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

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abodyjoe

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Photobucket restores photos "taken hostage," hopes to lure back customers


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.
 
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice.........SCREW THEM GREEDY BASTARDS!!!!!!:icon_fU::mad::mob:
 
lol.. good thing is a ton of dead threads are back now.. lots of how too threads were ruined with out 3rd hosting..
 
Good on Joey having him host our own pics. Hopefully the revenue is self sustaining. Photobucket, How about just a small PB watermark in the corner of each free hosted pic? Thats a lot of free advertising....but I feel the damage has been done. AND I bet that clown got a golden parachute on his way out after decimating the company, like they all do.
 
The incompetent display of how to run a company of this John Corpus sack at least has made me take full control over my own pics and reupload most of the pics to my own website.

Thanks John Corpus for having me fix my site. Too bad you ruined a company and pissed off millions of people over the world in the process.
I wonder where he will fail next.

At least some kudo's for the remaining peeps at the ruins of PB for flipping on the hotlinking switch again.
 
Having my own server salved this problem. It doesn’t cost anything but residing in a back office of a law firm it is subject to local outages, but my hosting is free.

Alan
 
When they first announce this idea, I said it would ruin them. I couldn't imagine how they could possibly think otherwise. I know a lot of companies are trying to do subscription services (adobe for one, ugh), but the price they came up with is just ludicrous! Before you try to charge an exuberant amount of money for a service, you might want to consider how many alternatives for users already exist. Glad to hear that CEO was canned. What an idiot.

But they're still going to need more than what they currently offer. There's plenty of free image hosting services around, so they need to come up with something extra if they expect people to pay. The way photobucket dropped this subscription services on users without warning was a borderline ransom attack I say!
 
Yeah my resto thread got fucked royally. Screw them. Wish there was a way to transfer any PB pics into the FABO server. That would be cool.
 
Yeah my resto thread got fucked royally. Screw them. Wish there was a way to transfer any PB pics into the FABO server. That would be cool.

Can you download them to your computer or external hard drive, then upload to FABO????
 
Yeah my resto thread got fucked royally. Screw them. Wish there was a way to transfer any PB pics into the FABO server. That would be cool.

PhotoBucket should have enabled all the pics again. Might want to try a refresh on the topic.

For phpBB forumsoftware someone has programmed an extention that does exactly that; Copy all images in each thread/topic to the local server and update the imagelinks in the topics.

I fixed a number of forums this way with this addition.
Maybe something like that exists for vBulletin as well.
 
Just an email with the first sentence. Yep, they are still going to be hostages.
--------------------------
Hello,

All of your hosted images across the internet have been restored for a limited time under your Free Account.
 
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.
 
Never did like PB or any other possible ransom site.
5 bucks a month I can upload anything I want, any time I want, and nobody has any rights to any of it.
 
Never did like PB or any other possible ransom site.
5 bucks a month I can upload anything I want, any time I want, and nobody has any rights to any of it.
Proof that the “pay for hosting storage only” model works.
 
What are ya using that’s $5 a month?

1and1.com domain hosting.
Your own website addresses, FTP, unlimited email addresses with auto responders, website building software and tons more I don't even use.

It's been super reliable for over 15 years so far.
 
Wish there was a way to transfer any PB pics into the FABO server

For phpBB forumsoftware someone has programmed an extention that does exactly that; Copy all images in each thread/topic to the local server and update the imagelinks in the topics.

I was just thinking that. I could write a script that would automatically grab all the images and upload them locally. The problem why it won't work is for the same reason we can't see them, 3rd party access is blocked. If we can't see photobucket images on another site, then no script is going to be able to access them either. Unless you can spoof the originating IP making the http request, but it's not likely.

One possibility would be to make a web scraper for photobucket. If someone can link me a page on the forum with dead photobucket links, I'll give it a shot at pulling the images from PB.
 
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