It is a canarie in the cold mine of sorts. 

Is there no end to the blight of these poor little birds, first they gassed them down coal mines but now you're telling me they're trying to freeze the poor little things. 

Well it seems that some have this industry all figured out and have nothing to gain from outside perspectives.  After all what could someone outside the industry that studies business models and practices to gain insight possibly know.

I am not selling anything, I have simply made an observation and have decided to share.  I could really care less if you buy what I am not selling.  It reminds me a little of GM ignoring the outside world and telling customers what they need.  After all they are the experts and are not susceptable to group think.  We all know how that song is ending.

From now on I will keep my observations and opinions to myself because I am obviously unqualified to offer any.

Yeah, yeah.  What he said.

I've been an industry analyst for the stock photo sector since 1999. I came into the industry because, as a photographers, I was curious about the same question as the original poster: what is the real size of the non-traditional photo buying market?  Since then, I've been doing research, aggregating data, charting trends of related industries that use imagery, and so on. (I have a prior history of economics and business/hi-tech development.)

If you truly want to dive into this subject, my blog has tons of content for you to churn through: newbielink:http://www.danheller.com/blogs [nonactive]

There are many articles related to this question, but also related to microstock's role in this industry as well. (It's not what you think.)  The various titles are self-descriptive.

Though it would be futile to try to address such a huge topic here, I can summarize it this way:  the total size of the "stock photo licensing market" (where the definition of a "stock sale" is "any financial transaction that involves purchasing a license for using a pre-existing image"--as opposed to paying someone to shoot a photo) is about $20-25B.  The size of the "traditional stock license" market involving stock agencies and "traditional buyers" (ad agencies, news outlets, media companies, corporate) is about $2-3B. (most of that is Getty, followed in sequence by the smaller agencies.)

Approximately 15% of total stock licensing revenue comes from pro photographers. 85% of the rest come from semi-pro's, newbies and amateurs. The distribution of those sales is almost exactly the same as that of any business engaged in internet-based "long tail economics." That is, the amazon.com model, where the "big winners" (such as best-selling books) actually represent a tiny proportion of overall aggregate sales of ones and twos that no one pays attention to.

As for photo sales, there's a pretty consistent distribution across the Us population of people who've "sold an image at some point in the past 5 years for any amount of money." When you aggregate 300 million people, this quite quickly totals large amounts of money. When you start factoring in those incrementally smaller sub-groups that sell increasingly larger and larger revenues--such as $5K/year--then the revenue map starts making more sense.

The reason why most pro and stock photographers don't see this is because long-tail economics is still a new paradigm most people don't understand. ("If you don't see it, it must not exist.")  But this answer is not entirely complete--for photographers, there's a cultural bias rooted in a complicated history that makes their true role in the larger market more difficult to accept.

A longer discussion on that can be found here: newbielink:http://www.danheller.com/truisms [nonactive]

dan

Thanks for joining in Dan.  I'm always pointing out your model and property release pages.

that's always appreciated--writing a lot and having people link to it relieves me a lot of time of having to prowl the forums and having to retype the same thing over and over. thanks for sending them to those pages.