
Amazon and eBay images broken by Photobucket's 'ransom demand' - uladzislau
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40492668
======
michaelt
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 agree it sucks about forum posts)

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
>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.

~~~
yellowsir
i guess that was the point, they don't rehost 3th party images...

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nstart
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.

~~~
IgorPartola
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.

~~~
throwanem
I can buy that. They've been an also-ran for a very long time now, ever since
Imgur (at least!) came along and ate their lunch.

~~~
IgorPartola
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.

~~~
Nadya
Bit of Google searching, found what I was looking for:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810889)

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

~~~
throwanem
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.

------
probably_wrong
I want to be angry at this, but I really can't.

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.

~~~
ben0x539
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.

~~~
krapp
>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.

~~~
BoorishBears
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.

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soulchild37
Don't be a free user if you really care about the long term service provided
by the provider :
[https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/)

~~~
mrkrab
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)

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reaktivo
An issue that could have been solved by watermarked pictures.

~~~
autokad
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

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kungpoo
TIL photobucket still exists

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SparkleBunny
They've been shit for a while now. Switch to imgur and be done with it.

~~~
SippinLean
Imgur has been riddled with ads and slow load times for quite a while, the
mobile experience is especially terrible.

~~~
SparkleBunny
That's your fault for not using uBlock Origin.

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Companion
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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orless
An earlier thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14669626)

~~~
kzahel
Another earlier thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695955)

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paulpauper
terrible site full of malware-laden ads. imgur.com is way better for free
image hosting

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jeffdavis
[https://xkcd.com/1150/](https://xkcd.com/1150/)

