I have to agree. Now that Dall-e2 is available to everyone it's a piece of cake to generate any image you want, all for free. The only extra step a contributor has to do is to upscale the AI generated art.

Theoretically even 7-8 year old children can be contributors now, if the stock site policy allows it.

Nobody can tell  the state of microstock industry earnings in 10 - 20 years.
About 20 years ago istock, shutterstock started.
Now AI is at the starting line.
AI is a tool like DSLR have been at the beginning of microstock. This tool is much more intelligent than a DSLR.
I guess the complete process of stockphostography can be done by a script in a few years. Making the image, editing, keyboarding, uploading, etc,.. So don't forget some users with powerful workstation uploading hundreds of images a day to free sites.
So i guess an enormous number of AI Images uploading at free sites will be hard competition for stock photographers. 

I compared at shutterstock.

10 years ago, I had 11 SODs in the whole month of July. These brought an average of $23.96 per SOD.

So far this July, after just over half a month, I have 27 SODs. The average take per SOD is $1.18, which is down to one-twentieth.

What that will look like in 10 years is anyone's guess....

Quote from: cobalt on July 11, 2023, 06:43

I agree, just "pushing a button" is not what makes our images sell.

Just "writing a prompt" is not what I do when I create content with the assistance of ai.

The whole research, mood board, concept, design choices for color, lighting, angles....it does not happen by itself.

Yeah, as if Ai tools were really eben able to execute color, lighting and angles exactly the way you describe them. Keep telling you that....

"Just writing a prompt" is exactly what you do when you have an AI create content for you....

I don't understand why people are trying to  tell others that this was some complex work, when the others they are talking to have access to Ai image generators just as well and understand how this works. I created thousands of AI images myself by now, I sell as many as real photos by now (even though I have much more real photos in my port!). I understand how this works and I can SEE for myself that AI can create amazing looking images that sell like hot cake by "just writing a prompt". The most effort AI images take is keywording them and no one can convince me to believe otherwise. I can create an image that would have taken me 1 hour of setting up and 50$ in material within 10 seconds and for the price of about 0,00001$ now.

Probably one day Ai image generators will really be so complex that you can describe exactly what you want down to the angle of a hand. But right now it isn't.

Maybe you have to keep telling that lie to customers, to keep them from figuring out too soon that they do not need you anymore and can create the images they want themselves just as easily as you (Oh, they will figure it out eventually!), but you cannot fool other contributors who have been creating AI images for months now.

Then I must be totally useless at prompting, because the images I want, I very, very rarely get them on the first prompt.

There is lots of 80% quality that I probably could upload, but I prefer to have things my way.

Might send the rest to wirestock, but I would like to fill my Adobe port with things that fit me. I don't want another endless "oh another prompter port".

But I am not using midjourney, perhaps that is indeed the magical engine that can read minds and give you perfect images with one sentence.

eta

Once Firefly is available for commercial use, I wanted to use mostly firefly. But I have to admit, I am not very impressed with the results.

I hope they drastically upgrade the quality.

...
Then I must be totally useless at prompting, because the images I want, I very, very rarely get them on the first prompt.
...
But I am not using midjourney, perhaps that is indeed the magical engine that can read minds and give you perfect images with one sentence.
...

Honestly, I think this is at least partly it. I tried Dalle again recently and was shocked to see it hadn't really improved since I first tried it when all this stuff started taking off. Midjourney is light years ahead. Other engines based on stable diffusion are also very good, but I don't have a lot of experience of others.

Currently working on a series with specific types of tea and I can maybe use 5% of the results.

If you just want some kind of cup with a hot drink, that is easy, but if you want something specific the results are horrible.

