There are millions (billions?) of stock photos in the world, and your plan is to replace all of them with 10 pictures of a MacBook Air?
Even with more pictures it's unlikely you'll beat a Creative Commons search on Flickr:
Even with more pictures it's unlikely you'll beat a Creative Commons search on Flickr:
For example, here is an image from the link in the parent
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamestemple/312325101/sizes/o/
and here is the license
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
which says: "Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). "
Ok, someone tell me what manner is specified by the author.
I think this is a great idea. Why go through the hassle of selling your photos and worrying about people stealing them when you can make money on ad revenue instead?
Well, for a lot of reasons... if photography is what you're good at and what you enjoy, the make-money-on-ads model makes no sense unless you're also very good at generating traffic.
It also at least partially removes your income from the quality and quantity of your output. Of course the latter will be one important factor in building and maintaining traffic, but the reality of your business then becomes driving traffic, with photography as an ancillary requirement.
Plus you're now dependent not only on your ability to take good pictures and drive large amounts of traffic, you're also at the mercy of changing revenue. Great, you're making a living wage... but now suddenly your ad service isn't paying as much as it used to, so the same volume of traffic brings you less money. Oops.
There are tradeoffs, but I would not say this is a viable alternative at all unless you're also doing other things and driving traffic is as much your primary skill as photography.
Anyone who's built side projects that could use a little pizzazz would be well served by this. It's really useful to the community.
If you need professional quality stuff, you should be paying for it from one of the many stock agencies around. The agencies have lots of rules and safeguards that are designed to save you the headache of worrying about whether model releases were signed, etc.
Also, photographers with GOOD images don't sell them for $0.05 on Fotolia, Dreamstime, etc... Getty Images sucks because of it's restrictions and $3,000 / price tag and prehistoric policies. If you check the stock photo site's payout rates you'll realize why they have so many generic images and so little amazing photography. The good photographers keep their stuff off those stock sites.