Re: Photobucket hosting
I agree that is a temp fix and will eventually be disabled. But I imagine things are a bit chaotic at PB headquarters and I'm sure a lot of their staff sees the writing on the wall and have jumped ship.
Since I've been thinking about it for a while now and this is a rant thread, here is my take on what went down.
If you've ever worked for any kind of big corporation then you know that no large decision is made without many meetings and discussions. I imagine they had several large meetings to brainstorm new ideas to bring in revenue. The days of grandmas clicking those stupid ads and earning them money are over. I'm sure a lot of creative ideas were brought up and praised by leadership. Those ideas were probably legit, came from grunt employees and managers and were discussed at length.
Then another set of meetings took place with only senior executives and owners. They were in agreement that all the other ideas were **** and not going to line their pockets so they could continue buying exotic sports cars and high priced hookers. A new idea was brought up in this meeting that everyone agreed would likely line their pockets but destroy the company. It was discussed and no one was happy about it. But they all suffer an affliction that affects many; greed. Greed was enough for them to accept that in a couple of years photobucket will be sold off for peanuts and they will be lambasted by the public in the interim. And they all probably felt bad about it until they cashed that big check.
From Google:
According to Photobucket, the service caters for over 100 million users and hosts over 15 billion images.Jul 5, 2017
1% of their user base is one million people. If 1% paid 400$ to keep their accounts active until they find some other solution photobucket pockets 400 million. Say 100 million goes to operational expenses that exist and to keep the lights on until so many users have left it gets sold off. The owners divided the remaining 300 mil and move on to the next startup, probably asking for seed money from angels and investment groups. I understand it is not this simple but at the end of the day they are a private company and they answer only to themselves if no laws were broken. And this assumes
only 1% were desperate enough to pay the 400. If you read the news there were a lot of people who have blogs and other sites that they make their living off of and used photobucket to host their media. For them I'm sure it sucked but was an easy decision to pay the ransom money and continue making money on their site. If you're making $2000 a month on your site and its lose that and rebuild your site somewhere else or pay $400 for the year and keep making money, I think most of use are going to pay. At least the first year while you migrate elsewhere.
My reasoning for this is "why"? What did they hope to accomplish for the business? There are an infinite number of photo hosting sites out there that are free and do not have a reputation for spam and malware ads popping up on their site. So what could they hope to have gained by charging many times more than any other hosting site out there to store a few pictures. Anything related to "keeping our customer base" is off the table. Anyone with a brain knows that this move did nothing but earn the hatred of the internet as a whole. So what could they possibly have hoped to accomplish for the business? Nothing. This move did nothing to bring in new customers, better their product or solidify the future of photobucket. The brand is ruined and I doubt will ever recover.
Sadly, this is only the beginning with the demise of net neutrality.
Rant over.
-Clint
