Size of Professional & Semi-Pro Photography Market

I'm currently doing the research and writing for a major market report on the broad digital photography market.

This includes things like the camera market, sensor market, stock/microstock photography market, etc. One of the

things I'm trying to do is to come up with a size of the revenues earned by all photographers, professional and

semi-pro (includes amateurs who earn some money from their photography). I've tried a number of approaches and

I'd like to run my latest attempt past folks to see if it can get an ok from you, based on what you know about

pros and semi-pros and their earnings.

 

Based upon the number of weddings performed in the U.S. during 2007 and an average price for a wedding

photography package at $1,570, I have calculated the total current size of the wedding photography market at

approximately $3,431B. This is based on an estimated number of weddings in 2007 of 2,185,888 multiplied by an

average cost per wedding package of $1,570. Of course, there are lots of people who make more than that on a

wedding and some who make less. This cost is based on some surveys of brides, asking how much they spent on

their wedding photography (does not include video photography). I estimate that there are about 100,000

professional wedding photographers (I based this on the U.S. Dept of Labor's count of a total of 155,000 people

who earn all their living from photography work; I think wedding photographers are the most numerous professional

photography segment.) in the U.S. Most of those earn about 75% of their earnings from wedding photography and

the rest from a combination of portrait, event and stock photography (based on several other studies I found).

This would mean that the total current market for professional photographers who are not commercial photographers

is $4.576B. To get the total revenues for all professional photographers, we still need to add in the earnings

of the 22,000 professional photographers who do not earn their living shooting weddings and events and

supplementing that with some stock/microstock photography. These are the professional newspaper photographers

plus those who do custom photoshoots for stock photography firms, businesses or magazines. I believe these are

the top earners in the professional photography business, with earnings of at least $100,000/year. This would

add another $2.2B to the professional photography market, making the total market $6.776B.

 

If we then add in earnings of approximately 35,000 North American microstock contributors (based on numbers of

contributors to various microstock sites; I'm assuming a large percentage of these contributors are not from N.

Am.) who supplement their primary earnings with microstock sales, we would have a number for the approximate size

of the total professional and semi-professional photography market. I believe the average microstock contributor

earns about $300/month or $3,600/year (based on anecdotal accounts I've seen in various forums). That amounts to

$126M. Added to the total professional market, we now have $6.902B for the total professional and

semi-professional photography market.

 

Does this reasoning and math make sense to you at all? Have I left out major groups of professional

photographers. I tried to generalize by lumping the wedding, portrait, event photographers together and all the

rest in a single category. Your input, suggestions for improvement to this model would be greatly appreciated.

I think that since you are using photo.net to generate data, that, I assume, you are being paid for, you should fork over $25 and subscribe.

Top earners in professional photography are NOT "professional newspaper photographers" who do "custom photoshoots". Advertising Commercial photographers in major markets make WAY more than $100K.

<i>Does this reasoning and math make sense to you at all?</i><P>

Do you have any real data (not anecdotes you've seen on forums) to support your claims about the numbers and types of photographers, and the averages they earn? It sounds like the only hard data you have is the Labor Dept.'s number of full-time photographers and the number of wedding per year.

The only "hard" numbers I have seen that are credible are the Department of Labor's numbers. They do not break the market down any further. I also have access to a number of studies done by professional photography associations that and the wedding photography association that have surveyed photographers about their earnings from wedding photography. Unfortunately, those studies looked at wedding photography studios in aggregate (many, of course, employ a number of other photographers), so I don't have an earnings number for how much the people who work for owners of photography studios make. I've come up with a number of approaches to sizing the market but the reason I described this one is that is seems to be a simpler approach to me.

 

We do know the number of weddings and the bridal survey provided an average price that brides pay for their photography package.

 

With regard to the numbers of microstock contributors, quite a few microstock sites tell us how many contributors they have. For example, shutterstock says it has 100,000 individual contributors. A number of other sites say they have about 35,000 contributors. The problem here is if you are dealing with the number of weddings in the U.S., as I am, then you need to estimate how many of the contributors are from the U.S. and no microstock sites I've looked at have provided that kind of breakdown. Therefore, I made an estimate. If you have better ideas, I'd love to hear them.

 

I've also had access to a few other professional photography earnings surveys but, as the earnings were very high, over $100K on average, I have a difficult time believing that most photographers have earning that high, especially since the Dept. of Labor's median annual earnings of salaried photographers was $26,170. The middle 50 earned between $18,680 and $38,730. The lowest 10% earnerned less than $15,540 and the highest 10% earned over $56,640. Median annual earnings in the industry employing the largest numbers of salaried photographers were $22,860 in the photographic services industry (I assume this to be wedding, portrait and event photographers mainly --- am I wrong in this?) Salaried photographers earn more than self-employed photographers, according to the Dept. of Labor.

 

With regard to my estimates of how much microstock contributors make, there are NO good published numbers on that, so far as I've been able to find. I've been researching this extensively for over three months and have talked with a number of industry insiders. iStockphoto paid out about $21M to contributors in 2007. At that time, they had about 35,000 contributors. In this business, the people at the very top are earning far more than the folks at the bottom tail. If you divided the payout by the number of contributors, you'd get $600. However, I assume they have a pretty large number of contributors who may have only contributed a few photos and may have made almost nothing from them. I don't know how big the core number of contributors is but quite a lot of photographers appear to upload 500 - 1,000 photos per month. Income on microstock sites seems to be pretty directly proportional to the number of photos uploaded.

 

I do have hard data that indicates that most wedding photographers earn about 75% of their revenues from that source. At this point, I THINK portrait and event photography makes up most of the rest, but, again, if you all think differently, I'd like to have you correct me.

 

The department of labor says that photographers that are not working in the services part of the industry are mostly employed by newspapers, magazines and agencies. They claim that very few photographers are able to earn a living from taking and selling fine art photographs. Obviously, there are exceptions to this, but we're talking in the aggregate here.

 

Also, I'm trying to be conservative. The last thing I want to do is radically overestimate the size of the market.

 

Also, with regard to microstock, it is a fact that, at least initially, many, if not most, of the contributors were not pros. Quite a lot of those folks have become pros, however, and lots of pros now contribute to microstock sites. Most contribute to more than one site.

 

What are the terms that I should use to refer to professional photographers who are not working in the services side of the business: editorial photographers/new photographers, agency photographers, etc. I would like to be accurate. That is why I asked for your help.

 

For those of you who are uncomfortable with estimates and guesses, I, too, would like to see "hard" numbers for everything, but those do not seem to be available. Analysts typically develop models to size markets for which there are not "hard" numbers for everything. That is what I am attempting to do here.

 

Obviously, no one has to help me if they choose not to, but I will very appreciative of any help you do provide and will take your comments quite seriously.

 

One reason I'm trying to come up with numbers for these markets is that, so far, no one seems to have done much of a job of analyzing this segment. If you all know of better data that is available, I'd love to know about it.