Going Getty - stock shooting

Nice write up. I went with Pond5 to sell my stuff. I have made some but it's more of a hobby with as much as I sell per year. But I haven't done anything with actors to sell on there like you have.
 
I always thought it was kind of ridiculous how Getty and several other stock sites make a submitter of stock footage jump through so many hoops. Maybe that is part of the image they want to project of exclusivity. I just don't have the patience to try to submit to them. Pond5 on the other hand is my kind of site. You submit a clip(s) and if it meets their technical specifications then it is online for sale within about a week or two. None of this sending a hard drive off for editorial review and waiting months and months. I would say Pond5 is the site of the masses. It contains some extremely good clips for a reasonable price as well as some junk that you have to sort through. You get to set your price and upon sale get paid 50% which is at the top of the scale for stock footage.
 
Mark Williams said:
I always thought it was kind of ridiculous how Getty and several other stock sites make a submitter of stock footage jump through so many hoops. Maybe that is part of the image they want to project of exclusivity. I just don't have the patience to try to submit to them. Pond5 on the other hand is my kind of site. You submit a clip(s) and if it meets their technical specifications then it is online for sale within about a week or two. None of this sending a hard drive off for editorial review and waiting months and months. I would say Pond5 is the site of the masses. It contains some extremely good clips for a reasonable price as well as some junk that you have to sort through. You get to set your price and upon sale get paid 50% which is at the top of the scale for stock footage.
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+1 on the pond 5 feedback. (Although the wait time has been longer for me)
I upload my own footage and also purchase what I need quite a lot.
 
I will echo Marks comments. I got the idea to do it a few years ago and I looked around at the different sites and some of them wanted you to be exclusive and pay you less. I went with pond5 because of its ease and how much they paid out. The only clips I have had denied were sequences that I put up. For example several shots of a historical boat that I thought would sell better as a group instead of individually. They sometimes let me do it but some reviewers don't. The wait time for the clips to show up on the site seems to vary for me. Some times its a week and at one point it seemed like 2 months or something but I think that was 2 years ago that they were so backlogged.
With all that being said I am not sure how well known pond5 is versus some of the others so even if you make more percentage on p5 maybe you would get more sales on another site and it would balance out. Maybe someone will chime in that has sold on several sites to see where there stuff sells best. With my limited experience in the stock footage scene I have been happy with pond5. They send me a paypal payment either every month or when it reaches a certain point.. not sure on that.
 
I started shooting stock about 5 years ago and have several thousand clips online at 3 different resellers. One thing I can tell you is that , in my experience, if you were selling 10 clips a month two years ago, you now sell maybe two. The largest, most exclusive company I sell through which usually sells clips for $400 up, recently started putting all my clips and most other seller's clips on a discount site for $5 each. Not much anyone can do due to the contract language.
 
mainstreetprod said:
I started shooting stock about 5 years ago and have several thousand clips online at 3 different resellers. One thing I can tell you is that , in my experience, if you were selling 10 clips a month two years ago, you now sell maybe two. The largest, most exclusive company I sell through which usually sells clips for $400 up, recently started putting all my clips and most other seller's clips on a discount site for $5 each. Not much anyone can do due to the contract language.
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Has the decrease been with just your stuff or have you talked to others that are experiencing the same thing? Is your stuff outdated? I'm not accusing, I'm just wondering. So far I have a few hundred clips but it seems like only 20 to 30 have actually sold and several that have sold multiple times. It just depends on what is being edited out there I suppose. I do work for someone that has a videoblocks account so I have access to that and while it is great for scenery and cities I feel like it lacks a lot of the random stuff that pond5 has from what I have seen.
 
I have had footage at both Corbis and Getty. I thought Corbis was a mess and I eventually pulled my footage from their site. More than once they sent me incorrect rental fees, based on the accompanying statements. I had to write and call multiple times to clear it up. It made me wonder, if their tracking and accounting was that bad, how much money that was due to me was being sent to other filmmakers! Although the contracts at both places aren't that great, I like them because I feel that they are the first stops for ad agencies and production companies looking for stock.
 
cyclone said:
I have had footage at both Corbis and Getty. I thought Corbis was a mess and I eventually pulled my footage from their site. More than once they sent me incorrect rental fees, based on the accompanying statements. I had to write and call multiple times to clear it up. It made me wonder, if their tracking and accounting was that bad, how much money that was due to me was being sent to other filmmakers! Although the contracts at both places aren't that great, I like them because I feel that they are the first stops for ad agencies and production companies looking for stock.
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Dang, that sucks! Yeah the high profile of Getty is why I wanted them. Did your footage ever start selling with Getty? If so, how long did it take to get money?
 
The first clips I sold paid quarterly, but that has changed now to monthly, I think - I know it seems weird that I don't know for sure but I try to let the footage just sit there and am surprised when a check shows up!
 
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