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Ported the page over to our new ‘Digital Goliath’ design September, 2023
Gear Patrol Traffic & SEO
Using first and third-party data in our research
When I studied 10,000 affiliate-populated search results, GearPatrol were one of only a handful of independent websites in the top 100 domains overall.
(Though I did have to note that digital goliath Hearst – behind brands like Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Elle – own a minority stake in the company).
GearPatrol founder Eric Yang has built the company into a media powerhouse since founding it back in 2007. He also wrote for the site as recently as December of last year, though his author profile only shows a single post, which may be a bug in their theme template.
As part of the Gear Patrol’s announcement of DP Review, they wrote:
Together, Gear Patrol and DPReview will reach over 7 million product enthusiasts globally across digital, print, email and social channels, making the tandem one of the largest product-centric media organizations in operation today.
According to Similarweb, DPreview receives 6.2M visits monthly, and GearPatrol receives 5.8M.
Those numbers may be lower than typical however for DPReview, since I imagine a lot of people will have stopped visiting the website directly after they announced they were shutting down.
As I alluded to above with how well GearPatrol rank at times, both sites have relied heavily on search traffic over the years. It will be interesting to see if Eric makes any big technical changes to the DPReview site based on what he’s learned doing so well with his original brand.
Regular readers of DPReview will be happy to know that their main editorial, tech and business teams will be staying with the site.
I don’t want to speculate on finances involved when I really don’t know anything and nothing was shared (to my knowledge) but you have to imagine if the site was pulling in a healthy profit then Amazon wouldn’t have looked to shut it down in the first place.
With that in mind, I would expect some changes to the frequency of publishing new articles or the percentage of product reviews you’ll find mixed in with news updates, but time will tell on that front.
Similarly, one thing GearPatrol look to have done well is include featured stories representing their sponsors in a way that isn’t off-putting. Here’s an example from their homepage:
I wouldn’t be surprised if some design tweaks are made to DPReview to highlight the same.
Gear Patrol Network
Changes are made here every month
We currently track 2 sites for Gear Patrol:
In March of 2023, Amazon-owned digital photography site, DPReview, announced they were shutting down.
The move came amid some restructuring at Amazon ($AMZN), with DPReview general manager Scott Everett saying “the site will be locked, with no further updates made after April 10th, 2023.”
Following the announcement, a lot of public interest was shown in acquiring the site. Gear Patrol founder Eric Yang was the winner.