But perhaps Midjourney would give perfect results, who knows.

when i asked for making omelets on flames of a gas stove i ended up with  flaming omelets - great presentation.  (in RL i discovered that if I add wine to a skillet after removing a steak, the wine will burst into flames)

Quote from: offisapup on July 10, 2023, 13:17

Think about it this way. 20 years ago, there was no microstock photography. There was stock photography where photographers were paid handsomely for their images. All that changed with shutterstock and the gradual race to the bottom. Why do you think things will be the same 20 years later? There's no reason why what happened to traditional stock photography wouldn't happen to microstock when VR and AR devices become the norm a few years later.

iStock started charging for pics in 2001.

I suspect the slide will continue and despite inflation everywhere else we will get a smaller percent of each cheaper sale which will be greatly diluted by the absolutely massive image libraries and all of the AI generated offerings. Will there be people still making money - yes, but it will be more difficult.

Correct iStock was first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_photography

Here's a summary and what I think.

The early microstock company iStockphoto was founded in May 2000. Originally a free stock imagery website, it transitioned into its current micropayment model in 2001.

Shutterstock was founded in 2003 with a monthly subscription fee. In 2004 Dreamstime was founded as new microstock agency. By 2007 Dreamstime was competing with iStockphoto, Fotolia and Shutterstock, all expanded into major microstock companies

Between the 1990s and the mid-2000s, Bill Gates' Corbis Images and Getty Images combined, purchased more than 40 stock photo agencies. iStockphoto was acquired by Getty in 2006. In February 2009, Jupitermedia Corporation sold their online stock images division, Jupiterimages, to Getty Images for $96 million in cash, including the sites stock.xchng and StockXpert.

The stock photo company Fotolia announced that it would be acquired by Adobe for $800 million on December 11, 2014.

Corbis Images grew to include other stock photo brands like Veer, Corbis Motion and GreenLight. In 2016, Corbis was sold to, Visual China Group. All content outside Asia is distributed by Getty Images.

Even if we don't see the line of reasoning from the history, because of our position, Getty (like them or not) will eventually end up on top of the whole photo market. For micropayment, there will be SSTK, iStock, Adobe as the leaders with DT as a middle level, and the rest will be minor or disappear. The boom is over.

State of the market and earnings? How low can they go?

I thought 25� was minimal ten years ago, and the agencies proved me wrong. They cut levels, cut prices, and cut commissions. We now get a smaller pay per download as a result. When enough artists stop working Microstock and start doing something else, the value will stabilize. Until then, financial facts say, on a basic economic system, Supply is far exceeding the Demand, too many images, too many artists, and the buyers are in command of driving price competition by the distribution agencies.

In any case, the value and get paid for our work will not be going up, except in specific need areas. General stock, common images, things that almost everyone can shoot anywhere will be just what it is. Common over supplied, minimal value image products.

If anyone believes there's a market for sand in the Sahara or ice in the arctic, then you might think the future of Microstock is positive and there will be a return of income and value. Not going to happen! I can be fairly confident in my prediction that things will get worse and will never get better than they are now, and never return to close to how things were in 2013.

In 10-20 years, these will be the good old days?

Well I am here to find out if the doom and gloom is true.

Trying to rebuild my stock income after a nearly 10 year absence (except for eyeem/twenty20).

When I look through the agency content, there are so many incredible loopholes and easy to shoot stuff missing, so I hope I still have a future.

Even editorial. You would think that my city has been done to death, but once you move away from the cathedral, the rest of the city landmarks and touristy places are not documented.

I was actually very surprised.

Then you upload content and you are basically the only person providing that.

I am also trying to make a small travel plan, look at the tourist or interesting things around me and do one or two a month.

Just because agencies have millions of files, or maybe Getty might soon have 1 billion, doesn't mean their libraries are complete.

And it reliably leads people back to our port.

One more plus: when people look through my ports there is no real bestseller to copy. I have a very wide mix of content that somehow sells, but it will not really show up if people keep looking for bestsellers to copy.

But especially with local editorial I might be the only one offering something.

The long trail portfolio might have a better chance of survival as the �only single bestsellers� ports in the future. Because they will find themselves mercilessly copied with ai.

How would the ai know what sells and is a bestseller?

And everyone doing that will just lead to even more copies.