I"ve been using imgur for years .. use their code and markup so they can make their money and hopefully they won't have to convert to a pay as you go system like Photof&ckt
Servers, Network, system administrators etc all cost money .. so unless you've managed to get all that capital and everyone to work for free, these hosting companies do need to make money. Most of them do it by exploiting your images and backlinks as a data source. for the most part you get what you want and they get what they want .. With photobucket apparently people were discarding the code and just direct linking the images, depriving them of their revenue ..
Not trying to defend their actions as there were better ways to handle it, but I do understand how they got there.
Quote from jrob_bent on Jul 21st, 2017, 6:29am:I am switching to Imgur when I get to my daughter's house today. The wifi here at RV park is way to slowwww. I think Photobucket is going to have repercussions for the way they did this. I got an email saying I was over using the 3rd party hosting, only after they deleted all my pictures from all sites. Very professional Photobucket.