The End of Stock Photography
What happened when I tried to get rich as a stock photographer
On the afternoon of Friday, August 4th, as I sat beside the pool, which sat beside Lake Michigan, which for its part sat atop the state of Indiana, I received an email from microstock mega-agency Shutterstock informing me of a change to its payout system.
This is not to be confused with the email many of us received from the company last week, informing us that Shutterstock agreed to merge with Getty Images and create the final boss of stock photography agencies.1 It is not a monopoly, because other agencies do exist. But like other famous not-monopolies Google and Microsoft, it will take up an awful lot of space and wield an awful lot of power. Let’s hope they decide to not be awful about it.
The merger is probably an effort to fend off Adobe. The software behemoth has a market cap roughly 150 times that of Shutterstock, a nonzero amount of which can be attributed to its stock image licensing business—which just so happens to be built right into the very applications designers use to create things that often need photographs.
Shutterstock’s summer message was not, contrary to my expectation, “we’re keeping more of your money.” In fact it was a note intended to be helpful, saying they would be reducing the minimum amount a contributor needs to earn before receiving a payout. This number would drop from $35 to $25, so I would be able to get paid faster.
If you’re a contributor, you get paid pennies (or, on rare occasions, dollars) for each licensing of your image. That slowly fills up your balance sheet until Shutterstock cuts you a check. Previously they didn’t cut you that check until you were due $35. Which meant if you earned $30 one month, you’d have to wait until the end of next month when, ideally, you’d sold at least $5 more.
In theory it’s good news. They’ve dropped the number to $25 so we’ll get paid more often.
But it’s not good news. Why drop the payout threshold by nearly 30%? There’s only one reason: because it’s taking longer for photographers to reach the $35 threshold.
Somewhere inside Shutterstock HQ was a meeting in which someone spoke up on behalf of photographers: “Hey, we need to speed things up. It’s taking them too long to earn $35.”
Let that sink in.
Stock photography is dying.
That’s not exactly a hot take, but I think it’s dying rapidly. The agencies and their licensing model will stick around, but you and I won’t be able to earn meaningful income licensing stock photography. Because AI.
This is pretty much the only AI prediction in which I have confidence. Stock photography will take a backseat to AI image generation. Because any time you need a $6 picture of a dog in a bowtie, a photorealistic illustration is likely to suffice.
The new Shutterstock/Getty behemoth will invest heavily in the capability to generate stock imagery (technically they already have) but what I’m assuming will be more impactful on the business is that designers who currently pay for stock photographs will soon be able to generate exactly the image they need via AI without involving a stock agency at all.
Why spend hours searching Shutterstock for the perfect image of a woman wearing a crown of flowers for your mayonnaise commercial when you can generate exactly the right woman with exactly the right expression and exactly the right flowers in just a few minutes?
If you’re a stock photographer you need to prepare for the worst, and soon.
Because the stock industry has already been decimated—the photographers I know who earn income licensing stock have been complaining of rapidly declining revenue for years—at least when the bottom drops out there won’t be far to fall.2
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That I missed the boat on the heyday of stock photography has always bothered me. I envy those photographers who built large archives and now augment their income, even just a little, while they sleep.
The golden era of stock licensing ended in the 1990s. Back then most stock was licensed in “rights managed” (RM) format—meaning the licensee outlined their use and paid a fee based on the prominence of that use. It also meant photographers were well compensated.
Then came “royalty free” (RF) licensing, and it turns out buyers really liked that approach. Images were much less expensive and sold for a flat fee regardless of the use. Photographers’ cuts were lower, but workable at scale.
As the digital era dawned, a new approach swept the stock photography world: microstock. Agencies such as Shutterstock and iStock (a Getty property) sold a large quantity of images at even lower prices. Think $7 for an image you could use in any way you’d care to. When social media boomed, the need for a firehose of cheap, good enough images was born. Microstock pays photographers as little as a dollar or less per image, and the trend has brought rates down across the industry.
More recently came the subscription model. Designers pay a flat monthly fee for access to an all-you-can-eat buffet style stock image library. It drives image licensing fees down below a buck, and the photographer’s share can literally amount to pennies.
That’s a long-term trend. Paired with a steady supply-side increase (everybody’s a photographer), this does not bode well for those who count on stock sales for income.
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During the pandemic shutdown of 2020, as I lazed in a hammock in the backyard, I decided I finally had the time to see what stock photography licensing was all about. So I pitched some images to a few agencies. The choosiest said thanks but no thanks. Another firm that focused on RM and RF licensing said great, send us what you’ve got. And the microstock firms required only that images be largely in focus. So I uploaded a handful of shots to a couple of agencies to see how it worked.
