I understand their decision to increase revenue and control their bandwidth etc, what I am having trouble with is the rather arbitrary way they did it. A longer grace period would be have been nice to allow some chance of a controlled change on the part of users
However, now that they have done so what will drive the success and or failure will be how many people pony up the big money to keep 3rd party links alive. If enough do then I would expect others like Imgur and Flickr and Smugmug to follow suit and raise their prices accordingly for similar services. After all the big money only comes into play if you want to keep the 3rd party links alive. As far as being an image hosting site where others can go look at your pictures very little has changed other than lowering the amount of "free" space.