alt Hacker News> Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5!
That kind of long con is (and has always been) part of the basic business model of most of the "free" service providers on the internet.
First one is free, played on a decade time scale, works fine in a world where capital is quasi-free.
The hyperscalers play it a little more subtly, but the principle is the same.
I really doubt anyone's getting rich off this. Genuinely doubt it. How many people remember their photobucket accounts, let alone bother to hunt them down, let alone want to bother getting a credit card out and remembering to cancel (or more hilariously, who's gonna pay $60 a year to keep that sub). I think whoever is running that site is probably barely breaking even at best, considering that they have to keep paying the S3 bill to store literally every image uploaded to PB ever.