Sites like these are almost like living fossils. They evolved in a completely different environment than today, and therefore nothing like them can evolve again today. When it first started, DP review was just doing what plenty of other blogs were doing in terms of longform, informationally dense content, because when the founders looked around at similar stuff to compare from that's what they saw, iterated on, and created.

Today, the environment is different. If you want to get an audience on your stuff today, you aren't going to make a dpreview or a kenrockwell.com, because when you look around you don't see that stuff very much. You see seoified crap articles, and information drip fed over 20 mins on youtube with advertising in between. Such is the game today and how it must be played if you are to receive any views at all and get that initial userbase.

- Great thing gets created by passionate, independent team

- Thing becomes popular

- Megacorp takes notice and offers eye-popping amount of money to acquire thing (or doesn't have to because the founders are in over their heads anyway with how popular thing has become)

- Megacorp shuts down thing because it is a distraction from their other things which are printing unimaginable amounts of money

- Rinse and repeat

Consolidation of the entire internet into the hands of a few megacorps isn't just a problem because of their outsized influence.

people wont pay for good when mediocre is there for free