Photobucket’s experiment with being a $399.99 premium service is over, and so too is the tenure of the CEO who led it. The Denver-based photo storing service on Thursday revealed it has slashed its prices and restored millions of photos around the internet hoping to mollify millions of customers it angered last year. “It’s the first step of many to restore the trust of customers,” said Ted Leonard, Photobucket’s new CEO. Article By Greg Avery, Reporter, Denver Business Journal, dated May 18, 2018 https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/...cket-drops-pricing-that-angered-millions.html I normally don't use Photobucket but in late 2016 I uploaded this picture: Others who use/used Photobucket can check their old posts to see if their pictures have returned.
Unlike so many other ventures who went the way of the dodo, after word spreads Photobucket will likely thrive well into the future.
Survive maybe, I would be shocked if they actually thrive. People that have never used them to this point have no reason to start and the overwhelming majority of people they chased away won't go back
Seems a little too late at this point as many people have moved on to using other services and I doubt they'll return. It will be nice however when viewing older forum threads to see the accompanying pictures again if they restore them all.
I have a different perspective . . . think of the number of prominent businesses which voluntarily backtracked like this after making such a mistake. I cannot recall a single one. Despite never once having used Photobucket's service, I now am at least looking into it, simply because they have demonstrated their awareness that the customer is always right. Yeah, until those other service's users move on after they try raising their own prices. It's one thing to make in-roads into a market as an agile business - and another entirely to retain it after substantial growth.
@ToughCOINS would you compare this to Coke backtracking on New Coke and returning to the classic formula?
There's nothing voluntary when you wait months and months and months to do it and then are only doing it because everyone is fleeing your service and no one new is signing up. There are countless options for people to use and all their former users have seen that they no longer need them. They has essentially held peoples photos hostage unless they paid up to get access to them them again, those people aren't going back
Similar, but not exactly the same . . . Coke changed their product, and Photobucket changed their pricing. All companies contemplate changes in pricing on a regular basis, and often enact them, but are much more cautious about changing product with a long-standing track record of success like that of Coke. I disagree. They were not fined by some federal agency or forced to pay reparations for some wrongdoing. Like Coca Cola Brands, they simply responded to free-market forces. Both knew the risks involved, and both were smart enough to recognize the choices made were bad ones, albeit later for Photobucket than for Coca Cola. Many executives which choose a bad direction, and later fail to reverse course end up taking the ship to the bottom, simply because they can . . . because they are not forced to do otherwise . . . because it is a free market.
Coke responded very quickly. Photobucket took forever to give up their insane pricing. There is a huge difference with how the two companies responded to what was obvious from the very start. There are a ton of threads all over the internet and the message is the same in every single one of them that the majority of their former users will never even consider them again
Coke is blessed with business savvy like few others in any industry. They almost assuredly contemplated and prepared contingency plans for potential blow-back even before endorsing the change in formulation. Startups like Photobucket don't have the resources for such marketing / risk eval / contingency planning. As I recall, small-time users for which the Photobucket service was intended had little issue with the changes. The insane pricing was reserved for ridiculous amounts of storage. I believe the biggest push-back came from those users who were domain-holders taking unfair advantage of the service by pig-piling in a big way on their memory capacity, rather than paying for their own memory storage. Those who did so, if they had any common sense at all, had to know it was only a matter of time before they'd get weeded out or have to pay for their excessive usage, no matter who they were taking advantage of. I suspect that they will never enjoy stability with any one service, as they will encounter resistance to their parasitic practices, one service after the next. If Photobucket has discovered an acceptable / profitable way to accommodate the memory hogs, kudos to them . . . they'll likely recover the lost business. If not, those parasites will likely become / remain some other service's headache.
Except photbucket isn’t a startup, they’ve been around since 2005 Most people that used them did so because they always had all photobucket did was teach their consumers that there’s other options out that that are free and better/easier. They essentially shoved their customers away so they would discover they don’t need photobucket. People aren’t going to stop using free ones that work better or move all their picture back to a company that held their stuff hostage who essentially retroactively applied charges to content that had been there for some time. Most websites and forums host their own images now making their party hosting less relevant as well and there’s more competition that’s continously growing. There is a path for them to stay in business maybe, but there’s almost no path to them being the dominate force again or really even a major player
Coke didn't return to the classic formula. I think the whole switch back and forth was deliberate. Before they brought out New Coke and dropped the old formula Coca Cola was sweetened with cane sugar. New Coke was the only option in the market for long enough for all of the original formula coke to get bought up and consumed, and then the "Classic Coke" returned. But now it was sweetened with High Fructose Corn Syrup. It's close but not quite the same in taste. Get a bottle of Mexican Coke which is still sweetened with cane sugar and you can taste the difference.
I’ve had the Mexican one and it does taste different. Also Pepsi has had a retro version the past few years where they use real sugar.
@baseball21 If you don't like photobucket, then don't use them. Easy peasy. I don't see the need to write a novella about their business practices. That's yesterday's news.
If you don't like reading a discussion that was occurring just don't read it. Easy peasy. I don't see the need to make erroneous comments about a discussion days after it had ended.
