I read an interesting little article by Stuart Maconie ( UK writer and DJ) in last weeks Waitrose magazine (upmarket UK supermarket), about a well known French academic  called Jacques Attali. He wrote a book in 1977 called "Noise: The political economy of music" where he predicted a future where there would be so much music and it would be so easily available that it would cease to have any value. He called it the coming 'Crisis of Proliferation'. Maconie then went on to describe the current situation in the music business, looking back to the 1970's where a record in the charts could sell millions and provide a decent pension plan, and comparing that with a successful band nowadays who, despite worldwide acclaim were struggling to buy a one bed flat in London.
Ring any bells anyone ? Sounds much the same with the image industry.

Well, world is changing everyday, and what it was once a good business now is worthless...

The question is, are we living this transition now??

A big and growing share of the public now believes - 'assumes' would be a better word - that music is free.  Physical media is ending, and even downloads are on a shaky basis.  The future is streaming services which are subscription based - sound familiar?  A microstock subscription is basically a stream. 

And beyond that, free but with embedded ads.  And that will come to microstock too - free image banks, all you have to do is rake your eyeballs over a few ads.  The middlemen are totally in control, the content creators can't get any accounting of usages, and there's no "sale price" on which to base a commission.

That's what happened to the App market in the past few years.

They have it way worst, because a good image can take less than 30 minute to produce, while a good app takes weeks or months. Now that everyone wants apps for free, many categories have become nearly valueless.

Being in both sectors, I can tell you guys that I make way more money selling images than apps and they take up less of my time. SS alone doubles what I make in the App Store.

I was a software developer until a few years ago.  I remember watching that 'app' thing get started, and become big - and yet I was always thinking that no one could possibly make any money at it.  You couldn't even charge $5. But the economics of software development still applied - any app worth paying for takes man-months of effort.  You'd have to sell many thousands of copies to even begin to make money.  So in the end, an app by itself would never be profitable - it would have to tie into some service, be part of some company's bigger picture, to pay off.    I'm pretty sure lots of guys spent countless hours on apps that turned out to be a waste of time.