Photobucket's commercial suicide

A return to the subject of tech after a few months of vehicle-related posts. You will no doubt have noticed a recent major change to the Photobucket photo hosting website as the consequences are far-reaching and have single-handedly destroyed a large part of the internet through what I fear is a commercially-suicidal decision. For years Photobucket have offered free third-party hosting and thousands of people have taken advantage of this to host photos for use on forums, auctions and blogs, but they have now got greedy and decided to start charging an annual subscription of $399.99 for the privilege of displaying Photobucket-hosted images on other sites. Needless to say, there has been a huge backlash and the company is losing custom at a rapid rate, so the popular nickname of 'Photofuckit' is fully justified as angry customers give up and move elsewhere.

The most hated image on the internet right now. It's everywhere and has replaced countless photos.

All over the internet, photos linked from Photobucket suddenly vanished without warning, to be replaced by an image asking the user to update their account to enable third-party hosting. This feature is now only available with the most expensive 'Plus 500' plan so Photobucket are holding their users to ransom by demanding $400 a year to make these images visible again. The lesser plans don't allow third-party hosting and this one provides 500GB of storage so at almost a dollar per gigabyte it is very poor value for money anyway compared with Yahoo's Flickr Pro account, which offers unlimited storage and third-party hosting for just $50 a year. Even the free Flickr account (which also allows third-party hosting) gives a terabyte, which is far more than most users will ever need, so against this Photobucket have very little to recommend them.

Many of the users who uploaded these photos make no money from them and simply chose Photobucket as a convenient repository to share them with others. There is no way they can really afford to pay anything just for the privilege of sharing a few photos, yet alone such a huge sum every single year, but they are spread across many thousands of sites so the damage is huge. While many are downloading their photos, re-hosting them elsewhere and replacing their Photobucket links, this isn't always possible. Many forums don't allow editing of old posts, a lot of websites are no longer maintained and some people just can't be bothered with the hassle, so these photos are gone for good and the placeholder image will remain online forever as a constant reminder that Photobucket have permanently damaged large swathes of the internet purely through their own greed and selfishness.

Photobucket's pathetic response to the barrage of criticism

The subscription fee would be difficult to justify even if the Photobucket service was top-quality, but evidence suggests it isn't a particularly good website and isn't worth paying for. I have never used it to host any of my own content because so many users have reported a lot of problems doing simple things like uploading and managing their photos, and I quickly gave up even trying to browse the site thanks to the sheer amount of client-side scripts and advertising that soon caused my browser to become unresponsive just through basic use, which is frankly very poor website design. Such issues are barely acceptable with a free service, but when you ask huge sums of money people expect good quality in return, and Photobucket just don't seem to be providing an acceptable level of service to justify such a large annual outlay.

I fear Photobucket have started themselves on a slippery slope of no return with this change, which is also likely to impact on their existing paying customers. With such huge numbers of free users downloading their photos to rescue them from Photobucket's clutches, the servers are starting to buckle under the strain, causing outages and poor performance that are also affecting paying customers. The inevitable result will not only be the loss of these free users but also paying subscribers who are dissatisfied with this level of service and choose to terminate their contracts. The most likely outcome from there is bankruptcy, all as a consequence of one ill-informed and foolish decision motivated by greed. Photobucket claim it was done to achieve a sustainable business model as they had too many free users and weren't profitable, but it doesn't take a business expert to see that charging $400 for less than the competition give away for free is clearly not sustainable.

One thing that has shocked me is the number of people who are panicking because they have no other copies of the photos hosted on Photobucket and don't want to lose them. All of the photos I have online are copies of originals that are safely stored offline and on backup media under my control, and surely this is just common sense to prevent the loss of irreplaceable images. Since the sudden collapse of Fotopic several years ago, I have become very wary of trusting third-party cloud services to look after my data, and Photobucket's behaviour reinforces this point. There is usually nothing in the user agreement to prevent these hosting companies from changing their terms of service at any time, and thus no guarantee they will continue to provide the service you signed up for and very little you can do about it.

Another variation. The extortionate fee is kept quiet.

This sorry episode strongly reinforces one of my fundamental principles regarding the competitiveness of the IT industry that too often gets overlooked. It is extremely naive of Photobucket to expect their users to willingly start paying huge sums for a service they had been receiving for free, and while other free alternatives exist the outcome is obvious. Far from earning money from these customers, this will simply cause them to close their accounts and migrate to a free competitor, so huge amounts of business will be lost and the service's reputation damaged. The worst thing is the underhanded way Photobucket have gone about making this change without properly notifying users what was about to happen - the only prior announcement was a brief statement that the terms of service had changed, with no further detail and no mention of these heavy new charges.

It has happened many times before but lessons don't seem to have been learned: two examples that affected me personally were Yahoo discontinuing free Geocities web hosting and the remote-control GoToMyPC service starting to charge for its use. In both cases rather than paying for what I used to get for nothing I, along with many other users, made the decision to find a free alternative, of which there are plenty out there, so their greed backfired on them and they lost a lot of customers. Photobucket have put themselves in exactly the same situation right now and the future quite honestly looks bleak for them - even if they reverse the decision now and reinstate free third-party hosting, it is already too late as the damage has been done, anger is widespread and too much custom has been lost. It's a very sad outcome, but big IT companies never seem to learn.