Photobucket was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures. 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.
In June 2010, Photobucket was named in the Lead 411's Hottest Seattle Companies list.
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, etc. Which effectively alienating a very large percentage of their users, whom only used Photobucket for third-party image hosting. 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 account 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.
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.
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.
The following describes Plus subscription pricing as of October 2016
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 (Only option that allows embedding/hotlinking)