What is the current Photography Industry Landscape in your Country? Is it getting better or worse?

I was just reading a few articles on the death of magazines and how many journalists have moved to create their own brands on sites like Substack as opposed to the ever dwindling salaries of magazines that have survived.

I realize over the past 20 years many major industry employers for photographers have collapsed.

Industries such as:

• Magazine Industry
• Journalism Industry
• Stock Photography
• Book/Print media covers

Many of the major employers for contract work have disintegrated which forces every photographer to become self employed and compete with each other in a race to the bottom for prices that clients will accept.

For example:

I recently accepted a $180 offer down from my initial starting offer of $380 for photos of a local 4 star lodge, that by the way charges clients $400 per night but stated they only had a budget of $100. Yes $100 for photos that are used to advertise their property that generates over $60,000 of revenue a month (I'm not in the US so in comparison this is a large amount of revenue)

Only reason I even took the job was because I said I could accommodate them by charging $30 a room, 3 photos each. Which would come out to $45,84 per day for 4 total days of work, shooting and editing. Almost double what what I was earning when I was employed full time at a traditional job, $29,34 a day. If I get enough reoccurring clients at this rate for a similar workload I can double my previous salary and as a self employed photographer, so that was the calculation.

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Besides private client work there doesn't seem to be any new industries opening up to photographers. Where do you go for contract work as a wild life photographer or a vehicle photographer these days? Even food photography and Real Estate photography have been threatened as Restaurants and Real Estate agents that prefer to use their phones to cut costs.

Large corporations such as super markets have their own in house photography team. Which is great for them but they get paid a standard marketing team salary. So you have situation where the largest companies in a country have their entire photography portfolio from brand campaigns to store images and TV ads were taken by a small photography team of less than 10 people.

Most industries seem to be turning to in-house volume photography employing unskilled (or barely skilled) labor with horrible but "good enough" results.

How is any of this sustainable in the long run? And for photographers that have been around for a few decades have you noticed a degradation in your earning potential and the amount of industries that are able to support a diverse photography community?