Falling Price of Stock

[riccarbi]

2 hours ago, Brian Yarvin said:

You are missing one of the most basic fundamentals of the stock photo industry; there is an unlimited supply of new photographers. People will keep entering the business without regard to what's happened in the past. Most of the stock photographers I knew twenty-five years ago have quit (because of falling revenues) long ago, and they've been replaced by another generation that's pretty much given up over falling revenues. You yourself joined in at exactly that point and now somebody is waiting in the wings to take your place too.

I am aware of that, Brian. Yet, low hourly revenues also apply to all new photographers joining Alamy, not just to me. You can afford low revenues per photo only if you live in a low-income country or (and that's the future of stock photography of which, possibly, Alamy won't be part of it unless it "downgrades" its current status of midstock agency) if you produce an enormous number of photographs without taking much care of their technical/artistic quality. That's a totally legitimate model of business and we have several online photo agencies that embrace it successfully, nowadays. Yet, I am not sure Alamy would be as successful as them in that playground, fighting against competitors that have been adopting that model for much longer and that perfectly know how it works.

We all know that it's the supply and demand curve which determines prices in a perfectly competitive market;  yet, the same microeconomy rules also state that not all companies can survive forever in that type of market.

Edited January 25, 2020 by riccarbi

[John Mitchell]

3 hours ago, Brian Yarvin said:

You are missing one of the most basic fundamentals of the stock photo industry; there is an unlimited supply of new photographers. People will keep entering the business without regard to what's happened in the past. Most of the stock photographers I knew twenty-five years ago have quit (because of falling revenues) long ago, and they've been replaced by another generation that's pretty much given up over falling revenues. You yourself joined in at exactly that point and now somebody is waiting in the wings to take your place too.

 

This is true of a lot of other "industries"  as well. I did freelance travel writing for many years; and when the digital revolution came along, it ushered in a whole new generation of would-be writers who were willing to work for almost nothing and forfeit all the rights to their work just to see their names in print. As a result, the old business models crumbled and the whole enterprise became not worth the effort (for me, anyway). It's an old story...