Photobucket
 | |
Type of site | Image hosting service |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Photobucket Corporation |
| Created by | Alex Welch, Darren Crystal |
| Website |
www |
| Alexa rank |
 346 (March 2015)[1] |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Optional (required for uploading files) |
| Users | 100,000,000[2] |
| Launched | May 8, 2003 |
| Current status | Active |
Photobucket is an American image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community. Photobucket hosts more than 10 billion images from 100 million registered members, who upload more than four million images and videos per day from the Web and connected digital devices. Photobucket's headquarters are in Denver with regional offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. The website was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures.[3][4] It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007. In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp, sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela. Ontela then renamed itself Photobucket Inc. and continues to operate as Photobucket.[5]
Photobucket is widely used for both personal and business purposes. Links from personal Photobucket accounts are often used for avatars displayed on Internet forums, storage of videos, embedding on blogs, and distribution in social networks. Images hosted on Photobucket are frequently linked to online businesses, online auctions, and classified advertisement websites like eBay and Craigslist.
As of June 30, 2017, Photobucket requires a $99 annual subscription to allow external linking to all hosted images and a $399 annual subscription to allow the embedding of images on third-party websites, such as personal blogs and forums. This policy change, enacted with no advance notice, has been highly controversial.[6]
History
Photobucket was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures.[7][8] It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007.
In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp, sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela. Ontela then renamed itself Photobucket Inc. and continues to operate as Photobucket.[9]
In June 2010, Photobucket was named in the Lead411's Hottest Seattle Companies list.[10]
On June 28, 2017, Photobucket changed its Terms of Use regarding free accounts and third party hosting (hosting on forums, eBay, etc). Only the most expensive plan, at $399.99 per year, now permits third party hosting and linking to forums.[11] Photobucket made this change with no input or consultation with their current users, or the public. Adding this to photobuckets use of excessive pop-up ads, scams, clickbait advertisements, and in some cases viruses embedded in ads, the number of active accounts quickly decreased.
This new business model has caused thousands of forum DIY's and write-ups with explanatory pictures to be rendered useless. About 500 words into the linked document was a declaration that free accounts would no longer permit image-linking to third-party sites. eBay and Etsy have also been affected, in addition to many forums and blogs. Thousands of images promoting goods sold on Amazon and other shopping sites have been removed after the photo-sharing service changed its terms, making Photobucket one of the most despised companies on Earth. One user was quoted as saying: "The CEO of Photobucket will have trouble getting a job digging a garden after this."
Twitter partnership
Twitter announced in June 2011 that Photobucket will become the default photo sharing platform for Twitter.[12] According to a report by Sysomos, 2.25M images are shared on Twitter daily, which accounts for 1.25% of all Tweets posted.[13] Just before the announcement, TwitPic and Yfrog were the leading photo-sharing services.
Features
Accounts
Photobucket offers free and subscription based (Plus) accounts. Free account users receive 2 GB of storage for photo and video uploads, 10 GB of transfers (which they call "bandwidth") per month for sharing and linking, and unlimited access to Photobucket’s editing, slideshow, and Story features. "Plus" accounts are structured into storage tiers and offer unlimited bandwidth, use of site features, and an advertisement free experience.[14]
The following describes Plus subscription pricing as of October 2016:[15]
- 2 GB - free
- 20 GB - $2.99/month, $29.99/year
- 50 GB - $4.99/month, $49.99/year
- 100 GB - $8.99/month, $89.99/year
- 200 GB - $16.99/month, $169.99/year
- 500 GB - $39.99/month, $399.99/year (As of June 30, 2017, the only option that allows embedding/hotlinking)
Videos
Photobucket supports video uploads of 500 MB or less, and 10 minutes or less. The following video file types are supported: 3g2, 3gp, 3gp2, 3gpp, avi, divx, flv, gif, mov, mp4, mpeg4, mpg4, mpeg, mpg, m4v, and wmv. All video files are converted to mp4 format after uploading.
Sharing
The service allows sharing of photos, videos, and albums by email, instant messaging, mobile phone, and social media.
