For anyone who wonders how stock photography sites stay in business (it seems like a marginal business), I have a true story for you: A friend of my spent week

For anyone who wonders how stock photography sites stay in business (it seems like a marginal business), I have a true story for you: A friend of my spent weeks doing the graphics for a national marketing campaign for a new laptop (I think it was Dell). The laptop maker selected 6 photos from a major stock photography site to put into their ads. The photos were totally innocuous. We're not talking about the photo of the student trying to stop the tanks in Tiananmen Square. The photos were, for example, a smiling woman sitting on bicycle, a guy jumping in the air with his arms open. The laptop maker $60,000 to license the 6 photos. (My friend got $7,000 for 7 weeks of work.) I'm not sure if my story makes a point, but it seems like you have to price discriminate severely at the high end (really soak companies like Dell) and not expect much money from the New Yorker.