There has always been a generation gap. The current generation of boomers so derided by millennials and Gen Z were once rebels themselves, rejecting the stuffy values of the establishment they grew up in, and supplanting them with their own. And what rebels they were: the swinging sixties, women’s lib, rock, hippies… boomers invented it all. But eventually rebels grow old and become the new establishment and then spend their sunset days complaining about the next generation of young rebels who are burning and supplanting their values. Plus ça change
Today though that gap is a chasm; swallowing cars, houses, whole towns like a Hollywood earthquake. This is mostly because (I would argue) younger generations have grown up with the internet, smartphones and social media, and it’s as much a part of the fabric of their lives as the blood that runs through their veins. Technology has rewired the way they think, the way they create, and of course the way they record the world around them. From birth, their neural pathways have grown around their internet bandwidth like ivy around a tree.
Older generations use the internet too of course, but we remember a world before it existed so we don’t use it quite in the same way, and this impacts the way we use our cameras. For example, we get a steady stream of letters from older readers who lament the obsession that camera manufacturers have with putting video features on their cameras. “I did a straw poll at my camera club and nobody wants this feature,” is a typical line of complaint “so why do they insist on forcing it upon us? Why don’t they listen to the consumer?”
If you’re one of these people I have some bad news: you are no longer a statistically important sector of the market. According to Statista there were an estimated 87,400 stills photographers in the UK in 2024, both amateur and professional.
But according to Adobe there are 16.5 million people in the UK who describe themselves as ‘content creators’. About half of that number became creators during Covid. This figure dwarfs the number of traditional photographers by a factor of 182 to 1, based on these stats. Across the world there are an estimated 300 million people who consider themselves content creators. They are not all young, by any means, and there are many successful older creators, but the demographic is heavily slanted towards youth.
I dislike the phrase ‘content creator’ because it sees artistic output purely as a commodity to be monetised by big tech, but that’s exactly what it is to the platforms. Photos are ‘content’ too, but the term is generally used to describe someone who creates video-based output not just for their social circle, but with the aim of building a wider audience of people they don’t know. It isn’t so much sharing as broadcasting and the motive is usually fame, or fortune, or both. They may appear in these videos themselves, but not necessarily.
There is a ready audience for this video content. Increasingly, internet users want to watch rather than read. According to the latest figures from Cisco, video accounts for a colossal 82% of all internet eyeball time, and rising. That $1.65 billion that Google paid to acquire YouTube back in 2006 now looks like the bargain of the century.
Of course for the majority of people who call themselves content creators it’s just a fantasy, with little content and virtually no audience, but it is at least an aspiration, but there are millions who are making a good stab at it, and hundreds of thousands (at least) making a living from it.
That’s why content creators are now by far the most important market sector for the camera industry. Few of them have the skills or the charisma to be successful but that doesn’t matter. They will spend money trying. Most of them are using their phones to create their content and the job of camera companies is to convince them that they would get better results (and therefore more followers) if they upgraded to a proper camera. Perhaps just a vlogging camera to start with, but then as they become more accomplished (or more desperate) they can be persuaded that an interchangeable lens mirrorless camera will give their content a more polished and professional look.
In addition to the independent creator market there is the fact that every brand in the world from clothing, to hotels to baked beans now does most of its marketing on social media and employs teams of in-house content creators to produce short-form video. All of these marketing departments also need cameras, lights, mics and so forth.
In the unlikely event that camera brands succeed in selling cameras to every content creator in the world, there is always the next generation to sell to. Go into any secondary school in the land and ask the kids what careers they want when they leave school at least half will say they want to be content creators. Nobody wants an analogue job anymore.
This is not a fad that will pass, this is the how the world works now. So any camera manufacturer that doesn’t take account of the needs of this vast creator market is committing commercial suicide. Video needs to not only be included, it must be competitive. The main arms race in camera design now is around video specs: 4K, 6K, 8K, open gate etc. The demand for cameras aimed purely at stills photographers will probably always exist as a niche, but small markets mean fewer unit sales to absorb the R&D and production costs, so they will be expensive.
If you don’t like having video on your camera the best response is to just ignore it, just like you do the other 90% of features in the menu that you never use, half of which are a probably a complete mystery. It doesn’t add to the cost (if anything the reverse is true) and it doesn’t add to the size (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get 4K video out of even the smallest phone and GoPro). Who knows, one day you might even use it.
The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Amateur Photographer magazine or Kelsey Media Limited. If you have an opinion you’d like to share on this topic, or any other photography related subject, email: ap.ed@kelsey.co.uk.
