DiabloScott

Most likely, this was a hail-Mary move to avoid going out of business altogether. All the photos they hosted would probably have been lost anyway, patrons are going to be mad as hell no matter what... why not try something extreme?

CliffordK

Likely we'll see an evolution of "free" over the next decade.

Some companies like Google will thrive because they can have targeted advertising, and perhaps charge website owners in one way or another to be indexed.

Other companies will flounder. The problem with the image hosting service is millions of people see the images, but very few see the actual ads. And, unlike popular belief, bandwidth and server space is not free.

In fact, I think Microsoft may have a policy of steeling bandwidth. I just got a new update pushed to my PC (not much I could do other than accept it), and now see that I can not completely turn off shared uploads being sent from my computer.

And, with being inundated with unwanted ads for one's whole life, one quickly learns to tune them out.

I think there may well even be a point where advertising becomes a negative.

I'm reluctant to admit that I've been playing some of the Microsoft Solitaire games. But, I find the included ads to be most intrusive. Worse than E-Mail SPAM or telesolicitation. I have no intention to ever buy from the companies that advertise through this mode, nor will I ever buy the games that MSFT is trying to push (since they seem to be running out of advertisers).

Anyway, likely that Photobucket's income fell short of expectations. One option would have been to charge $1 a month for users, and encourage non-paying users to leave. Instead, they chose to charge prohibitive amounts to force most users to leave.

I think the same thing happens with abstracts and journal articles. There are a lot of casual users who don't want to pay $50 for a single article, but might fork out $1 for that article. So, they distribute their articles to a fraction of their potential audience. They could even add multiple rates for "professional users" and non-professional users.

Fahrenheit531 

I'm just honing my attachment skills here in the forum. I'll trade resolution for simplicity and not-going-anywhere.

DiabloScott

And now Vimeo is limiting storage for free members.

5GB total, but they won't delete existing stuff. I have 16GB on there and I won't be able to make any more unless I cough up $85 a year.

dweenk

First you are invited to free "something" and then you are screwed. It is the way of the world.

noglider 

@Deal4Fuji, I have that same problem. I don't understand why some people have it and others don't.

I'm still using google photos, which has a bad user interface but is not likely to go out of business soon. From what I see, flickr seems to be the best site, and the paid membership isn't expensive.

tmh657

The point where advertising became a negative, hmmmm, like 1962 perhaps when I was able to understand the spoken word.

I cannot tune out ads. I still have cable tv but rarely watch it. Other family members do. When an ad comes on the tv it sounds like this to me, "Hey you buy my sh¶§, come on buy some. Get it now." I gladly pay for content I want to see.

Web browser- ad blocker. If I want to read something that requires ad blocker be disabled I will paste it into a different browser to look at it, maybe. And yes, I would pay a monthly fee for an ad free browser. Does it exist already?

smontanaro 

Hopefully people won't mind me resuscitating an old (painful?) thread, however, I recently stumbled upon an extension for Chrome which seems to take care of the Photobucket greed. This Google search should help you find something appropriate for your browser of choice:

https://www.google.com/search?q=phot...+fix+extension

HTH...

CliffordK

Perhaps I should try the new "fixes"... They still don't fix other websites that have crashed links or deleted accounts

I just can't believe we still have members blindly posting photobucket links as if nothing has happened.

Vintage_Cyclist

These fixes only help you see PB links. If you keep using PB to host your images (w/o paying) then only that small number of people using the fixes will see what you post.

In all likelihood, PB will probably get around to writing some code to kill the fixes (like many websites are now doing with ad blocking software).

smontanaro 

Maybe nothing seems amiss for them if they are logged in Photobucket users?

JaccoW

They are the "default" website when it comes to linking images on red dit.com but most links there lead to their website, generating them revenue.

Imgur used to have a paid model but then they switched to ads.

My guess is that hotlinking to forums is okay but using them to hotlink to your Blog for example is less so. And building a simple website where every single image is on their servers probably really not okay.

It's a grey area so they "reserve the right to" as a rule on a case by case basis.