I'm reminded of the old print shop poster which says, "You want it good, fast, and cheap? Pick two and call me back."
There are some fundamental economics to content creation based on the fact the models don't pose for free, photographers are even more expensive, and there are unavoidable costs involved (less true as more and more content providers go digital, but still largely true).
There are two ways to recoup costs, and how that is done is of interest to you, the webmaster. The provider can either sell them by the boatload, allowing him to ask for a very small price, or he can sell relatively few of them and charge quite a bit more.
If you finally find the $.025 photo, you can bet a lot of other webmasters have it, too, which means the surfers will likely have seen it many times before. For more like $1 a photo, you get shots that haven't been sold to 10 zillion webmasters and aren't out on mass-produced CD's. Sooner or later, every photo will uploaded to the newsgroups and used in galleries, which is why fresh content is important.
I think newbies in particular are always looking for cheap content, and buying it, without realizing why it's so cheap. Well, now you know.
I'm a small content provider. I have a small list of clients, and I like it that way. I don't want to become the K-Mart of content providers.
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