You can sell sets of images or graphics to designers or entrepreneurs that they can use in their own projects, such as on their social media accounts, websites, or any advertising and marketing that they are creating. I have been doing this for a number of years and I use different marketplaces, including Creative Market, Design Cuts, and Creative Fabrica, to sell these.
Selling Graphic Assets
I will show you a few different packs that I have been selling using AI. The type of thing that you can create are backgrounds which people could then use on different media, for example, as website backgrounds or on print for business cards or even in their logo designs. This helps designers save time and create very high-quality effects. You can create a consistent collection of graphics that people can use in their brands, such as a set of repeating backgrounds or some illustrations.
Selling Illustrations
For example, you can create tiled backgrounds which are repeating textures that can be used infinitely. You could make a tie-dye set like this. You can see that these work really well on fabrics and other merchandise for people to create themselves. Another thing you can do is sell collections of illustrations for people to use in their projects. For example, you might create thin line icons and create a whole library of these for people to download and use in their projects.
Selling Stock Assets
The next business model you can try is selling stock assets using websites like Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, or Pond5. These allow you to create images, upload them, and every time somebody uses and purchases one, you will get a small royalty. The name of the game in stock photography is quantity, so you want to create a lot of different images, but you don’t necessarily have to worry about creating sets like you would in selling graphic assets. This is a great way to help people save time and money if they don’t want to sit around making their own photographs or using AI to create a specific image. They can search on stock websites to get the perfect photo.
Selling Print-on-Demand Merchandise
The next opportunity I invite you to investigate is selling print-on-demand merchandise. Print-on-demand allows you to put your designs on a whole host of different merchandise, everything from T-shirts to water bottles, even little scarfs for dogs. The great thing about print-on-demand is that it’s only when a customer purchases an item that it actually gets made, so you have no stock sitting around. The margins can be quite tight on this business model, so I encourage you to price your items pretty high. Redbubble is a great site for selling your goods because you get to create your own store and Redbubble even drives traffic towards your goods if they are performing well. There is a huge variety of different goods that you can sell, from leggings to wall art to phone cases, even baby T-shirts and masks for children.
Selling Wallpaper
Another print-on-demand service that I recommend checking out is Spoonflower. The reason for this is that it allows you to create wallpaper which you can actually put up in houses. So if you’re creating an interior design brand, this is fantastic for showcasing some of your best tiles and textures.
Selling NFTs
Another approach that you can try out is investigating selling your work as NFTs. NFTs are non-fungible tokens that allow you to sell your art on a registered blockchain. There are collections on OpenC, which is the largest marketplace for NFTs, that have sold artworks that are worth huge amounts of money. For example, Board Ape Yak Club is one of the most popular collections. For example, Board Ape Yak Club is one of the most popular collections of NFTs where they have these different apes in different outfits with different accessories that people are using in their profile pictures. You can see here that they are selling for a huge amount of money. These are selling for 76 Ethereum, which at today’s exchange rate is worth over a hundred thousand dollars.
But the issue with NFTs is that it is quite a saturated market. You need to have a good marketing strategy and some really unique, eye-catching art.
Selling Art
The next opportunity is to sell your art as art. There are a number of different ways you can do this. One option is to use a marketplace like Etsy where you can sell digital versions of your art for people to print out and put on their wall at home. The advantage of this is that obviously you’re not carrying any stock, you don’t have to create anything, and you have a very scalable business. People are having great success with this.
For example, this frame tarot print from this seller has sold over 20,000 units. Another option is to create actual framed prints, so you can sell either digital or framed, or both, on Etsy.
Selling Prompts on Prompt Base
Now, an interesting and original business model for making money from AI art is to sell your prompts. If you’re working in stable diffusion and you create a prompt that is particularly good at getting a distinct style, you can sell that on a marketplace called Prompt Base. You can sell these for between two and five dollars. It’s an interesting and new way to make money. You can see some of the options that people have been selling, from sticker styles to origami to bonsai trees to Persian princesses. It works best if you select a very distinct and unique style that is consistent. For example, these GTA loading screens are a perfect example of something to sell on Prompt Base. They give people a unique option where they can create a lot of artwork in a distinct style that is popular and well-known. One thing to bear in mind is that prompts are not copyrightable, so there’s nothing to stop people stealing these and reselling them. But another approach to this would be to create a large library yourself, where you’re not just selling individual prompts on this marketplace, but you’re actually selling packs of prompts curated in a book or online file.
Creating Illustrated Books and Comics
Now the final business model I’d like to introduce you to is one where you take old, out-of-copyright books that are in the public domain and create illustrated versions of these. You can create art using stable diffusion and then produce these books and sell them either digitally or in print. You can see that illustrated books are highly popular on Amazon. This one has over 2,000 ratings and an overall star rating of 5 stars, so they’re very popular and well-received. Allowing you to combine AI art with some existing content gives you a really unique product to sell. You could even write your own book or comic book and sell that.
Offering Services in Stable Diffusion
Another interesting thing to do with stable diffusion is to offer your skills in this tool as a service. You could offer to train stable diffusion on people’s images so that they can create their own art words. For example, you might offer personalized portraits. Again, you can see people on Etsy selling these vectorized style portraits, and you could easily create a prompt and train stable diffusion on images given to you by a customer to create this style of personalized portrait. You might even want to try out your own style, perhaps it’s a GTA loading screen style portrait.
Another thing you can do is use a platform like Fiverr to offer logo design or branding services. For example, this seller is offering a brand design service for $1,300 and you can offer your services to create designs in stable diffusion. You may also use Fiverr to advertise your services for creating specific art for illustration or even photography if you’re creating a specific type of photograph using stable diffusion.
Creating Your Own Tools for Stable Diffusion
The final opportunity in using stable diffusion as a business is to create your own tools. As it is an open-source software, you can either adapt it yourself or pay someone to create a version of stable diffusion that has a very specific use case. Perhaps it’s set up specifically to create book covers or YouTube thumbnails, or maybe you’re offering a way to animate the work in stable diffusion in a very distinctive way. You can charge people a small fee for using your tool and create money that way.
Conclusion
There are a number of different exciting opportunities to make money with AI art. You can be very creative here and combine these different business models in different ways. Perhaps you create a personalized portrait of someone and put it on merchandise or perhaps you offer a set of graphic goods but include a library of prompts for people to create their own with as well. I wish you the best of luck in monetizing your art and turning your hobby into a business.