Originally Posted by Paul Markham

Another reply exposing a lack of knowledge.

Mastering film isn't that hard with a light meter, on video it's easy with a monitor. As you point out the rewards were there for people who got it right. The problem was producing content the publishers chose from a huge selection offered to them. Image sets making $3,000 a set were common and with that type of return you can be sure of a lot of competition.

The change was the Internet allowed people who could never sell to offline publishers to sell directly to the consumer themselves. Because offline demands an absolute minimum of 5,000 sales per month and online 500 sign ups per month is the minimum.