I’ve been letting the Photobucket drama play out over the past week without much commentary – after the initial hit, I just wanted to see what they would do in response to the criticism lobbied against them, and the results are about what I expected: Photobucket isn’t changing anything, beyond allowing one particular type of hosting account to continue to be hotlinkable until the end of 2018, so long as the account is still active and in good standing.
I guess that’s good for those users, but what about the rest of the people who use the service? Photobuckets comment can pretty much be summed up as “pay the $400 or go somewhere else” which many users are indeed doing.
There are plenty of people saying that no one should be getting mad about this, that they have had a “free ride” for years now, and while they can move to other sites, those too will eventually reach the same issues Photobucket did in that, quite simply, the “free with ads” model doesn’t work when something like 75% of the images being served are being linked to on other websites, where Photobucket ads aren’t shown!
I would say there are ways to solve this but those are complex to explain and aren’t the subject of this article anyway. The point is, image hosting isn’t necessarily cheap at the scales Photobucket works on, I’m not stupid, but to hold people’s images hostage in such a way still doesn’t set right when this really does break a good chunk of content, and make quite a bit of work for website owners to clean up the mess, so to speak.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the cost wasn’t absurd – $400 for a year of hosting? That’s insane! My own server costs a little over 1/4th of that, and the one annoyance I have with that is a logistic limit on the total number of files on the server, an issue inherent to the server itself, not an issue of bandwidth or other complications.
I would love to see the actual statistics on what the “average” user actually uses data wise over a month – perhaps a more reasonable tiered bracket system? I recall back in the day people had bandwidth limits and images would stop showing after a limit was reached. How about charge along those bracket, and eliminate “free” hotlinking, but otherwise allow small amounts, for less prominent people to host images at affordable rates?
Or, even better, just charge a more reasonable flat rate and see how that goes for a time – the odds are Photobucket would actually get more people signing up if the cost was reasonable, which works pretty well for Netflix, for example – granted they have multiple revenue streams, but the principle remains that people are more apt to pay, let’s say, $10 a month for image hosting than try to raise $400 for a year! $33 a month, what the math works out to for the hotlinking capable plan over a year period) is a little much, I would think, for some people to justify for image hosting, but again, that’s just what I think.
I don’t know, I still say a solution could have been found before this happened, and could have been implemented years ago, but it’s too late to change that now. I mean, they could, but it would still take work on the end user’s part…
Maybe I’ll write about those ideas in another article, but for now, I’ll leave you with the Photobucket blog updates on their policy changes on July 6th. It’s worth checking out.
http://blog.photobucket.com/please-review-latest-changes-photobucket/
http://blog.photobucket.com/photobucket-launches-unlimited-3rd-party-hosting-plan/
I’m still under the illusion that the only reason they’re charging the $400 a year is because they just sat there and sat there and just let it get THIS bad and that they’re THAT desperate to recoup all the money they’ve lost from as few people as possible. As I’ve stated elsewhere, this took YEARS to unfold and eventually happen. This didn’t happen overnight.
If you do the math, if they were to get at least 10,000 customers on board for this (at this point, I’m being purely hypothetical), that’s $4 million. 100,000 would obviously be $40 million. The $400 per year makes SLIGHTLY more sense at this point…SLIGHTLY. Whether it works or not is another matter entirely.
Man, i hope, that at this price the customer service would be impeccable… Anyway, i never used photobucket, so i can’t really comment impartially as i’m not part of their aimed customer base!
I never did use them either, but I think that puts us in a fine position to look at the situation neutrally – we are still affected as now our own forum and website browsing might be spoiled by blocked images, and as users of the internet we still have our opinions as much as anyone, right?
Anyway, their fate seem similar to the fate that myspace got… Once people gonna have retrieved their stock they won’t pay the 400$ twice mostly by seeing all the alternative that currently exist on the web… But at the same time, to be truthful, since 2010, i rarely seen website still using photobucket… (whatever the amount of account they had, pretty much sure only very few were really active in 2017… But hey i’m maybe wrong, i’m maybe saying that because i’m come from a french speaking world, where pretty much nobody ever heard about photobucket…)