From the business perspective, it doesn't make sense to subsidize your free users' business needs. The article mention a backslash, but I'm not sure how much should they care about complaints from customers they have chosen to fire.
From the users' point of view, this is their 6-months reminder that a) you should read the terms of what you are agreeing to, and b) if you are not paying for a service, you get what you pay for. A harsh lesson for sure, but a lesson more people should probably learn.
Im sorry, but saying someone needs to read the terms of services is BS. If i where to read all the updates i get, i would be doing nothing but read these BS agreements. The way they did this was very ugly, instead of sending a notice, they hid it in a all of text. This is why these agreements should not be classified as contracts and not legally binding in any way.
Caveat Emptor. If you're running a business that depends on a third party hosting assets related to your product, reading and keeping up with the terms of service isn't BS, it's mandatory. If you don't want to do your due diligence, then host everything yourself and eat the bandwidth costs.
I wouldn't be angry about not letting people do the thing, but after letting people do the thing for over a decade, they could have been a lot more graceful about changing their mind.
Like, I don't really blame them for not sticking with a clearly nonviable free tier, but taking the easy way out at the expense of fucking over your (free, sure) users is still sorta rude.
idk if people "should" know better, it's a pretty dreadful world where you're to completely understand the business model behind every service you rely on to some extent, or else it's really your own fault when they pull the rug from under you with like five minutes of very non-specific notice.
Society just couldn't operate if everybody actually read the entirety of the terms of all the services they use. We'd get nothing done.
>it's a pretty dreadful world where you're to completely understand the business model behind every service you rely on to some extent, or else it's really your own fault when they pull the rug from under you with like five minutes of very non-specific notice.
I'm baffled that people seem to feel this is an unreasonable expectation for anyone trying to make money from such a service, especially as a free user. It's not a public utility.
>Society just couldn't operate if everybody actually read the entirety of the terms of all the services they use. We'd get nothing done.
This isn't society, though, this is business. This is why companies hire lawyers and pay for contracts with their suppliers, etc.
Yes, the way Photobucket went about this is crass, clueless and rude, but users who just expected the service to "work" indefinitely are also at fault for doing so.
In a general case I'd agree with you, but Photobucket is an exception. This would be like Yahoo shuttering their free email tier overnight and asking for payment.
The bar for being a business is pretty low, though. If they had the logistics and budget to pay for a lawyer, they probably wouldn't be hosting on photobucket anyway.
I think that expectations from physical-world objects could be clashing with online service "objects".
For example, if I buy a physical-world object then it's well-understood that the vendor can't break into my house and take it back or, in most circumstances, demand its return. Many physical-world objects additionally come with a warranty assuring that it will continue to work for some length of time.
Online, the digital "object" that I upload to a free service has no such ownership analogue - the service provider can generally cease to offer the service at will. This not only means there's zero warranty, but effectively that service providers can "break into my house" to "take back" the object.
I don't think there's much awareness in the general public that GMail, to pick on a well-used example, could shut down tomorrow and almost every user would irretrievably lose the last N years of their email.
I think a decent analogy would be a grocery store. Sure, you've gone there and got free samples for over ten years, but now they feel those burger bites and cheese dip w/ crackers weren't actually helping them sell more product.
Do you expect the grocery store to give ample notice? Should they change their mind when people complain?
Admittedly the analogy isn't perfect because the samples aren't a major portion of the grocery store's cost/business, but it's still decent.
This is a BIG (and breaking) change. It would cost the company ten minutes to send out a proper notice. Burying these changes deep down in a terms and conditions document is bad behaviour.
Proper way to do this would be to:
- Notify your customers about the change in an easy to read email and/or message when you log in.
- Only apply the change to new uploads at first, then it's easily discoverable and handled by users. Inform them that you plan to do this for all hosted images.
- Apply the change to older uploads a few months later.
Hiding and rushing it just makes people angry. They won't pay if they feel you tricked them.
It would be more accurate to not call them customers but users.
There's a serious distinction, and the complaints explicitly are from business users claiming that they shouldn't be considered even potential customers.
Honestly, I'm very surprised that Amazon and Ebay aren't hosting all their own product images.
After all, if there's a dispute over a listing, they need to be able to see it as it was at the time of the sale - which means storing copies of all the images.
It would give them control over page-load times and avoid leaking data about customers' browsing habits. And both sites have obviously demonstrated the ability to host (and pay for the hosting of) user-submitted images, as they have much better revenue sources than Photobucket.
>I'm very surprised that Amazon and Ebay aren't hosting all their own product images.
