Look at all of the people giving their work away as Creative Commons. Tell them, "hey not only will we let you give your work away, we'll even pay you 10 or 15 cents for ever download!" And I guarantee there will be a ton of people who think it is a great deal. Ever lower commissions for higher standards, just for the privilege of possibly having one of your images used in an advertisement someday. How exciting! 

there's also a lot of "being in the right place at the right time" to factor into what we do. I'd like to hope that gives many of us an edge.

Don't we already have a thread here discussing his $2 an hour or something African interns?

I come across this all the time, except they something think I can magically transform their ordinary staff member to look like Yuri's Emma, cos I'm using an expensive camera that takes good photos.

Yep, wish I had bought their stock during their IPO.  Doubled in under a year 

But even with an LLC, the tax on profits still affects the owners rather than the corporation.

The beauty in living in a country like Moldova is the tax treaty whereby you only pay 10% to the Moldavian country and none of the outrageous 30% you would pay to the U.S.

Exactly. The problem is always going to be worse for RM. As the quality and quantity of micro continues to increase then so they will also take an ever-increasing share of the total money spent on stock imagery.

Xanox, writing books almost always starts as a hobby, but there are other forms of writing that you can make money from. Same with photography. And when you talk of stock photographers being "creatives", we're about as creative as an advertising copy-writer or political speech writer. One or two may stand out as having real creativity and flair, most are just workmanlike.  That's the problem, the bulk of stock photography is easily copied and sometimes better than the original. Even the very best microstockers are just exceptionally good and hardworking technicians, they are not great creative artists, we don't have any Leonardo da Vincis,  or Jane Austens among our ranks or, as Tror rightly points out, if there are then they aren't using their creativity in this field.

Let's remember that neither stock nor microstock were created with the intention of creating full-time jobs for photographers. Stock started as a way for photographers to make a bit of extra cash from stuff they happened to have left over from jobs. Microstock began as a swap-shop for designers. Maybe they are drifting back to their roots.

There are 20 new agencies popping up already that nobody cares about. What boggles my mind is that nobody is really trying it. You have Stocksy, SS's new project and some illustration sites, but not a whole lot beyond that. If contributors want it, why isn't somebody building it?

Won't work, Xanox.  If all the microstock agencies in the world got together tonight and created an entry barrier and push up prices, then tomorrow there would be 20 new agencies pop up to grab all the material that was being pushed away and sell it cheaply. That was what created iStock and the moment it showed there was a niche DT, Canstock and SS sprang into being to grab a slice of the action.

The iStock model, where you don't pay the supplier of goods until months after you have sold them, while the purchaser pays you weeks before they take delivery was a stroke of utter business genius. It made it very difficult not to make money or to run into cash flow problems - your customers became your financial backers without even knowing it.  So anyone can set up one of these operations as soon as they notice that people are trying to mess with the market, push people out of it and charge more than the minimum.  That's the reality. You can't bring the 1990s back again.

Yes, there is a minimum production cost. But if the cumulative average earnings of the images significantly exceed it, then you're basically OK. I've got pictures that have clocked up more than $1,000 in pennies here and there. I suppose that on average each of my images has made $40-$50 and rising (some of them make nothing at all). And I spend hardly anything to create them. Maybe $20,000 on equipment over 10 years. So, it works.

Asian producers won't supplant western ones in the end. The models don't look Western so they won't meet Western market demand. The goods and food aren't Western. I live in the east and my pictures don't sell particularly well in the US, they do sell in Europe and Asia.  If first-world photographers do stop producing, then the prices will have to rise to pull them back again.

I think that the return has now dropped to the level that may well keep new producers out. I've been arguing for about eight years that at some point the return per image will become so low that anybody who isn't already established will just give up. I suspect that we are about there (looking at the $5 iStock has made me on 60 images over the last six months).

Because there isn't an available niche for them to slide into. But  Xanox wants to create that niche by raising prices and excluding photographers from selling - basically taking us right back to 2004.