Photobucket restores photos “taken hostage,” hopes to lure back customers with cheaper plans after l

Photobucket totally fubared their business model.

At first, it was free hosting and selling add-ons like printing, etc. But the market changed and nobody wanted the services.

Then they added massive amounts of ads, but missed that the free hosted images around the internet didn’t get ad views...so they got zero extra revenue.

Then, they doubled the adds but missed that those with subscriptions didn’t see them after logging in...and new customers became so turned off by the ad bombardment that they didn’t join.

They they decided to try ransom of their existing subscription base and wrecked that entirely.

Now they want to play nice and give a tease of back to free and then demand a newer, cheaper ransom...but a ransom just the same.

If they had half a brain, they would have capped the old free accounts where they were and sold additional storage at fair rates to encourage people to buy more space and keep on using them...just like cell phone companies do when they sell you more data when you need it. Then they could have redone the ad structure to show limited ads at certain transition points in the process to get revenue without pissing off the users. Add a small unobtrusive banner ad to each photo used for embedding in other sites (with a click point)...and they would have been rolling in revenue.