Photobucket

[BanzaiCat]

I deleted mine and told them what a wonderful job they've done at ham-fisting their way to a happy customer base.

[Con]

I deleted mine and told them what a wonderful job they've done at ham-fisting their way to a happy customer base.

For sure one thing photobucket excels at is fisting their customers.

[Toonces]

Not sure who their director is, but man alive was this a stupid thing to do.  Pure and utter business suicide.

#covfefe

[BanzaiCat]

Botofucket kinda did screw the pooch. They shouldn't have been quite so draconian.

[Toonces]

Thing is, this is the easiest decision evar.  Just move to another free site.  Flickr must be jumping for mother-loving joy today.

$400?  YGTBSM.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

No idea what their business model is now.  I was busy deleting all my photos from the Bucket when I started getting pop up ads from them offering some kind of lame mail order products.   Do they really think they're going to compete with Amazon?

[mirth]

This is their business model now.

https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2017/07/07/free-service-isunsustainable-in-an-age-of-online.html

[bayonetbrant]

you're going to start seeing more and more of this on the web

services weren't ever really "free" - you were the product to be sold to the advertisers
But as the advertisers start to realize the ROI just isn't there, are people really going to be willing to pay for services that were previously "free" (ie, paid for by someone else)

That's a much bigger discussion for elsewhere, but over the next 15 years, there's a lot of media consumption decisions that will come down to "are you willing to pay for it?"

[Toonces]

I totally get where they're coming from.  But $400 is simply ridiculous.  I mean, if you're going to start charging for something that was previously free, start small.  I probably would have been willing to pony up $10 a year.  That's almost trivial.  But $400 is going to drive every single casual user away.  I can't believe early results are "encouraging."  My bet: photobucket either rolls back to its earlier model, or completely folds, within a year.

[BanzaiCat]

I agree, I completely understand where they're coming from but they really could have approached this from a much better standpoint than the whole 'ransom demand' thing.

The rise of ad blockers is a vicious cycle with advertising...more ads and more ad versatility in getting around ad blockers, then more sophisticated ad blockers, then more ads, and on and on and on. I'm now using Fair Ad blocker on Chrome, and it works brilliantly...when I last logged into Photobucket it blocked 50 or so ads. I mean, Jesus Christ, people. 50?!? Phuck you and your ads.

I totally get advertising and how it works, but I absolutely and utterly despise it in all forms with few exceptions (gaming being one of them that I am all about of course).

[bayonetbrant]

I agree that the price is crazy.
$10/yr reasonable?  Probably.

But where's the dropoff in between those numbers?
$20/yr?
$5/mo?
One-time fee of $200?

there's a lot of ways to juggle those numbers, but where are people's thresholds going to be?
And I suspect the thresholds will slowly rise over the next 5 years.

[BanzaiCat]

Since there are so many free services out there, I'm going to jump around and partake of them as long as I can. As will, I imagine, a few million other pissed-off PB users. Ex-users, I should say.

Giving a 400/year option kind of sucks. They should have tiered it to something more digestible - say a lower-end plan for five bucks a month, with options for other tiers that cost a tad more for each one. On top of everything, they should have started warning their user base months in advance of doing so. Unless I/we missed something somewhere?

[JudgeDredd]

My beef is not that they're charging. It's not even how much they are charging (by the way that P500 link is not the only offer - I believe you can go Ad-Free and be able to get 3rd party hosting).

My beef is with them pretty much deleting my posting history when I made those posts on the basis that I was able to do so. That MUST be illegal?

Anyway - they can f*** off. I wouldn't pay them a cent and even if they were to do this as a quick money grab and reverse their decision, I'd still dump them like a hot brick.

[bbmike]

Wait until they start requiring dongles.  :-"

[mirth]

They're really targeting the people who are using the service to post lots of pics to eBay, etsy, and so forth. Those people are running businesses and getting free image hosting. Those are the users who can afford the $400 per year. And even if they get a small percentage of the total user base to pay, that could be some serious cash.

I don't think they care about the casual users who can't afford the $400/yr. Stay or go, they're not going to be revenue generating for Photobucket.

I don't agree with how Photobucket has handled it, but I do understand it. They are spending lots of money on free image hosting and not making more than a fraction of it back from advertising. They either need to come up with new revenue streams or close the company.