Every one of these was a real opportunity at some point in the last three years, and every one of them is now either explicitly banned by the platform, competed down to nothing, or a programme that does not exist. They are still being sold to you, which is why this page exists.
These routes are still being sold, and working out for yourself that one of them is empty takes about four months.
Selling AI images on stock sites#
Shutterstock does not accept AI-generated content from contributors. Not “discourages”, it is rejected as non-licensable content. Their own reasoning, from their contributor help pages: they cannot verify that you own the intellectual property, and they cannot verify which model produced it, so they cannot be confident the artists whose work trained it were compensated.
Meanwhile Shutterstock sells AI generation on its own site and compensates its contributors through a fund. Make of that what you will, but the practical position is unambiguous: uploading is not a strategy, it is a rejected submission.
Adobe Stock does accept AI content with mandatory labelling, and pays less for it:
| AI content | Conventional content | |
|---|---|---|
| Adobe Stock, per download | $0.25–0.50 | $0.33–1.00 |
| Shutterstock, per download | not accepted | $0.25–0.80 |
But the supply side is the smaller problem. The demand collapsed. The customer who used to license a generic stock photo now generates exactly the image they want, in seconds, for effectively nothing. Contributor earnings on the big platforms are reported at around $0.78 per download in 2025, down from over $1 a few years earlier, and the categories most exposed are precisely the generic ones AI is best at.
So the route is closed twice over: you cannot upload it to the largest marketplace, and the thing you would be uploading is what killed the market you were uploading into.
What still works here: photography of specific real things that cannot be generated convincingly, real people with releases, identifiable places, actual products, documentary and editorial material. That is a photography business, not an AI business.
Shutterstock’s own contributor documentation. Per-download rates are from aggregators. Sources: content policy update on AI-generated content, contributor FAQ, why content is rejected as non-licensable.
Custom GPTs and the GPT Store#
OpenAI announced a revenue-sharing programme for GPT builders, to pay US builders based on engagement, launching “in the first quarter”. That quarter passed. Builders have been asking about the status on OpenAI’s own developer forum ever since, and the answer has not changed: there is no revenue share on the GPT Store, and it remains in testing with US-based users.
So if someone is selling you a course on making money from the GPT Store, they are selling access to a programme that does not exist for you.
What custom GPTs are good for: a free thing that demonstrates what you know, attached to your name, that sends people to something you do charge for. A shop window. Not a shop.
Sources: OpenAI’s GPT Store announcement, “what is the status with GPT store revenue share”, “has anyone successfully monetized their custom GPT”.
Prompt packs and prompt marketplaces#
This one did not get banned. It got obsoleted from both ends.
Models got substantially better at understanding plain, unstructured requests, which removed most of the value of a carefully engineered prompt. And the models themselves will now write you a better prompt than a pack will sell you, for free, if you ask.
There is no policy to cite here and no dramatic collapse, just a product whose reason to exist evaporated. If you find a marketplace still selling them, look at when the listings were last updated.
Faceless AI content channels#
Not banned as a category, and worth being precise about because the panic and the sales pitch are both wrong.
In January 2026 YouTube deleted or hid the videos of at least eighteen channels publishing AI slop; one had over 1.2 billion views. In July it named three categories that cannot be monetised: templated content produced at scale, content built on manipulative or shock formulas and AI personas giving advice on finance, law, health or medicine.
A faceless channel with original scripts, real curation and an actual point of view remains fully monetisable. A channel whose next video could be produced by swapping one topic for another is the thing being described. The distinction is authorship, not whether AI was involved. Making video with AI covers the paid uses of these tools — what gets you demonetised has the full rules and a self-audit.
What has definitively ended is the version sold in courses: spin up channels, generate scripts, generate voice, generate visuals, upload at volume, collect ad revenue. That was a business until 2025 and it is now a three-strike removal process.
AI music at volume#
Spotify removed more than 75 million tracks it classed as spam over the past year, introduced a Verified badge for human artists in April 2026, and is building an AI disclosure standard with DDEX.
AI-assisted music is allowed. What gets enforced against is the behaviour: mass uploads, duplicate tracks under multiple artist names, metadata manipulated for search, and inflated stream counts. That describes the “generate a thousand tracks and collect fractions of a cent” model exactly.
Voice cloning of real artists is a separate and worse problem and increasingly a legal one rather than a policy one.
Print on demand with generated designs#
No blanket ban across the platforms, and no opportunity either, for a straightforward reason: everyone can generate a design, so the marketplaces filled with near-identical listings and discovery became the entire bottleneck.
Uploading a thousand generated t-shirt designs is a bet that the recommendation system will pick yours out of ten million. It is a lottery with an upload cost. The people still making money in print on demand are the ones with an audience who want their thing, which means it is an audience business, see digital products.
Automated “AI-powered” e-commerce stores#
This is not a bad opportunity. It is the specific thing the Federal Trade Commission prosecuted.
The Click Profit scheme sold a “proprietary system powered by artificial intelligence” that would run online stores for you, charged $45,000 to $75,000 plus $10,000 or more for inventory, and claimed affiliations with Nike and Disney. In the FTC’s filings, using the company’s own data: more than a fifth of customer stores earned nothing, and another third earned under $2,500 in gross lifetime sales. The court ordered monetary judgments of $13.6 million and $7.3 million.
The FTC also ran a wider enforcement sweep against deceptive AI claims in September 2024. If a pitch involves an upfront fee, a done-for-you store, and the word passive, you are looking at the category regulators are actively prosecuting.
Sources: FTC press release, Click Profit case file, CNBC, September 2024 crackdown.
The pattern behind all of them#
Every dead end on this page has the same shape, and once you can see it you can assess the next one yourself without waiting for us.
Where AI made something easy, that thing stopped being worth money. Generating an image, a track, a t-shirt design, a prompt, a formulaic video, the moment everyone could do it in seconds, the price went to approximately zero. Not because the platforms were unfair, but because value was never in the generation.
So here is a test for any new AI money-making pitch. Ask: what is scarce here? If the answer is “nothing, anyone with a subscription can produce this”, there is no business, however impressive the output looks. If the answer is a credential, a client relationship, a niche credibility, an audience, or the judgement to know which output is any good, then there might be.
That test points at the same three places every time, which is why they are the only routes we recommend in this section: expertise the labs need, implementation businesses cannot do themselves and work where AI improves your margin on something you were already selling.
If one of these reopens, a platform changes policy, OpenAI actually ships the revenue share, please tell us and we will update it: [email protected].