Viewbug

I don't really know what to think of Viewbug, to be honest. As a service for uploading your photos so you can share a link to them without paying hosting costs, it's great. If you don't pay, you're limited in terms of how many photos can be uploaded per day, but that's not a huge deal - if you want to upload huge amounts of photos, I think it's reasonable that you pay for this.

There are constant competitions, some of which are open to everyone and some that are only open to paid members. I think the themes are interesting and can inspire you to take some photos to fit the theme that you otherwise might not have taken. But, I probably wouldn't pay to enter the competitions. There are prizes, some quite decent (e.g., an actual camera), but I've entered a few and not come close. I'm not a professional, just an enthusiastic amateur, so I'm not sure it's worth continuing to enter. You don't really get feedback or anything. That said, it seems Viewbug might automatically enter you in competitions anyway by picking one of your photos for you. You can change which photo if you like, but you have to keep on top of it because this keeps happening. That's fine, but it fills the competitions up with a bunch of photos that are sometimes irrelevant to the theme.

There are prizes for other things. For example, you can build up points to buy things. Most of the things that you can buy are things like ebooks and the like. There have been physical prizes from time to time, but they are constantly out of stock and you need to build up a LOT of points to get to that level.

There seems to be a lot of automated interaction. I get emails regularly stating that "Your membership expires tonight" (even though I don't have a current paid membership, and they're not exactly going to terminate a free account), or "You won an award" or "You have 3+ pending notifications" or similar. Of course, I can change mailing preferences, but I also feel like I've done this in the past and it hasn't changed anything.

Other members do sometimes like or comment on your photos. I'm not sure how legitimate these are. I do have a few followers who will often like a photo soon after I upload it, but I think there is some automated liking going on. For example, about once a month I get a notification that I got some likes on some photos, and it is always the same two photos. It happens on the first of the month, and the usernames always follow a pattern: a man's name followed by four numbers (e.g., davidsmith_8375) and a woman's name without numbers. I mention this because I don't really believe a lot of what the site tells me is happening with these interactions - it's clearly about trying everything to get you back and keep you engaged in the hope you will upgrade.

I did upgrade one year, just to see what happens. Apart from allowing more uploads (fine if that's useful to you) and entering more competitions (probably a waste of time), it didn't add much. It's also constantly 80% off. If you want to host lots of photos somewhere, maybe this is worth it to you. As an amateur, I'm happy with what I get in the free tier.

So now I just use it as a site to upload photos from time to time so that I have a single link with my photos to share with friends, rather than paying for my own photography site. Otherwise, I take it all with a grain of salt.