I simply can't understand this.
1/ Photobucket has been around for years, for free - or nearly free.
2/ Maybe a few users were 3rd-partying images to
hugely popular websites. Most users, probably, had simply backed-up pictures of their cat.
3/ At a meeting the
Men In Suits decided to make money because of this 3rd-partying.
4/ As a result, every user, without warning, was effectively sent a bill for $399 per annum.
5/ Chunks of the internet (Photobucket photographs on blogs and forums) break.
Did
no-one at that meeting have the nerve to investigate or question the likely outcome?
At what point did the
Men In Suits think this was a viable business proposal? The backlash has been obvious, and immense.
Users, many of them, have stated they would have paid 'a reasonable rate' for server space and bandwidth. Who decided $399 a year was realistic?
Putting on my
finest tin-foil hat, this almost reads as if Photobucket is sick of the work it did, and has decided to leave the industry. I see that the company is privately owned, after Fox sold it out to a Seattle-based company a few years ago, so there's no way to see their shares free-fall, but there is no future for them. They've got two options:
A/ Fold.
B/ Back down - with the potential threat that they'll do this again.
In either option their user base are legging it. No-one would seriously put in an offer, any offer, to take this company over.
It is, by any rational investigation, an insane move.
Andy