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 ...