They do. Amazon has it's own CDN. I guess users can link to third party images in the product content but the main images are hosted on Amazon CDN via AWS.
Amazon is THE marketplace to sell on. They don't need to keep adding features. Sellers are welcome to take their business elsewhere but don't have any reasonable alternative.
Amazon does host the product images, but the sellers (or 3rd-party services used by the seller) can upload/update those images by providing Amazon with a spreadsheet/feed that contains URLs - I'm guessing those pointed to Photobucket in these cases.
I don't think anybody cares about the long term service of Photobucket. Everybody knew that was going to happen.
It has happened to all image uploaders in history, and it will keep happening forever, since image uploaders are 1) a money-losing business (people will flee as soon as you stop hotlinking) and 2) have no real value (how much time does it take you to write an image uploader? probably one of the first things you do when you're learning to code for the web)
that sounds like a much better approach. Even if they needed to ditch the hosting of them all together, they could have water marked them and inform them in the water mark the cut-off date
Curious why they felt the need to do this at all in this way. Their goal is to maximise profits.
How does making people super angry about your service serve that purpose? And they had to know. They had to know the numbers of conversions after the ToS change and whether or not their was an uptick of people seeing this and converting. They had to know that they were going to affect a lot of people overnight. This was not accidental in any way.
So what's the difference in money you'd make/lose by putting it up front and center all over your site saying "Photobucket is transitioning away from the free tier". A blog post? An email? A release to the press?
At "worst" they'd find themselves in a situation where most people stop using their service. I put it in quotes because, this also means that the incredible cost of hosting people who never intended to pay also goes away. It's tough but hey, it's still a win for Photo bucket.
At best, if done right, they might even earn the goodwill of people and convert more people over than they'd expected in the first place.
Doing it this way can never get them anywhere more than "worst", and in the long run it'll probably be actually worse as people who might have considered paying will be spooked/pissed off and will vanish into the ether.
I can't understand how anyone thought this was a good execution plan to maximise business profitability.
Maybe they are trying to cash out? Instead of building a sustainable model, they are banking on some people paying because their service is broken right now, and after the initial inrush of cash, as everyone leaves they will shutter the whole thing.
And now I wonder how long it'll be until someone comes along and eats Imgur's lunch. Imgur is now a community, not just an image host, so there is some value there, but monetizing it from what I understand is a struggle. And a cheap image host alternative is very low cost of entry.
I read somewhere that this particular business goes in a cycle of: dominant player starts trying to monetize, that pisses off the users, one of the users creates a new free/fast/easy-to-use clone and everyone migrates, and then that new company starts running an actual business and wants to monetize, resetting the cycle. I am sure this is the case with more than just image hosting, but image hosting in particular takes like 20 hours and a few hundred bucks to get started and scales very poorly as you get into multiple millions of users.
I don't have an Imgur account; I just use it ad hoc for sharing low-res photo excerpts and whatever else in IRC channels. (Palaver's integration in particular makes this easy.)
But based on occasional browsing and the odd bit of inside baseball that makes it to the front page, I'd surmise Imgur is somewhere between stages 4 and 5 on your list, and closer to the latter than the former. I'm sure its eventual successor is doing a slow burn toward virality even now.
Not many sites show the source of the image like Reddit does. For most uses, the viewer doesn't know where the image is coming from, just that it is there on the page, and that is quite hard to do as an ad-supported service.
I am more shocked sites like Amazon/eBay allow users to link to third party sites, what if they decided to change it to porn or something if they got hacked? I am surprised they don't download and rehost the images themselves...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadFrom the business perspective, it doesn't make sense to subsidize your free users' business needs. The article mention a backslash, but I'm not sure how much should they care about complaints from customers they have chosen to fire.
From the users' point of view, this is their 6-months reminder that a) you should read the terms of what you are agreeing to, and b) if you are not paying for a service, you get what you pay for. A harsh lesson for sure, but a lesson more people should probably learn.
How can a firm rely on a free service without a contract guaranteeing anything?
Like, I don't really blame them for not sticking with a clearly nonviable free tier, but taking the easy way out at the expense of fucking over your (free, sure) users is still sorta rude.
idk if people "should" know better, it's a pretty dreadful world where you're to completely understand the business model behind every service you rely on to some extent, or else it's really your own fault when they pull the rug from under you with like five minutes of very non-specific notice.
Society just couldn't operate if everybody actually read the entirety of the terms of all the services they use. We'd get nothing done.
I'm baffled that people seem to feel this is an unreasonable expectation for anyone trying to make money from such a service, especially as a free user. It's not a public utility.
