In an amazing example of what amounts to a successful hostage situation (that is, successful for the hostage taker) it would seem over the past few weeks since Photobucket Screwed Over The Blogging Community that people have actually been paying $399 for the account plan that allows hotlinking.
…Are you fucking serious? I can only question what all they have on photobucket and where it is being shared – it would have to be an indescribably complex network of thousands of images over probably a dozen or more sites that are still active to cause someone to decide $400 a year is worth it to not have to change hosting on these images.
Of course, Photobucket would find enough sucke-I mean, people crazy enough to pay $399 a year.
From: https://t.co/WZEpmoNKw5 pic.twitter.com/fy638KMQ0N
— PrinceWatercress (@PrinceWatercres) July 16, 2017
I say this because a person can get their own hosting for, depending on the host, $30 a year if you are thrifty! If you’re a blogger, using wordpress, combined with the off-site image loading that the jetpack plugin allows this is not only incredibly affordable but is also quite trivial on bandwidth!
Now of course, this isn’t the best solution for other users, but for anyone who would have used photobucket for their own website purposes, well, you would do just as well with your own hosting as an image storage service than rely on anyone else for it.
There has to be some other reason, it certainly isn’t just average users doing this, but what amazes me more about it is that this has been enough people that their revenue has “double[ed] since [they] launched this initiative.”
So, by holding probably a billion images around the internet hostage, Photobucket has managed to double their income this past month? What the hell scummy shit is that? What’s worse, if you read the full article (linked in the tweet, and down below) you will see that the the people in charge also didn’t expect the backlash they would receive.. or so they say.
I’m not going to lie, I haven’t bothered to read the whole article – this is just a quick reaction to the info shared to me. The article does go into details saying that Photobucket has never quite operated profitably, something I can totally understands – still, you would think a more gradual locking down of the site would have been in order, rather than this quite sudden change.
I’ll go over the linked article more, and maybe come up with something additional to say, but I think when skimming it over I’ve covered the key point – at least the main fact that people have actually paid this amount!
Look it over if you wish, link is in the tweet earlier in the article.