Very sad at number of useless posts

proxim2020 wrote:

SCVJeff wrote:
That makes no sense at all since Photobucket makes zero$ on me using their site as a picture host, and I likewise pay zero$ to do so. So how does this cause them to fail?

Well that's a silly statement. Photobucket makes tons of money off of you using their site. Just a few years back the company was sold for $300 million. Up until this point Photobucket was mostly supported by ad revenue and printing services. Visiting their site generates traffic which generates ad revenue. Also, when someone shares a photo with the internet, more traffic and ad revenue is generated. The end users doesn't pay with dollars, they pay with their eyes which is worth something to advertisers.

This subscription service comes about because ad revenue, one of their primary sources of income, has taken a hit over the last few years. Also it's an attempt to capitalize on commercial users using their service for free. All of those eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, and Etsy listings use third party image hosting and lots use Photobucket as their hosting service. This is why the subscription that supports embedding is so costly at $399.99.

Ultimately I don't think they'll be as successful with it as they think they will. There's still a whole slew of free image hosting services out there. Both commercial and regular users will just migrate over to those instead of paying for a subscription. The dip in traffic will hurt ad revenue even further.

Photobucket makes ZERO off of me. Until now I have not paid them anything for this service, and because my postings are a "hobby", as opposed to being an eBay seller, I'll simply work on migrating it all elsewhere. Getting rid of the freeloaders will cost them nothing other than significantly reduced data storage, power and internet fees.. Someones paying for all that (but not me..). I get why they're doing it. I just don't like it much. They've also managed to almost completely break their iOS apps over the last few years too