At the risk of spoiling the surprise, my major takeaway is that for stock to be feasible even as a side hustle, you have to submit constantly. Images get stale quickly and timeliness matters. Like investing in that other kind of stock, incrementally adding for growth over time is crucial for even modest success. I didn’t do that. I uploaded about a hundred images in May of 2020 and then started planning what to buy with my millions.
A couple weeks later I licensed four images—my first stock sales ever. Three of them earned me a quarter and the fourth garnered $1.88.
The next month I sold 21 images for a grand total of $5.35. This continued over the next six months, until things picked up in December and I raked in $20 to $30 a month through the spring of 2021. This was largely because I shot something timely: my government stimulus check. Images that illustrate a current, newsworthy event will sell. You won’t make a lot of money, but at least you’ll feel smart for figuring that out.
To this day, 55 months after uploading 100 images to Shutterstock, my total earnings are $381.66. To be fair, the vast majority of that was in the first year. This is my fault for not feeding more photographs into the hopper. During that same time I’ve had 12 sales at Alamy, where I only uploaded about 45 images, totaling $413. So on the whole I’m a 700-aire!
This was not without effort. I didn’t spend weeks on it, but I surely spent more than $794.66 worth of time on it. And that’s the problem. Even if you dedicate yourself to this and master becoming prolific at producing the kinds of images that sell, microstock is not going to earn anything more than pocket money. I don’t know if there are enough hours in the day to make this a profitable venture. And that’s before factoring in AI.
As I wrote in “The Content Problem”, the system works if you’re Mr. Shutterstock or Mr. Getty, and maybe for their employees too. But for the workers producing the widgets—speculatively, on our own time and with our own equipment, mind you—it’s gig work. We would frankly earn more if we spent that time driving for Uber.
If you’re sitting on a library of thousands of images, it may still be worth licensing royalty free if you’ve got the time. Or if you create stylized images for a boutique, rights-managed agency. Either way you’ll have to act fast, because the clock is ticking. If you’re starting from scratch, I don’t know how you could ever justify taking the time to make stock work with generative AI looming.
Every stock image that does not need to be factually truthful—newsworthy images from photojournalists should be safe—is ripe for AI replacement. It’s going to get faster, better, and cheaper. And that triumvirate, combined with the decades long trend, will soon kill stock photography.
It’s possible I am overreacting. I’m no bonafide expert on the nuances of the industry, but I have been interviewing and commiserating with professional photographers for 25 years. Many of those were world-class landscape and wildlife photographers profiled for Outdoor Photographer, who were reporting a decline in stock revenue that whole time. Look at places like Reddit and Flickr where photographers congregate and see they’ve been lamenting unsustainably low fees for 15 years. I simply don’t see the trend reversing.
I will admit, I do find the whole thing quite fascinating—seeing an entire industry evolve, devolve, and disappear in the span of a handful of years. If it weren’t making it so much harder for my people to earn a living, I might have actually enjoyed watching it unfold. Instead, even though I’m not personally banking on my own stock archive, I don’t think I’ll enjoy watching this at all.
The press release called it “a merger of equals,” which initially elicited a chuckle because I believed Getty Images to be much larger than Shutterstock. But a quick search showed me the companies’ respective financials: Getty has a market cap of $1.08 billion on $240 million of revenue in the third quarter of 2024, and Shutterstock a market cap of $1.07 billion on $250 million of revenue in the same period. I’ll be darned. It really is a merger of equals.
I would love, genuinely, to be proved wrong. And I’m sure for every 1,000 photographers not making a living from stock there’s one who is. So if you know that person, please put them in touch with me. I’ve long been fascinated by stock, and I’m even more intrigued by the challenges the industry is currently facing, and if anyone is able to do it and prosper as a photographer I want to know (and share) their secrets.
Agreed about the death of stock.
Back in the mid late 90s I was with an outfit called Photonica, and was able to do quite well for myself with stock. They were subsequently bought by Getty and my profits went way down very quickly. I hung on with them for a little while, and finally gave up the ghost about eight years ago. Now, I’ve moved on to licensing on my own, and there has been more of a positive up tic. But not like the mid-nineties.
Hi Bill-
My second job in photography was with the stock behemoth Thre Image Bank in the mid-1970's. Among our many successes was the sale of Pete Turner's shot of Devil's Postpile to the "Close Encounters" movie. I believe we got $9,000.00 for that - a new benchmark in the business. Those days are long gone, just like the fees I used to earn out of my south-of0-Market studio in San Francisco.
The problem is this: there is little creativity left in the profession. How many flower/sunset/redwood-grove/homeless-people-on-the-street/sexy woman and otherwise don't-you-feel-bad-about-the-way-it-is shots are out there? There is truly nothing new under the sun when it comes to shooting with a camera. And there are more cameras out there than ever before, regardless of the talent, or lack of, that wields them.
The only thing that keep me going is a deep love of the craft - that is why it is analog for me!
-Robert Buelteman