Photobucket stories
On November 15, 2012, Photobucket announced the availability of "Photobucket Stories" which provides users with an easy new way to combine photos, videos, and text into complete, sharable narratives. Photobucket Stories allows users to easily create and collaborate on living stories by inviting friends and family to contribute photos, video and text to a single, sharable canvas. Once Stories are created, they are easily embeddable on blogs, personal, and brand sites, and can be shared among friends from mobile devices or across Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.[16]
Editing
On February 6, 2013 Photobucket announced a partnership with Aviary, an image editing application suite.
Privacy
Photobucket has three privacy options for albums: public, private, and password protected privacy.
Public
When an album is public:
- Photos and videos that have tags, titles, or descriptions display in Photobucket search results when someone searches for the terms in the tags, titles, or descriptions. NA as of March 18, 2013
- Photos in the album may appear in other search engines like Google or Bing.
- Users can follow linked photos on other sites back to albums and browse other photos in the album. NA as of March 18, 2013
- Photos recently uploaded to the album appear on Profile page. NA as of March 18, 2013
- Images will appear on the Photobucket Community page. NA as of March 18, 2013
Private
When an album is private:
- Photos and videos in the album do not display in Photobucket search results.
- Account followers will not see photos uploaded to the album.
- Images uploaded to the album will not display on the user Profile page.
Password protected privacy
When an album is password protected:
- Users enter the password in order to view the album.
- If someone searches for a username, they cannot access password protected albums unless they have a guest password.
- Content will not display in search results.[17]
Fuskering
Although it is possible to set Photobucket albums to "private", this does not prevent the photos within being accessed by someone who knows or can guess the URL. Programs called fuskers exist, which can test for likely photo URLs. This has led to "private" photos on Photobucket being downloaded and distributed elsewhere on the Internet without the consent of their uploaders.[18][19]
Photobucket monitors suspicious activity to track for possible fuskers. However, the easiest way to protect your content is to scramble the links to your photos and videos. Unless users have a need to preserve original file names, Photobucket recommends that users select this option to scramble both past and future uploads.[20]
Since Photobucket does not allow sexually explicit or objectionable content, they may remove content at their discretion due to violations of their terms of service.[21]
See also
References
- ↑ "Photobucket.com/P500 Site Info". Alexa Internet.
- ↑ Wauters, Robin (October 26, 2012). "Photobucket Appoints CEO, Claims Users Upload Four Million Images Per Day". TechCrunch. Retrieved July 3, 2012.
- ↑ "2% of U.S. Internet Traffic goes through Photobucket".
- ↑ "PhotoBucket Closes $10.5M From Trinity Ventures".
- ↑ "It’s Official: Ontela Bought Photobucket from News Corp.".
- ↑ Humphries, Matthew. "Photobucket Breaks Image Links Across the Internet". PCMag.com. Retrieved 2 July 2017.
- ↑ "2% of U.S. Internet Traffic goes through Photobucket".
- ↑ "PhotoBucket Closes $10.5M From Trinity Ventures".
- ↑ "It’s Official: Ontela Bought Photobucket from News Corp.".
- ↑ Lead411's Hottest Seattle Companies List
- ↑ "Photobucket - Photo and image hosting, free photo galleries, photo editing.". Photobucket. Retrieved June 30, 2017.
- ↑ Kiss, Jemima (June 1, 2011). "Photobucket: Twitter's surprise new partner for photo-sharing tool". The Guardian.
- ↑ "How People Currently Share Pictures On Twitter". Sysomos. June 2, 2011. Retrieved June 2, 2011.
- ↑ "Plus Subscription Pricing & Info".
- ↑ "Photobucket Plus Storage".
- ↑ "Photobucket Unveils "Stories" Feature for Creating Lasting Multimedia Narratives".
- ↑ "Album Privacy Explained". Photobucket Support.
- ↑ Read, Max. "Ladies: 8,000 Creeps on Reddit Are Sharing the Nude Photos You Posted to Photobucket". Gawker Media. Retrieved August 16, 2012.
- ↑ Notopoulos, Katie. "The Dark Art Of "Fusking"". BuzzFeed. Retrieved August 16, 2012.
- ↑ "Keeping your photo links safe online".
- ↑ "Photobucket.com Terms of Use".