where money changes hands like that, you’re still the product being sold.