Just to return, ideally briefly, to the discussion of camera market sizes, I have to say that the disagreements with my simple remarks were bizarre, to say the least.
Rob, I chose the 1970s since i happen to have those numbers on hand, and because it is a reasonable stab at "the last time the market was really stable, and not driven by an endless parade of new technological innovations, drawing in new blood constantly." This might not be spot on, but it's tolerably close.
In the 1970s, the market contained Serious Photographers of the amateur and professional stripes, and these people were purchasing something like 2.5 million cameras per year. At the same time, the casual "I just want pictures" people were, as a very rough approximation, purchasing 5 million polaroid cameras per year.
While you cannot *really* compare the market then with the market now, you can roughly line up the 2.5M number with the people who are buying any kind of camera at all today, and the 5M number with people who use their phones. While there are many deeper analyses that you could perform, it's not a wildly unreasonable comparison to say:
In the 1970s we saw market segment X buying 2.5M cameras/yr, and now they're buying 15M cameras/yr
In the 1970s we saw market segment X buying 5M cameras/yr, and now theu're buying 1.5B phones/yr
Yes, this is driven by non-US markets, largely. My thesis is that the rapidly shrinking current camera market is still much larger than historical markets, though, so the fact that the Chinese are buying some of these things does not negate my argument, it supports it.
None of this changes the fact that the camera market is shrinking. Not only has it completely lost the "polaroid" market, the people who just want pictures, it is losing the constant flow of new blood, and new sales, driven by endless innovation. The platform is stabilizing again, as it did in the 1970s, to a well-defined family of objects that are thoroughly wrung out, well understood, commodities.
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At the same time,the web site industry, never healthy, is starting to gather the crop of sorrow it has long sown. Advertising online is not a magical panacea, it works as near as anyone can tell, less well then any other form of advertising, and is beginning to be priced accordingly. Online ad revenues are largely laundered venture capital at this point, rather than actual ad sales, and that's not sustainable. Nobody wants to pay for content.
The only revenue stream that's doing much of anything is straight-up cyber begging. Running a patreon is arguably the best way to monetize your online content, and that has limits.
