RIP Photobucket...

[CoolHands]

peterperkins said:

Perhaps there is a business opportunity here.

Start a new photo hosting thing for forum/e-bay pics etc..
Get a million people on board with discrete ads to cover the costs.
Bury deep in the t&C the option to start charging/change the site policies blah blah..
After two/five years do a 'photobucket' but only demand £50 to keep pic links.
A lot would pay £50 a year to keep forum stuff etc alive..

If only 1 in 50 go for it that's a nice million quid..
Rinse and repeat...

But you've paid more than a million for 5 years hosting billions of free images for them. Adverts don't make jackst. To get that money back + profit will take some doing.

[problemchild1976]

CoolHands said:

But you've paid more than a million for 5 years hosting billions of free images for them. Adverts don't make jackst. To get that money back + profit will take some doing.

not what youtube stats state.....

advertising revenue from gangnam style is around $10M

the rate is about $10 per 1000 views

so 5 million people all with 1 advert viewed 1 time per month = $50k per month (for all users with 1 pic and 1 view of that pic)

JJ

[finnie]

The car DIY world is ruined. Where once we could search a forum and find a step by step guide, all we can do now is see the same PB reference where the essential phos once were.

WHAT DO WE DO NOW, is there anyway we can see these photos, I have noticed that google images seem to reference the thread and show the pics in the preview yet when you go to page, they are PB give me money erefernce!

[ChemicalChaos]

finnie said:

The car DIY world is ruined. Where once we could search a forum and find a step by step guide, all we can do now is see the same PB reference where the essential phos once were.

WHAT DO WE DO NOW, is there anyway we can see these photos, I have noticed that google images seem to reference the thread and show the pics in the preview yet when you go to page, they are PB give me money erefernce!

Google has its own low resolution preview cache of all images. It's OK for a broad overview, but if you need to study some detail then of course you are knackered

[227bhp]

finnie said:

The car DIY world is ruined. Where once we could search a forum and find a step by step guide, all we can do now is see the same PB reference where the essential phos once were.

WHAT DO WE DO NOW, is there anyway we can see these photos, I have noticed that google images seem to reference the thread and show the pics in the preview yet when you go to page, they are PB give me money erefernce!

Read the post at the top of the page - run Chrome and use their free extension.

[LeoZwalf]

Corso Marche said:

I came across this elsewhere, and it provides the ability to view images hosted by PB on forums, BB's etc

It's an extension built for the Chrome browser, appears to be an open source project shared on GitHub;

On the Chrome Webstore here;
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/photobuc...

On GitHub here;
https://github.com/kzahel/photobucket-embed-fix

I've no connection to it, and found it linked to elsewhere. We're all adults, so please make your own decisions to use it if you see fit !

(You will likely have to clear the image cache in your browser if you've visited pages before)

Holy moly - it works! Beautiful. Thanks for posting this!!

[Lance Catamaran]

Seems to work after clearing my image cache - great find

[djdest]

All well and good until people close their accounts

[Markbarry1977]

Or photobucket realise there is a loophole and close it down.

[thebraketester]

My friend made a script that searched the forum I used to admin for any PB photos. It then ripped the JPG from the PB website and copied them locally and edited all the URLS.... how clever is that.


Makes you think whats possible when people who know what they are doing get stuck in.... if only................. never mind...

[stevoknevo]

Seems like they have reinstated sharing to forums etc.

EDIT: seems they haven't after all but this pic definitely linked when I posted it :/

Edited by stevoknevo on Tuesday 7th November 18:42

[RBH58]

stevoknevo said:

Seems like they have reinstated sharing to forums etc.

Really? This seems unlikely. I think they mean pay us a fortune and we'll allow it.

[djdest]

Unless they’ve realised no one would pay their daft prices

[DonkeyApple]

DELETED: Comment made by a member who's account has been deleted.

What this event really highlights is just how many tech enterprises have focussed on the SV mantra of 'users at any cost' as opposed to targeting traditional business aims such as profitability. The valuations being given by brokers of the worth of a 'user' is hugely wrong but has been this way for over a decade because the brokers are also the investors in these business models. If the 'value' of a user gets revised down to credible levels then the entire FANG style business model is bust.

