I haven't been to SmugMug in years (decade?) but wow, holy early 2000s big bold brash neon web design. Then there's this huge scrolling ticker in 72pt text at the top, "free festival passes for the next 50 subscribers" that has been there ... for a few days now. Gives total "You may already be a winner!" vibes.
Which is basically a "pro-ish-plus" version of Flickr from the same owners as far as I know. I've been a Pro user of Flickr for a long time but probably hard to justify at this point which probably means that it's even harder to justify for the average consumer. Interviewewed them back in the day when they were a prominent AWS customer.
Yeah, they should buy Flickr and abandon the whole social media aspect and just turn it into an exact copy of SmugMug, but interleave the pricing tiers.
It would really be crazy if they did that, but they claimed that limiting the number of photos users could upload, instead of limiting the quality, somehow made it more like a social media platform.