Is Stock Photography Dead?

I’m not sure that stock photography is dead, but it’s been dying a slow death for years. 

In the not-so-distant past, when there weren’t digital cameras in the hand of every single hand, shooting stock photos and videos was a highly profitable venture. The agencies and photographers working with them had a market and a product with endless demand and high revenues. Single photographs often sold in the thousands of dollars range.




But two things happened. First, low-cost digital single lens reflex cameras (DSLRs) created a vast new crowd of photographers who could make professional quality photographs on a low budget.  And second, media agencies moved to the internet and built platforms that allowed crowd sourcing of huge amounts of content with very little in the way of royalties.

Photographs that may have sold with a $2000 dollar royalty for the photographer were now being sold with a $2.00 royalty.  The company that pioneered this new form of online stock agency was iStock. iStock still exists, but it is part of the Getty Images family of companies. 

Since then, things have only got worse.  Several online platforms have began distributing content without any charges to end users or royalties to content creators like photographers.  Instead, these new platforms generate revenue using models like affiliate marketing or advertising.  Regardless, easy access to free licenses further undermined the royalty-based stock photography market.

As photography lost its value as stock content, content creators often supplemented or replaced their licensable content with video.  The growth in demand for licensable video content allowed the stock agency business model to continue to flourish and attract additional content creators into the market.  Prosumer cameras with amazing video capability and cheap drones with 4K video changed the game for many.

But with the start of the AI revolution and quick prompts to generate ‘fake’ stock photographs and videos, there is new uncertainty about how much longer content creators will be able to generate income creating stock assets. 

For now, video content remains lucrative and editorial images and videos remains safe from generative AI. And many purchasers of stock content still want authentic images.  For now, the stock photography market remains viable but there are fewer and fewer individuals looking to make a fulltime living from stock, at least in high cost jurisdictions like North America and Europe.

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