iStockphoto

The internet is spawning hundreds of new ways to make money every day and you can be a part of it. All you need is an alertness and an openness to change. Ever heard of iStockphoto? It’s a website full of amateur, and some professional, photographs available for commercial use for extremely cheap prices. What’s that have to do with you? Plenty.

As this excellent article notes, iStockphoto is doing two things simultaneously.

First, it’s totally changing the rules of an industry that didn’t even know it needed change. It has traditionally cost a lot of money to get professional photographs for commercial artwork. Whether for ads, magazines, brochures, presentations and stuff like that, finding good images was expensive. Conversely, if you were a photographer or agregator of images, you could make a great living because of scarcity. In otherwords, images were expensive because they were hard to get. Meaning each image was expensive. iStockphoto is changing that by offering the use of great looking photographs very cheaply (they’re not alone by the way, there are several other sites doing the same thing. Most notably everystockphoto and stock.xchng.)

While that last point may seem like a bad thing, and if you were a pro photographer making a great living, it is, it actually brings my to my second thought: Second, iStockphoto has created a way for lots and lots of images from lots and lots of people to be easily available. What that means is there are now a slew of folks making money from their photos. This has opened a once closed market to a bunch of new folks. Are they getting rich? No. But a whole lot of little fees can add up. Especially compared to a few big fees (which most of these photographers never got anyway.

My ultimate point is that this happening to music too. MySpace has already helped “unknowns” gain fans, and there are similar stories all over the net. There are also countless (and I mean countless) places music is needed just like photographs. You could have a piece of that business.