>Society just couldn't operate if everybody actually read the entirety of the terms of all the services they use. We'd get nothing done.
This isn't society, though, this is business. This is why companies hire lawyers and pay for contracts with their suppliers, etc.
Yes, the way Photobucket went about this is crass, clueless and rude, but users who just expected the service to "work" indefinitely are also at fault for doing so.
For example, if I buy a physical-world object then it's well-understood that the vendor can't break into my house and take it back or, in most circumstances, demand its return. Many physical-world objects additionally come with a warranty assuring that it will continue to work for some length of time.
Online, the digital "object" that I upload to a free service has no such ownership analogue - the service provider can generally cease to offer the service at will. This not only means there's zero warranty, but effectively that service providers can "break into my house" to "take back" the object.
I don't think there's much awareness in the general public that GMail, to pick on a well-used example, could shut down tomorrow and almost every user would irretrievably lose the last N years of their email.
Do you expect the grocery store to give ample notice? Should they change their mind when people complain?
Admittedly the analogy isn't perfect because the samples aren't a major portion of the grocery store's cost/business, but it's still decent.
Proper way to do this would be to: - Notify your customers about the change in an easy to read email and/or message when you log in. - Only apply the change to new uploads at first, then it's easily discoverable and handled by users. Inform them that you plan to do this for all hosted images. - Apply the change to older uploads a few months later.
Hiding and rushing it just makes people angry. They won't pay if they feel you tricked them.
There's a serious distinction, and the complaints explicitly are from business users claiming that they shouldn't be considered even potential customers.
After all, if there's a dispute over a listing, they need to be able to see it as it was at the time of the sale - which means storing copies of all the images.
It would give them control over page-load times and avoid leaking data about customers' browsing habits. And both sites have obviously demonstrated the ability to host (and pay for the hosting of) user-submitted images, as they have much better revenue sources than Photobucket.
(I agree it sucks about forum posts)
They do. Amazon has it's own CDN. I guess users can link to third party images in the product content but the main images are hosted on Amazon CDN via AWS.
Amazon is THE marketplace to sell on. They don't need to keep adding features. Sellers are welcome to take their business elsewhere but don't have any reasonable alternative.
It has happened to all image uploaders in history, and it will keep happening forever, since image uploaders are 1) a money-losing business (people will flee as soon as you stop hotlinking) and 2) have no real value (how much time does it take you to write an image uploader? probably one of the first things you do when you're learning to code for the web)
How does making people super angry about your service serve that purpose? And they had to know. They had to know the numbers of conversions after the ToS change and whether or not their was an uptick of people seeing this and converting. They had to know that they were going to affect a lot of people overnight. This was not accidental in any way.
So what's the difference in money you'd make/lose by putting it up front and center all over your site saying "Photobucket is transitioning away from the free tier". A blog post? An email? A release to the press?
At "worst" they'd find themselves in a situation where most people stop using their service. I put it in quotes because, this also means that the incredible cost of hosting people who never intended to pay also goes away. It's tough but hey, it's still a win for Photo bucket.
At best, if done right, they might even earn the goodwill of people and convert more people over than they'd expected in the first place.
Doing it this way can never get them anywhere more than "worst", and in the long run it'll probably be actually worse as people who might have considered paying will be spooked/pissed off and will vanish into the ether.
I can't understand how anyone thought this was a good execution plan to maximise business profitability.
I read somewhere that this particular business goes in a cycle of: dominant player starts trying to monetize, that pisses off the users, one of the users creates a new free/fast/easy-to-use clone and everyone migrates, and then that new company starts running an actual business and wants to monetize, resetting the cycle. I am sure this is the case with more than just image hosting, but image hosting in particular takes like 20 hours and a few hundred bucks to get started and scales very poorly as you get into multiple millions of users.
Image/File hosting sites are much like you described.
1. All existing options suck because of feature bloat/ads/slowness/what have you
2. "I can run my own!"
3. Popularity explodes for being better (no ads, faster, etc.)
4. Bandwidth costs increase due to growth
5. Owner tries adding ads and other features (paid accounts, file size/bandwidth limits etc.) to help with bandwidth costs
6. This host shuts down or enters into the ring of "sucky existing options" barely keeping afloat
7. The cycle continues
But based on occasional browsing and the odd bit of inside baseball that makes it to the front page, I'd surmise Imgur is somewhere between stages 4 and 5 on your list, and closer to the latter than the former. I'm sure its eventual successor is doing a slow burn toward virality even now.
Edit: is "gambit business" a term? Because if not: (tm)!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669626