Free. But you had to put up with pop up adverts sliding from all sides, over and over, and taking over the whole page, so that every time you used it was a time consuming struggle and quite excruciating.
That is what I thought (but without the level of editorial
) So, they offered it for free but the only people who saw the adverts were the people using it to upload pictures, not the people who were viewing the pictures embedded elsewhere (for example, on a forum)?
See, at that point, I don't know if I would call their decision to charge $400 per annum a bad business decision or the inevitable consequence of a God-awful business model from the get go. "Hey, guys! I've got an idea! We'll offer a free service whereby people can host pictures. We will generate revenue with adverts - but they will only appear when people are administering the albums. The people who are viewing the pictures (i.e. the vast majority of people using our bandwidth) will never see an advert!"
That is just a TERRIBLE model. If you have a hosting service (YouTube, Photobucket, DeviantArt, whatever) the majority of bandwidth and eyes on the site are ALWAYS going to be viewers, not creators. You need a model where the VIEWERS get adverts (because there are more of them to view them) and the creators have a smooth experience (to encourage them to upload more content).
Photobuckets fundamental model - of allowing people to embed pictures WITHOUT viewers having to see adverts - was always flawed. Them having to go crazy now is just the natural result of that.
It might work for them; if a certain percentage (a fraction of a percent . . . ) of users pay $400 per annum, they might generate the same revenue as they were before. It would be people like Padre but without his common sense who pay; people with LOTS of images invested in there and who consider $400 to be small potatoes.
This is, however, essentially a business model of extortion or a protection racket . . . merely a legal one.