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The prices of photos sold by those services are insanely high. Those businesses would be much more profitable if they lowered their prices significantly, but I

• michaelbuckbee 2y ago
  You're right and wrong. While they're very expensive to me in my everyday life, they were originally 10x cheaper than the alternative: getting custom photography done for ads, websites, brochures, etc.
• mschuster91 2y ago
  > The prices of photos sold by those services are insanely high. That's because private citizens are not the target group of Getty, Shutterstock etc. - the target group are newspapers, TV stations, high-profile/fulltime YouTubers and media/advertising agencies. They all have these expensive stock photo licenses because that's cheaper than hiring dedicated photographers. Whatever shot you want - unless it's of your product or you have very specific artistic needs, chances are very high one of the stock photo services (either Getty, one of the large press agencies such as AP or local/industry specific services like Imago that specialises in sports) will have whatever shot you need. And that kind of database access is not cheap to start.
  • ghaff 2y ago
    Right. There's no way you can provide meaningful compensation for photographers/artists from a target market of need some fairly random image/graphic for a blog post. But photographers on staff are expensive. And even as it is, a lot of us who toyed with submitting to microstock for a bit mostly gave up. They don't even want a lot of nature/flower/landscape photography and once you've got pictures of people, you need to faff with model releases and the like--and you still don't even make beer money.