I think it's funny because this is market economics at it's worst--best for those who are money manipulators, like the stock agencies.
First, it turns photography into a stock market of sorts and creates a sort of feeding frenzy for anyone who can afford a point and shoot camera and has PS skills.
Second, it makes professional photography less and less possible because everyone with with a point and shoot or Rebel can submit pictures, and using the shotgun affect, like the stock business does, they are bound to get a few from each 1, 000 persons who submits everything they shoot.
Third, it lowers overall prices, which is really good for other corporations, like National Geographic, because then they don't need as many full time photographers.
Fourth, like the web link above, books and other marketing techniques tell everyone that they too can be professional photographers in 72 hours--you ever see the books like that, such as "Speak German in 3 Days!"? People suck that get rich fast and smart quicker crap up like a vacuum.
So either way, and there are two outcomes to this marketing technique, stock photography, and photography in general as a profession suffers: (1) People get their 40Ds, or whatever, and buy the get rich fast books and give it an honest go. After a year or so they've taken hundreds of images and submitted them, made a few hundred dollars, maybe, and then they lose interest because they aren't rich and famous yet and move on to the next thing, such as "You to Can Make a Million in the Stock Market, In 3 Days! with only 10 dollars." The problem here is that there are hundreds of thousands of people running this circuit, which gives the stock agencies, and the marketers, a steady influx of income and images. (2) Someone with talent, time, brains, and perseverance, plus the money to invest properly, really does take off. The problem here is that many more "professional" level photographers really do enter the market, spreading the possible profit ever thinner, since they can do it "on their spare time."
I'm not passing judgment here, just showing what is completely predictable process in any market system--where there is money, real or not, people will flood in to stake their claim on the free gold--just like in the gold rush days in the early days of the United States. And just like the gold rush, 90% of the people looking for riches will make very little money, simply because of the numbers doing exactly the same thing, and 10% will make lots of money--the marketers and corporations. (Look where all the gold ended up, Fort Knox, jewelry, etc.)
In days gone past, people already in business could weather these waves of pie in the sky searchers because they would soon go broke and leave the market. Here now we have a market that everyone can get into and stay in for almost nothing, that is, everyone who can afford a 600US camera, which is a LOT of people--most people already own one. So even though Jimmy may only submit 100 photos a year from his P&S or Rebel, thousands more are doing the same thing, and when Jimmy stops, a thousand more will take his place.
A related example: Microsoft hired hundreds of photographers for a year and told them to go out and take all the pictures they could of specific categories, such as landscape, commercial, etc. They paid them for their time and when all the dust settled, Microsoft had 100,000s of thousands of images they put on DVDs and sell, and resell, and reresell--because while those photographers were working, they were giving up all the rights to their images. So if I'm a designer and need photography for my design needs, and I can buy 10 MS DVDs for 60US with the rights to use the images for pennies, why should I hire a photographer, or buy them from individual photogs for much more money? And the images on the disks are as good as you will find anywhere, since the photographers were all professionals.