Greg's Corner

How not to treat your customers, courtesy of Photobucket

All businesses want to make money. That’s the entire point of a business. The main thing businesses need to make money is customers. Apparently no one told that to Photobucket.

Photobucket is a photo sharing website and service that has been around since 2003. A great number of their users used the service in order to post photos of the items they were selling on places like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy. This is a common process called hotlinking or 3rd party hosting. Photobucket allowed their members to use this feature free for years, as the website was making the majority of its revenue from ads. Now with ad revenue being down all over the internet, no one should bear ill will towards Photobucket if they wanted to increase their revenue stream so they could stay in business. The problem is how they went about trying to make this extra revenue.

Rather than telling their members they would soon start charging for 3rd party hosting, Photobucket just turned off the switch. Everyone who was using Photobucket to post their photos on 3rd party sites were met with the above image, or a variation of it. To make matters worse, Photobucket said they would allow 3rd party hosting for the low, low price of $399 a year. But wait, there’s more. When social media erupted with complaints aimed at Photobucket, all Photobucket did was post a brief note that said users should review their new terms of service. It should go without saying that users are claiming to be leaving Photobucket in droves. Unless the heads of Photobucket made a bet with Uber to see who could lose more customers, the way they handled this is almost inexplicable.

If you are a former user of Photobucket, here is a list of alternatives. You may have to check with the other services to see if 3rd party hosting is allowed.