The hard work began to pay off, we saw our visitor figures skyrocket; 3 million page views per month after a year, 11 million after two years, today we serve around 140 million pages per month to over 7 million unique visitors (or about 24 million visitor sessions if you prefer).  In 2004 having done virtually a hundred hours a week for five years I decided getting some help may be a good idea and was extremely lucky to hire someone with a long standing digital camera review pedigree; Simon Joinson.  In 2006 I was approached by Amazon to discuss potential acquisition, for me, and for the site, this was actually perfect timing, we were massively resource limited, needing a new office, more staff, more development and new infrastructure.  In the eighteen months since the deal was signed the way we work has changed completely, we now have a large dedicated office and studio, totally new server infrastructure (hosted in the same facility as Amazon) as well as four camera reviews, a lens reviewer, a studio assistant / news author and two (soon to be three) developers.

Naturally I'm very proud of how far we've come, but I am also aware (especially in tough times such as these) that the need to constantly innovate and change never goes away, proof of this can be seen in our recent group test series which is a totally new format to dpreview but has been delivered to perfection by Simon and the team.  You should also expect to see a lot of new development next year, not least of which our new Challenges system which we'll be launching into public beta on 29th December.