If you haven't tried to purchase a stock photo recently, it is incredibly difficult. I can order same day delivery of physical goods from Amazon much faster than trying to buy a single stock photo. All of the services are subscriptions now and they have dark UX patterns to convince you the only way to get the images is to sign up for an annual plan that will auto-renew. In comparison, typing a prompt into a generativ…
IMO, the only value in selling assets on those stores is to attract the attention of companies who might want to hire you for real work
It's not viable to have an art company without some way to drive repeat transactions. Subscriptions are the only thing they can come up with that keeps the companies afloat and able to pay people's salaries
But yeah, I sure don't like them as a customer