Photobucket And Their Greed

Photobucket has decided that you now have to pay $400 a year to have your images show up anywhere except their pathetically slow ad riddled site.

Effective 5 minutes ago photobucket will no longer be allowed in new posts.

I saw this coming and that's why I have been pushing for everyone to upload here. I even upped the upload size limit to waaaayyyy more than necessary and have a new disk (4 times the size) scheduled for install on the server for just uploaded images. Now we have thousands of useless topics.

This is what's showing up for your images now if you use Photobucket and haven't paid the ransom to the greedy kidnappers.

Wow, bummer. I think all of mine were uploaded, but I know that other Stamp websites are going to have real problems with this. Thanks for staying on top of things.

It sorta like the hostage cyber attacks. Pay up or lose all the reposts.

Well it is great the Bobby allows us to upload our images to SCF. It is so easy to do, and even has the optimizer.

That is one of the reasons why I am a SCF subscribing supporter - I think everyone should be the same.

Some ebay sellers are none to pleased either.

Ha! I was a supporter. I guess my period expired.

Just expired on the 10th. But I got your new one. Thank you!

I find it hard to understand the outrage, but maybe I'm missing something. They offer a service that has costs, probably ever-increasing costs. If too few convert to paying customers, they cannot cover their costs. With third party hosting, as the internet has exploded, they are probably serving your images to third party sites millions of more times than they expected. Too few of these users, who are driving millions of retrieval operations, have converted to paying customers at a sufficient level. Therefore that aspect of their business has become unsustainable on a free basis. They are simply reacting to evolution of the market. If they misjudged the price, likely they will lower it - tell them what lower amount you'll pay. But I find it hard to characterize it as greed. They're trying to run a sustainable system - as SCF does in soliciting donations.

People can always set up their own servers to do the same thing at their cost - but no, in the internet millenium, we want someone else to pay for all our services. Not every service can be ad-supported at a level that sustains the business.

The owners of this forum as well as many other forum owners made a choice at some point to allow photobucket images (and advertising) - both opened certain vulnerabilities to market change.

BeeSee: well said! I just signed up for the recurring monthly plan.

Terry

Good on you Tlmcca!

The admin of StampBoards spammed me last night (one email would have been fine, I really didn't need five of the same emails) comparing Photobucket to the devil's spawn. He mentions legal actions and other such nonsense. Exactly how would a legal action be used? 'Gee, this free service caused me damage when they decided to try to make money?' Or perhaps it might be 'I suffered emotional harm and now have PTSD because I can no longer suck free services from an online image hosting company'? Or maybe a Class Action where they force a company to provide a free service forever?

You get what you pay for. What's next? Users getting upset that Google is searching every one of their Gmail emails for key words so they can target ads to them?
Don

Just checked some older posts on SCF...images are still there.

I also got multiple emails from stampboards.

Seems my PB uploads here, and on other stamp boards are effected, but many others aren't. Do I have a post-it note stuck on my back?