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Photobuckets failed experment dead

karzrus

Well-known member
By Greg Avery – Reporter, Denver Business Journal
May 17, 2018, 2:47pm MDT Updated 8 hours ago
Photobucket’s experiment with being a $399.99 premium service is over, and so to is the tenure of the CEO who led it. The Denver-based photo storing service on Thursday revealed it has slashed its prices and restored millions of photos around the internet hoping to mollify millions of customers it angered last year.

“It’s the first step of many to restore the trust of customers,” said Ted Leonard, Photobucket’s new CEO.

He became CFO at the 15-year-old company in October, after it surprised users worldwide by starting to charge $399.99 for hosting a large number of photos and being able to post them on third-party blogs, ecommerce sites and elsewhere.

John Corpus, Photobucket’s CEO at the time, defended the change, saying a subscription model was necessary given the disparity between the online ad revenue Photobucket’s website generated and the expense of hosting billions of images its 90 million customers stored with Photobucket.

But the pricing, especially the $399.99 a year service that enabled posting images on third-party sites, didn’t convert a meaningful number of Photobucket users into paying subscribers, Leonard said Thursday.

“There’s not a one-plan-fits-all approach to image hosting,” he said. “We can build a subscriber-based business without charging more money than the perceived value of the service.”

Leonard became CEO in March. The company has spent the weeks since them coming up with new pricing and strategies to make 90 million customers happy and generate revenue.

The new prices start at $1.99 per month for 10 gigabytes of images stored and rise to $3.99 monthly for 20 gigabytes and $8.99 for two terabytes of storage. All the plans enable third-party hosting for a $2.49 monthly add-on price.

Photobucket on Wednesday also turned back on millions of users’ images that were still linked to around the web.

The move allowed the images to reappear in place instead of the stock speedometer image that had replaced them last summer. Leonard ruefully joked that speedometer might have become the most viewed image in internet history, though one linked to users’ anger with the company.

“This was weighing on us,” he said. “We wanted to see the images replaced and the internet to be put back together in a sense.”

A pair of Level 3 Communications engineers, Alex Welch and Darren Crystal, formed Photobucket in 2005 to help people to store and use digital photos. Photobucket became the fastest-rising photo storage startup as it grew in parallel with the popularity of MySpace, the first widely-popular social network, where many users of Photobucket posted images.

Fox Interactive, a division of News Corp., bought both MySpace and Photobucket in 2006, envisioning something that presaged Facebook and Instagram. But Facebook soon dwarfed MySpace, and photo-filtering apps took on prominence as smartphones supplanted desktop computers.

News Corp. sold Photobucket in 2010, making an independent, Denver-based company again.

It employed 120 people in downtown’s ballpark neighborhood at its height. Welch, its co-founder, returned to Photobucket at one point after it purchased his photo-sharing app company, but he since left the business.

Today Photobucket has 10 full-time employees and is based at a downtown co-working space.
 
I’m done with PhotoBucket! Switching over to Postimage to see how I like it. I don’t think PhotoBucket will ever recover from this fiasco.
 
When this first happened, and they held all my photos hostage, I called Photobucket about not being able to download all my pics to move them. Their response was: "We're having issues with certain accounts". Right... They knew people were going to leave en masse. And people did. So (it appears), when they saw massive downloads of stored pics happening, they locked that feature. I would have had to download over 500 photos, one at a time, to move them. I told the 'tech guy', he and his buddies better start working on their resumes, because Photobucket is going to be 'history' in a year.

Photobucket sent me a survey recently, and I blasted them (again) about the whole ransom tactic. Now I see they are offering a $19.99 annual subscription (instead of the outrageous $399).

For as much as I liked the features on Photobucket, they can KMA.
 
When this first happened, and they held all my photos hostage, I called Photobucket about not being able to download all my pics to move them. Their response was: "We're having issues with certain accounts". Right... They knew people were going to leave en masse. And people did. So (it appears), when they saw massive downloads of stored pics happening, they locked that feature. I would have had to download over 500 photos, one at a time, to move them. I told the 'tech guy', he and his buddies better start working on their resumes, because Photobucket is going to be 'history' in a year.

Photobucket sent me a survey recently, and I blasted them (again) about the whole ransom tactic. Now I see they are offering a $19.99 annual subscription (instead of the outrageous $399).

For as much as I liked the features on Photobucket, they can KMA.

They are all but dead now, I don't think this will save them, too much animosity among the lost clients and who would risk going back while they are circling the drain. If you pay the new low $20.00 fee and lose all your pictures (permanently this time) in 6 months when they fold up the shop, now how screwed are you. Better to find someplace that will be around for a while.
 
I agree their move was total bull$h!t, but I'm hesitant to punish the poor guys trying to right the ship when the previous captain is the one who ran it ashore. That a$$ho1e needs to be taken out behind a wood shed...talk about running a perfectly good business into to the ground. The $19.99 is reasonable...I'll probably pay it, but only if that cuts down on all the ad BS and the sit improves from a user point of view. All my stuff is there I'm just too lazy to move it...:eek:
 
Better to find someplace that will be around for a while.
Most of my photos now are taken by my cell phone anyway. Back when I started, I was uploading from my digital camera to Photobucket. Or scanning 'regular' 35mm prints, then uploading. Since then, technology has moved on, and all my pics are automatically stored on OneDrive. Heck, now you can even get a digital camera with built in Wi-Fi that will automatically upload to 'the cloud'. I can post pics to forums from OneDrive, and Microsoft is going to be around long after I die. It's just a bit more 'work' to generate the IMG code. Photobucket did it automatically upon upload. OneDrive doesn't. (AFAIK). It takes a few more mouse 'clicks'. And a ton of my 'historical' photos (mostly Jeep project) are locked up on Photobucket.

The $19.99 is reasonable...I'll probably pay it, but only if that cuts down on all the ad BS and the sit improves from a user point of view. All my stuff is there I'm just too lazy to move it...:eek:
Agree. And I'm pondering whether to pay their subscription fee or not. I already pay an annual fee to Microsoft for Office 365, and I'm not feeling warm and fuzzy about even another $20 a year, since I'm finally going to retire (again) next year.
 
I never used Photobucket as a sole place to store my images, I used it as an online backup; and of course to post picture on third party web sites. I definitely not paying them anything, ever.
 
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