Pamela Chan, BCFamily.ca/ Editorial
Recently, I read that a photo sharing site where I house the photos for BC Family has radically changed its financing plan. The site owner started charging website publishers who used the photos they have placed on that site, when they share them on their own website. This is otherwise known as 3rd Party Hosting. As one user explained “I thought I was putting my photos there and that I’d have to pay if I exceeded a certain amount of memory usage”. Some users even paid a monthly fee to avoid ads and gain a few other perks. The first user also explained that he always thought it was understood that these photos would be used elsewhere.
The company has been affected by ad blocking, and other issues, and feels they now need to charge a monthly fee that amounts to $399 US (effectively $500+ per year). If there was an e-mail announcing this change, I didn’t see it. Without warning, I opened up BC Family and found that 100s of photo links had been broken!
If you’re a regular visitor to BCFamily.ca – and thank you for that – you’re going to be seeing the little speedometer for awhile as I tidy things up and sort this out. Right now I’m buried in the depths of html frustration, trying to rewrite the code to work.
At a time when I’m not even sure that my Yahoo account will survive – and who knows about Flickr – this isn’t something that I need right now.
But I’ll figure it out.
🙁
Hashtag #feelingfrustrated !
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