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Various celebrities over the years have "broken the Internet" when risqué photos or shocking revelations surfaced, with or without their knowledge or approval. Photo hosting service Photobucket may have surpassed Kim Kardashian's most notorious stunts, though. The company recently changed its user agreement for the hosting of images on third-party sites, and as a consequence truly may have broken the Internet.
Photobucket users in recent weeks have been receiving emails with this message: "Some features on your account will be disabled. Your account has been restricted for excessive usage and 3rd party hosting. In order to restore 3rd Party Hosting, please upgrade to the Plus500 Membership Plan."
On the surface, this seems like business as usual for an online service, because nowhere in the email does Photobucket mention that its Plus500 Membership Plan requires a nearly US$400 a year subscription! Worse, users were given no advance notice, while all images hosted on Photobucket were replaced by a graphic that suggested third-party hosting was at 100 percent.
It didn't matter if a user had a single image or hundreds that were posted to third-party sites -- those who had not subscribed to the Plus500 plan suddenly found they had reached 100 percent usage!
Hosting of Images
To understand why this is such a problem, one needs only to look at Internet forums, eBay, Etsy, Amazon's third-party sellers and the plethora of blogs out there. For more than 100 million users, Photobucket has been the de facto photo and image hosting service.
Since its founding back in 2003, the service has been an online "Great Library" of images from around the world, and the service today hosts billions of photos.
Photobucket's messages telling users their accounts had reached full capacity for third-party images were more than a bit disingenuous, given that it didn't matter how many images were hosted on third-party sites. In fact, according to the new terms of the user agreement, anyone with a free account is still allowed 2 GB of free storage -- but the free accounts no longer allow users to link any images to third-party sites.
The user agreement states that those interested in image linking and/or third-party hosting need to subscribe to one of the Plus Accounts -- but in fact it is only the P500 level -- the most expensive option -- that allows for such hosting.
Where it becomes more confusing is that those who already had paid for lower-tier accounts and were in good standing as of June 1, 2017, would still be allowed to utilize third-party hosting until the end of 2017. This in essence makes an exception for those who already were paying for service -- and understandably so, given that the Internet community has taken Photobucket's move as tantamount to extortion.
Even those who have been paying for hosting will have to upgrade at the end of the year or they will lose their images -- but at least they have time to find another solution.
Photobucket's Side of the Story
Criticism has been heaped on Photobucket since it updated its user agreement last month, especially for giving users little notice.
However, from the company's perspective, "this path to a more sustainable business model allows us to develop an even more robust product to meet our customers' needs," Photobucket CEO John Corpus said, according to The Denver Post.
Photobucket's chief problem is that it is a small shop, with 50-some employees and little way to make a profit. About 75 percent of Photobucket's costs come from hosting non-paying users' photos on third-party websites.
Historically, Photobucket largely was supported by ads -- but in recent years the site has received almost zero revenue from non-paying users, who typically ignore the ads.
Extreme Business Strategy
This move to charge for third-party hosting of images essentially has left users with few options, and many forum administrators have advised seeking another hosting service. The problem is tha
