> People are buying Chinese action cameras in such droves? Everyone I know with an action camera owns a GoPro.

At least in my circles of people who are relatively well to do, yes, quite a few bought Chinese knockoffs on online retailers like Amazon. Hell, when you search GoPro on Amazon Canada a Chinese knockoff is the first result and has over a thousand more reviews than the actual GoPro!

You live in a rich environment where people can afford gopros - where I'm from(Poland) for a lot of people even the cheapest Session camera is 1/2 of your monthly salary. I've got some friends who work as C++ programmers, and for them the Black 6 is 2/5 of their salary. It's just completely unaffordable for vast majority of people, but there's plenty of Chinese knock-offs around, re-branded by local companies(Manta for example), and those sell a lot. If you go to an electronics store looking for an action cam, 95% of their stock is gopro knock offs, if you want a GoPro it's not that easy to find.

If you own a GoPro, you probably have had to buy a second one. I personally do not know of a single GoPro owner that has not damaged/lost/whatever their camera. After you buy the first one at full price today, do you buy a second one or go out and buy something else? It used to be that you could only get another GoPro, so GoPro sales looked good. Now, for $70, why not try the something else? Based on sales, looks like a lot of people are choosing the latter.

The only reason I own a 4 is because it was bought for me. Otherwise, the price point was high enough, and my old 2 was "good enough", that I just didn't see the point to upgrading that often. It's not going to compete with my phone upgrades. And I suspect repeat customers would have to be a significant portion of their business sustainability.

I imagine now or sometime last year would have been about when I naturally would have upgraded, and I suspect if I had seen a ton of reviews favoring cheaper models from competitors, I probably would have jumped ship.

That's why I said would have. I don't know whether this has yet occurred to a significant degree or not. I just can't imagine any investor confidence in something that's so easy clones by generics, especially when people were using the trademarked name for the general product category.

The Yi 4K+ action cam ... https://store.yitechnology.com/

i assume you mean 4k60?

the yi 4k+ also does that but no it isn't waterproof by itself, however you can see the hero 6 got a $100 price cut because of the stiff competition