Definition of lucrative is producing a great deal of profit.
http://www.sramanamitra.com/2012/03/26/doing-5m-a-year-with-3-employees-fineartamerica-ceo-sean-broihier-part-5/
Average annual revenue per artist - $15,000,000 / 100,000 = $150. Some might consider it decent, but no one would call it lucrative.
It was the same problem with stock, even before the impact of digital. When I got into it, I didn't have all that many people shooting similar genres, but as the agency grew, my pictures and I became ever less valuable as many more contributing photographers didn't mean the market had grown - just that more people were feeding it.
I did think of changing agencies to the
Image Bank, but I read an article (interview with TIB) in the
British Journal of Photography where TIB claimed to have 36,000 images of the Eiffel Tower; the incentive to shoot and supply nos. 36,001 and 36,002 didn't overwhelm me. It didn't really matter about genre, though, because everything was oversubscribed in the picture stock market. Consequently, it was mainly the
agencies that were really coining it in at that time because print was still big business, but I think that today, even the agents are having a less than wonderful experience, though I've been away from that world for so long that I can only go by reports from fellow photographers who were contemporaries of mine in the business. Hence my remark the other day that instead of spending time and money shooting stock, I'd have been better off today had I bought a box of collectible watches instead! As bonus, those photo-trips would have been a lot more fun for both my wife and myself had the cameras stayed at home; then we would have been having holidays unmolested by the position of the sun, and other silly considerations like that!
;-)
Rob