Quote from: SpaceStockFootage on March 12, 2024, 07:21

Quote from: Video-StockOrg on March 12, 2024, 05:49

No. I hired someone to make me an original character design...

Were they cheap?

 There is a good saying: "The only way of making money in photography is by selling all your gear."

3000??? How do you write a description and keyword that many if you don't mind me asking?

I would say 5 to max 7 years is a realistic scenario where only the big agencies like Adobe Stock, Getty / Istock, Alamy, etc. and of course agencies with editorial content will survive.
Perhaps small very specialized agencies (food, architecture, etc.) will survive by license supplying AI model developers.
All others are either too unknown, poorly diversified or have no recognizable long-term strategic orientation. They will disappear.

3 years are to short to see large market changes because of current AI technological barriers. With the exponential technical development, the marketing and thus the awareness of AI models will increase significantly the following coming years. In addition, many users most likely have medium-term plans for stock licensing, so they won't switch next year. I think we will see a strong shift for the first time in 3 years, when image generation will be possible in real time.

In my opinion, there is a scenario in which the big stock agencies could remain profitable in the long term without ending up like Shitterstock as a pure data supplier for AI model developers.
You would need to develop your own AI assistant that allows prompting that combines an AI model with stock or customer's own photos using img2img with inpainting / outpainting.
This would have the advantage of being able to fulfill a wide broad of customer wishes through a high degree of flexibility by using the available high res photos with very low image errors.
You have to get away from the rigid old concept of a pure image database.
I have a design suite platform like Canvas in my mind but with focus on images, 3d and videos.

Let's take the example of a small car repair shop that wants to create a customer offer for cheap winter tire and oil changes as an advertisement for Christmas.
The marketing manager has an in oil covered smiling Santa in mind who is changing the tires in the car shop garage.
He could either take his own photo of his own garage and then pick out a Santa and integrate it into the photo in real time using an inpaint command, or he could use a prompt command to display a garage and a Santa separately, pick out suitable ones and then merge them into one picture. He could leave copy space free for text or his own logo, etc. 

The advantage would be the extremely high individual flexibility in comparison to current AI image generators.
Agencies need to integrate AI in a clever way.
There is no way around it. They have to invest money to remain profitable in the long term. And only the big ones can do that.
I would bet heavily on Adobe Stock to expand in this direction.
They actually have a lot of expertise in this area with their software design suite.
So integrating stock photos into Photoshop was a smart first step. But Photoshop is too complex for the normal user so they have to replace it with an AI assistant.