Just noticed last night; Photobucket is now offering a "Non-Commercial" customer classification. This new deal offers unlimited third party posting to not-for-profit customers for $8.33 a month. ($100 per year.)

I guess the Photobucket folks finally got tired of cleaning the rotten eggs off their office windows every morning.

It is called the "PLUS 100" plan.

Meaning: their 400-USD-a-year-sales suck, they have an ebb of users, but plenty of bad PR.

We have a saying that stipulates "Take measurements seven times before you do a single cut".

They could have done that earlier.

They have had their data, could have analyzed it(share of cross-linking to non-commercial sites vs. cross-linking to commercial sites), could have zeroed it in down to individual users and could have come up with some tailor-made offerings.
Before they messed up.

Sign up for a month or two, retrieve anything you didn't have backed up, then go elsewhere.

Angel I agree totally. I make no defense for Photobucket's corporate marketing stupidity. Whoever is the author of such a foolish tactic should be voted out of the company. The amount of bad PR they have generated for themselves is beyond measure.

On the other hand to those of us who have been using Photobucket heavily for third party hosting over the past years this should come as good news. I know I take it as good news.

Interesting...
That's pretty much an admission that whatever number of paying customers they wanted to keep, they didn't get. I would love to know how many users they lost.

I never ceases to amaze me how stupid that ppl. in business can be. What kind of internet genius thought you could take a free service to $400 yr. an one step ?
Poopbucket said they had 100 million users, so we know its about 1/3 of that. If they had started a hosting plan for 60 US dollars year (5 per month) who would have not gone for that? Who wants to spend 100's hours download and re-uploading their pics to new sites? And then re-linking ? Ppl are busy (lazy), they would have gone for it!
30 Million users at $60 would have been 1.8 billion year (that's about 3 times what they make now).

Q: Who's going to close their new free Imgur account and go back to The Bucket for $100 yr ?

Gary the cloud storage of any photos you may have uploaded to Photobucket has always been free and remains so. If you currently have anything stored in Photobucket you can still download it back to your computer at no charge.

The topic of third party hosting has been the bone of contention not the free storage.

Why?? You still have full access to all your pictures, they just don't allow linking them to other websites, like Armorama. If you need to copy or to back them up, you can still do that without paying a dime.

$8.33 a month doesn't sound like too bad a deal, esp. since I have been moving, buying a new house, setting up the new hobby room, etc. since they shut down the free linking and haven't started with a new photo hosting site. Might just have to give them the money and go the easy way.

I agree totally with you,Mike!

I don't see you as PB defender, but as a user, who had the misfortune to be held hostage-by the shear size of his archive-till PB found out there are people that do not make money by cross-linking.

Reason prevails in PB-and that's really a good news!

Exactly. Check PB out, now. It still takes 9 clicks to get through all the pop-ups.

There is also the old proverb:
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

I deleted my PB-account and have started using another service instead. Don't think I feel inclined to spend money to get extra work again. If you kick your customers where the sun doesn't shine you should not be surprised if they go elsewhere.

They had some reason for blocking direct linking, maybe they were losing money, maybe they thought they had their customers well and truly locked up and could start cashing in. Surprise! Customers left (at least the majority).
Time for a new decision.
If their other sources of revenue had been sufficient (advertising and selling copies of Your phots and My photos) they would never have gone this route.
I think that their business model is flawed and I doubt that the drastically lowered price will be sufficient.
I think that PB is sinking ....

Maybe someone should have asked the decision makers at PB if they are sure they want to ride this train
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKWq-1reVGQ

/ Robin

This new $100 non-commercial package includes foregoing the constant ad pop-ups!

They can put on all the hundred dollar lipstick they want , they'll never screw me a second time ..............

Check out www.fotki.com I've had a paid account there for about 17 years. Never had a problem. It's also a lot less than $100/yr. Their main page has had an offer for "Photobucket victims" for several months.

I've never paid a dime for any photo storage. I had free Fotki but they pulled the same paid stunt years before PB. I can't even access those photos now. You can use Facebook for photohosting but their compression does a number on the quality. I've also used Flickr, Google Photos (used to be Picasa), now I use Imgur. All free, all work.

screw photo bucket !!!!

Amen to that!

Well done PB for alienating your users, just wondering how much revenue they have lost through advertising with people not coming to their site to look other people's images that were hosted on sites like this?

Imgur all the way for me folks!

All my PB images were reduced copies for easy illustration in forums, so losing the links wasn't painful enough to warrant spending money. I chose the "Go Away" deal, which is still more appealing than any ransom they can come up with!

For now. I'm sure you'll be cursing them in due time.

KL

I doubt it. Imgur is its own community, it's more like social media than a photo host. Flickr has Yahoo behind it. Google is, well, Google.

Dear Photobucket, Screw you guys!!!🤮

Not if:
News Flash - June 2018
Imgur "Guys we need some cash. Server farms and bandwidth are not free and killing us.
It will be $5 - 6 month for a personal account and $12 - 20 for a commercial account that links to Amazon & EBay.
That starts Jan 1 , 2019. Hope you stay but you have six months to decide."

IF:
They are honest and upfront, they axe for a reasonable amount and they give user a reasonable amount of time (so they don't pull a PBucket ransom) who would not stay.
We all know some day the free stuff on the internet wont be. Only the giants can make enough money from add revenue.
It's been a nice ride but we will have to pay at some point...

Imgur is one of the giants, they're the 11th most visited site in the world.

The problem with many free hosting sites is that they have a very limited amount of storage. The user will replace photos since they can only store a limited number, then when you read the how-to article on weathering a tank, the pictures are of little Joey's 3rd birthday party, or "Image no longer available". That sucks. Paid hosting can be 18 bucks a year. That's 1/3 the price of one tank model.