So I reupped to PBase for another year, albeit with an eye on the exit. I've been here before of course, having made an ill fated excursion to SmugMug in 2010, but I've learnt from that experience.

For the moment I'm stuck here. Not because of the photos; if or more likely when the site finally implodes under its owners' apathy and arrogance, I do have all of them stored locally and increasingly backed up to the cloud. The problem is that with many of the earlier ones I made the mistake of watermarking them with a PBase address and only having the photo descriptions in the PBase gallery. I therefore have to reprocess the images with my own watermark, and suck all of the description data out and put it in the photo metadata before implosion day. That still leaves any and all comments that I've received on PBase vulnerable to loss, but one problem at a time. (In any case, a lot of the older comments now show as coming from "Guest" because they're from ex-members whose accounts have been vapourised, and I don't recall who left them.)

Yes, I've been predicting said implosion for some time now, but look at the chart and see if you can see that story ending any other way. The average decline in photos posted between 2010 and 2018 was over 21% year on year. In 2018 it moderated to "only" -8.4%, went back into a double digit loss (-12%) for 2019, then Covid hit. Boom, -34.9% for 2020, -11.34% for 2021.In 2022 there was growth for the first time in over a decade as people got out shooting again; +8.97% which did bring the total number of photos for the year back above 1 million, but didn't even recover 2021's loss. As of the time of writing the projected full year for 2023 will see a new drop by about 3.5%. The big unknown is how many members and therefore how much revenue that number represents, though it's safe to say that it's "a reducing amount". If it's an AVERAGE of 2 photos per day across the membership for a year with a million photos posted, there would be 1,370 members. That would be about $US31.5K in revenue. Maybe a bit more for the handful of people who use over 3 Gig storage, but not much more. That's not a huge amount these days. The price hasn't changed in the whole time I've been here which might be considered a positive BUT I suspect that the reason is the lack of a business plan and inertia on the owners' part more than a strategy of keen pricing. Indeed the price has (kinda) dropped since (even ignoring inflation) $23 was originally for 1 Gig and is now for 3 Gig. Except... it's easy to give away nothing and look like a hero. I've been on PBase for 16 years and have just this year gone above 1 Gig (and not by much), and I'm sure I'm not the only one. So that 2 "extra" Gig? I'm not really noticing it.

I didn't realise how dead the forums and therefore competitions were until I set the messages to "mark all as read" either. I assumed that "PaD Discussion" was still active. In reality it was only being kept afloat by themes and scavenger hunts being set up by Lynn H, but she apparently gave up on those at the end of 2022 and there hasn't been a posting in there for months. The Show and Tell competition is still creaking along but anything above 5 entries for a competition is a good week, anything beyond 10... well, that rarely if ever happens any more.

Of course the News forum has a posting every 3 years or so about Great! New! Developments! like sharper thumbnails (and I swear, I could not see one iota of difference before and after that alleged change), or thumbnail sizes which caught up to what other sites were doing a decade ago. This is followed by a chorus of cheers and posts of "Bravo!", "Brilliant, Thank you!", "Can't wait to see what's next!" (Sure you can. You can just wait 3 years, give or take.) At this point you have to wonder when on Earth some people are going to realise that this is like that tired old Peanuts cartoon where Lucy would keep pulling the football away from Charlie Brown just before he kicks it. How many times is it possible to fall for it?

At present I'm moving across to Flickr (which I once loathed, but don't now) as I complete updating PBase galleries. The only issue there is that I normally post to PBase with landscape at a width of 1200 pixels which is large enough to not be a postage stamp on large monitors (as long as the images are displayed at Original size), but small enough to discourage theft. Flickr, on the other hand, will resize anything between 1025 and 1599 pixels down to 1024 pixels. I'm not a fan of the display site doing the resizing, and I don't REALLY want to be posting 1600 pixel images (though I've done a couple of "hero" ones at that size). Sooo... go back and redo the old ones at 1024, or just let Flickr resize them? Probably the latter, but maybe change to 1024 as my "standard" size for the future.

I'm spending a LOT of time on photography now, just not necessarily new photography. Hopefully I'll be finished long before 2024 rolls around.

To be honest I'd have more respect for them if they just came out and said what, IMHO is apparent. The site is just a hobby for them now, it's not generating much revenue so short of major outages they don't really pay much attention to it, they'll do support requests based on whether they feel like it and whether they like the requester, they can't be bothered doing anything to arrest the falling membership and membership engagement (not ignoring the membership would be an obvious first step, but one which seems too hard; hence the reason why the OM5 is not in the database despite many (ignored) requests), and the only improvements you'll see is when Slug gets an itch to play around with some code. It would be profoundly unprofessional in my view, but at least it would be honest.

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Edit April 2024: So the numbers came in for 2023, and I've updated the image accordingly (and made the numbers easier to read). Apparently things slow down in the northern Winter. (I thought that there may have been a boost with Christmas, but even if that does result in more photos taken they may not be posted until January.) In any case, the final drop was 5.05%. It's back below a million, but still slightly up on the all time low of 2021. Extrapolating the year to date figures for this year, though... that predicts a drop of about 157K shots, for a drop of 15.36%. If that happens, it will be a new record low.