PB is just a window into this as they ceased being able to spend other people's money and found themselves needing real revenue to finance the business. Hence the sudden and Draconian change in business model as it dramatically cuts costs instantaneously while also instantly creating a revenue. PB suddenly had to join the normal world of business, it just didn't have the option to do so in any particular way.

Also, as others have alluded to earlier in the thread, if PB actually manages to get people to pay then they pave the way for all hosting to start charging. This is after all the final step in the drive to get users into the habit of storing vast amounts of data non domestically. The cynic in me would want to see if the owner of PB had recently received a large payment from another party in the industry as it would be the first time that an about to go defunct business was used in the shadows by the sector to test whether the market is ready for a next step.

[djdest]

I agree they are a business and need to make money, but it’s the way they’ve gone about it.
How many will sign up at £400 a year? Not that many I’d bet.
They’d make a lot more money and get a lot more signing up if the cost was more reasonable.
I had a paid account with them for years, and would happily pay again if it was a sensible price

[DonkeyApple]

djdest said:

I agree they are a business and need to make money, but it’s the way they’ve gone about it.
How many will sign up at £400 a year? Not that many I’d bet.
They’d make a lot more money and get a lot more signing up if the cost was more reasonable.
I had a paid account with them for years, and would happily pay again if it was a sensible price

But they have all the data regarding their 100,00,000 users and have studied it and made the decision that the way they have gone about it will make more money.

The only question lies in understanding who or what gets that money and where from.

All we can see is the absolute basics and have an entirely external perspective. We might think many of us would have coughed up a much smaller sum and they would have made more money but they will have run the metrics on just how many live and credible users they had and looked at all the data raised from their junk/spam advert deliveries. Frankly, when you look at the adverts and also the merchandise they've been trying to sell then it does look like the vast bulk of their users were pennyless tards that could never pay 1c and would always be a cost burden.

This was an emergency exercise to keep the lights on but it still would have been thought out so as to benefit the financial owners as best as possible. We just don't know what the commercials are. Could be anything from just trying to eek out a few more months of boardroom payments, through to meeting an emergency investor criteria of slashing overheads and increasing revenues through all the way to a cash bung in an offshore account to use PB in its death throes to test the waters for the industry. We don't know. They do.

[djdest]

I agree they are a business and need to make money, but it’s the way they’ve gone about it.
How many will sign up at £400 a year? Not that many I’d bet.
They’d make a lot more money and get a lot more signing up if the cost was more reasonable.
I had a paid account with them for years, and would happily pay again if it was a sensible price

[DonkeyApple]

djdest said:

I agree they are a business and need to make money, but it’s the way they’ve gone about it.
How many will sign up at £400 a year? Not that many I’d bet.
They’d make a lot more money and get a lot more signing up if the cost was more reasonable.
I had a paid account with them for years, and would happily pay again if it was a sensible price

Ok. Why would they make a lot more money?

They have all the data, they know what the criteria are that they need to meet so how can anyone on the outside possibly know?

It's always about the money and they have made the choice they have made because they believe it makes the right people the most amount of money. We have none of the data, no nothing of their financial structure and so we simply cannot state that changing a sane figure would make them more revenue. We don't even know if maintaining the business or generating revenue is their key objective.

[TonyRPH]

Their infrastructure costs must be high.

To support the distribution of so many (usually large) images would require multiple servers likely spread across multiple data centres.

And then there's the bandwidth costs/

It really can't be cheap.

The reason they probably went for £400 per year was because they realised that as soon as they change their model to a chargeable one - there would be a massive decline in users - so it's striking a balance between users and costs.

I suspect that some people think they would be making huge profits, but I would be surprised if that's the case.

[227bhp]

In an email Photophukit said:

We are overwhelmed by your support!

(and so was our site)
We had so much traffic this weekend that it took us to the limit. Our tech team has been working around the clock, and NOW every element on our site is stronger and ready for our growing service and soon-to-be released new platform.

Thank you for your loyalty as we grow and improve Photobucket. We’re sorry for the inconvenience – please accept our code good for $15 off your order.

Anyone believe this?

I don't know where the idea came from that they've reinstated forum images, I haven't seen any evidence.
The site has been up and down and all over the place since they announced their $400 fee, I wondered if it was countering attacking the Chrome app as It doesn't seem to work for me and I noticed I couldn't view my own pics properly when i'd downloaded it.