The Fall of Photobucket

So this news is a few days old, but I myself only just noticed this. All images embedded on Photobucket now show up like this:

Photobucket has suddenly pulled the rug out from underneath all of its users who uploaded images by making us suddenly fork over $399 a year in order to keep showing all of the images we've embedded onto 3rd-party sites. They gave us no prior notice of this, for those of you wondering. All of those images I've embedded on these forums and other places with Photobucket for the last 6 years, are now suddenly broken. Some users have been using this service much longer than I have, and have been hosting much more than I have. I did begin to notice within the last couple of years that their site had gotten incredibly overrun with ads, which I knew was a bad sign, but I wouldn't have suspected that they would do something this insane. I'm a bit surprised that I'm surprised.

A lot of users have decided to leave Photobucket, and that's what I plan to do as soon as I get all my images migrated. I don't know who in the right mind would decide to pay up unless it was an emergency situation. Photobucket has the right to do this since it's their business, but this was a really stupid move they made. It will be interesting to see what happens to this long-standing image hosting site once the dust settles.

 

honestly i'm surprised anybody uses photobucket post-2010
there are several much better services for image hosting

 

honestly i'm surprised anybody uses photobucket post-2010

I have been using it for near a decade (next month would have marked 10 years since I started using it).

In those 10 years I used the service and even recommended it because I was sick of seeing broken imageshack images and photobucket images generally never disappeared. I was happy to deal with the clunky interface for the sake of image uptime. At least not until now.

I've decided to host my own shit from now on.

I should point out that you can still download images from the photobucket interface. Click on "library" after logging in.

 

RIP in peace DT's_face.jpg

 

I guess my luck just sucks. Back around 2009, I used MegaUpload as my main file host. You can guess how that went. Around that time, I also started using ImageShack as my image host, and when that went boom, I switched to PhotoBucket.

I just can't catch a break :|

 

RIP in peace DT's_face.jpg

Most but not all heroes die!

(Although this might be lower quality than the original, it’s hard to say...)

 

No it was always that small because my webcam had/has extra software that's supposed to be installed and I didn't do that properly at the time

 

honestly i'm surprised anybody uses photobucket post-2010
there are several much better services for image hosting

Same. I've always hated how if you tried to copy and paste the direct image link in a new tab it would actually take you to a full photobucket page instead of just the image.
Have you guys ever tried imgur? It's pretty good for linking images for 3rd party sites and what I'd recommend everyone use, at least for now.

Well thank god I don't use it. I always use Imgur these days, and previously Flickr for very specific reasons. Hopefully both of them will see how it ruins PhotoBucket and decide not to follow suit in fear of similar repocussions.
As for PhotoBucket, I hope that they completely lose their user-base and fall to their knees.

I hope they don't follow suit, but honestly, was photobucket making any money from how they were being used? When sites let you link/host images directly like this it's more of just a bandwidth drain than anything else. So I can't really blame photobucket for this decision, since they probably actually want to lose all those users who were using their hosting services for free due to the costs associated with it. I don't know if their new marketing plan will really make them any money either but at least it won't be sending them into the red? Sites like imgur at least have a sizeable userbase that browses the site itself, which means they can recover money from advertising on it.

 

um, have you even seen imgur? they are absolutely swimming with ads - it's their primary revenue stream.

 

but to my knowledge they don't use ads.

Hm. Turned off the ad blocker to have a look

I sense a contradiction here.

Adding to that, their website is ridiculously easy to use, and I've never heard of there being any file limit.

Photobucket never had any file limits either. My largest upload was a 4mb animated gif.

 

Sorry but... What's photo bucket?

 

I don't see what you mean.

You claimed knowledge of their being no ads, but you had an ad blocker in place, so you had no way of knowing.

I've uploaded a 100MB .gif over Imgur. Does it have a file limit now?

We seem to be having completely different conversations here. You were saying how imgur was better than photobucket because it didn't have file limits. I am pointing out the flaws in your reasoning.

 

I sense a contradiction here.

You claimed knowledge of their being no ads, but you had an ad blocker in place, so you had no way of knowing.

Lack of knowledge =/= contradiction. They only claimed to have knowledge that was limited to their personal experience.