Since 2003, the popular photo hosting service Photobucket has been letting users upload and host images for free on their servers. They have over 10 billion images stored by 100 million registered users. But now they’re going to start charging, and that means billions of images around the Web are now broken.
Hotlinking (AKA inline linking) is when someone takes an image file hosted on a server and embeds it on a different webpage elsewhere. Since the new webpage continuously requests the file from the original source server, it saps the server owner’s bandwidth (and storage space).
Photobucket allowed hotlinking photos uploaded to and stored on its servers for a long time. This was their business model, and they made money from ads on their own site, which users would be exposed to when they went to upload content.
Unfortunately for Photobucket users, things are about to change in a big way as of June 26th. Now the service is rolling out a $399 per year subscription fee for those who want to hotlink images from Photobucket’s servers to display elsewhere. That means that billions of images across the Web now display an error message instead of the image in question.
Just look at this forum thread to see how Photobucket users are reacting to this change. The move has sparked fury from users, who have relied on the service for years and now feel “blackmailed” into paying the subscription fee.
Seems that the majority (if not all) of users also were NOT notified about this change.
So now you have forums loosing picture access, eBay sales that are apparently killed off, and even paying customers (lowest tier) that suddenly find they can no longer hotlink stuff.
One response on that page hits the nail right on the head:
ïffydiffy wrote:All the free users are not going to pay $400. And any new user is certainly not going to sign up at those prices.
What they've done is turn all those free users into an army of bad publicity and turn away any potential new users.
All they had to do was give some advance notice, and start charging something like $5/month. Lots of the freebie users would have paid that. There may have been some minor grumbling, but by and large, people would have admitted that yeah, after all, they can't keep expecting to get the service for free. THAT would have turned the army of free users into revenue.