Originally Posted by
merlinextraligh
Anybody remember Photobucket.com? Photobucket was a free third party photo hosting site. At one point most of the photos on this site were hosted by Photobucket. They then imposed some really high fees, and everyone on here quit using them, and found other free or cheaper ways to manage digital images. Photobucket isn't publicly traded so its hard to see how they've fared financially, but it appears that they are a much smaller company as a result of changing to a subscription model.
To a lesser degree, I think Strava runs a similar risk.
Photobucket was always terrible. That's the main reason nobody wanted to pay for it. The interface was terrible. It was sluggish, non-intuitive, and had no "community" despite its lame efforts at pretending to be some sort of social media. It was what the name implied -- just a dump for snapshots.
The only thing good about Photobucket was it managed to make Flickr seem good. I think I still have a Flickr account but haven't used it in years. My ISP fees used to include a premium subscription to Flickr, but when they discontinued that I never bothered to pay. Flickr never managed to develop decent tools for archiving photos. I switched to Google for awhile because auto-backups worked seamlessly in the background without being a resource hog. Flickr never managed that.
Strava isn't terrible. It generally works pretty well. They've made some efforts to improve (there's no evidence Photobucket ever tried to improve that lousy site).
I got a long free trial run. I don't mind paying for a subscription for a year to see how it goes.