Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Photobucket

I had not got any of these so far and was wondering if I had some different setting etc then yesterday the email arrived and mine went pop as well.

Slash and burn here I come.

I am expecting Box and Dropbox to start doing the same soon.

There must have been a bad harvest in the cloudydiscstorage crop last year driving up prices !

I'm waiting, with baited breath.
When they come for me my response will be to delete everything and close down.

What's next? Facebook demanding $100 a year?
Why not, they have a captive market?
I'll bet there are a lot of owners of "free" software watching to see how it works out for Photobucket.

No they don't! There are lots of more modern rivals. I don't think any of my kids use Facebook anymore apart from to communicate with their ageing parents.

I always thought that the give-it-away model was never going to work and I'm quite prepared to pay to have images hosted that I can use on other sites. Photobucket's problem is that they have priced their service way above the competition.

~iw

In the background the issue is that advertising has become more intelligent at last. VC funding and free is under pressure as well. It would appear that reality is taking grip and profit has rejoined the dictionary.

People are becoming more focused on how their advertising budget is spent at last. In the early days you just threw your money at Google and let it handle it. This has led to rates going down and less income for sites like Photobucket.

So the choice is to pay or accelerate advertising or go pop and close up. It will happen on more things. The Internet has driven a total "its free" attitude. We benefit from it on TM as someone is kind enough to underwrite it. I cannot remember when I last paid for an App on my iPhone and so "in app purchases" is becoming the scourge there are well.

Ain't nothin free worth avin as my uncle used to say.

They won't charge you - you should be charging them, under FB's T&C's they own the rights on anything you put through their site, you don't own copyright on any of your data they can use it with impunity.

Facebook is a data play. They sell their data on a CPM basis as do all of the major players. Facebook also have ads on their site too....

Data is the new oil and location will be the new cookie as marketing becomes more geo local/hyper local.

Google is an advertising company - they sell their data in a vast array of guises, from SEO solutions through to straight CPM.

As I said recently when talking about this 'when did you last get a bill from Google?' - and yet we use it multiple times a day.

I see Photobucket made a couple of announcements on Thursday:

PHOTOBUCKET LAUNCHES UNLIMITED 3RD PARTY HOSTING PLAN

Quote:

John Corpus, CEO of Photobucket, said that historically the company “relied heavily on advertising revenue but that major industry-wide changes in the advertising space have greatly impacted Photobucket, including the rise of ad blockers and the Company’s explosion of 3rd party hosting that generates zero revenue.”

“This model is no longer sustainable,” Corpus added.

and this one...

Please review the latest changes at Photobucket.

includes this point:

What users are affected by the changes to our 3rd Party Hosting policies?

Moving forward, new and legacy free account users will NOT have third party hosting available.

If you were a Plus Account subscriber in good standing as of June 1, 2017, you will continue to have all the privileges you have enjoyed including 3rd Party Hosting until December 31, 2018 as long as you maintain your subscription.

So I guess Peter J and anyone else with a subscription can look forward to 18 months of continued image hosting.

~iw

Ian,

Thanks for that.

I can understand their logic: I just wonder why they didn't make the announcement earlier.

For what I pay, worth it and to be honest, $5.00 a month wouldn't hurt. Perhaps by the end of next year they will have refined their business model with cheaper options for a more limited storage and perhaps file size restriction for downloading?

And perhaps it will be too late.

...yes absolutely too late. I appreciate that the free accounts were not economically viable but it's hard to imagine a less effective way of converting free account holders into paying ones.