Stock footage websites

longshanks

longshanks

Well-known member
I'm looking to get into selling my footage for stock video websites. Does anyone recommend some particularly good places to submit work? Some of the more popular sites I know about are TurnHere, ArtBeats, iStockphoto, freestockfootage, etc. First off, is this a viable business, and does anyone have experience working with such companies [ minus TurnHere :( ] ?
 
Man! pixelflow.com -no question about it. Finally there's a site that truley looks out for their video artist. As far as I can tell they support every hd format out there and they hook up an 80% pay out 'if Im not mistaken'.. Its unheard of. I had a few questions about uploading video and the sites architech "Patrick" contacted me on my cell and took me thru my first upload. Super cool dude. Impressive site- sweet search engine- mega pay outs-
I give 'em props
I had waiting for a site like this one "built by a video artist for the video artist"
 
There's a few things you need to think about.
Do you want to sell your footage as royalty free or do you want to sell it as rights managed?
Do you want to sell your footage on a micro-stock site or go with a traditional stock house.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

An 80% commission may sound great but if the top selling footage is only selling in the $25 range then are you going to be able to quit your day job anytime soon? A 50% commission on a $600 sale means more money but you'll probably sell less clips.

It's purely a numbers game. The more clips you have the better chances you have of selling.

Royalty free means once they buy it, they can pretty much use it forever on any future projects.
Rights managed mean s that they license the clip(s) for a specific project and must purchase a new license if they want to use it in another project.

Again, there are pros and cons to both.
You need to figure out what direction you want to go.
 
Also the site just recently launched so its wide open for pioneering. Google is advertizing pixelflow plus it raised interest at NAB before it was up so its pulling some serious traffic. I am able to adjust the price at any time based on supply and demand. The little video I have on there so far has generated a rediculous amount of hits since I got this site almost entirley to myself for right now.
 
The other thing you need to decide is if you're in it for beer money or if you want to make a living at it.

If you're in it for beer money, about any stock house will do plus you can put up a few clips and you're good to go.

If you want to make a living at it then you need a lot of clips and constantly add clips to generate income.

You need to decide what business model you want to go with.

Do you need $45k a year to live on? How any clips do you need to sell to make that?

It doesn't matter if you're just looking for a little spending money but if you want to be serious about it then you need to figure out what the best route is for you to take.
 
Hey Phloespace, Thanks for the positive feedback. This is true; we are generating a ton of traffic and are short on videographers. I would like to hear some feedback from others about what they think of the site (http://www.Pixelflow.com).
 
Absolutley Pixelflow!! You guys rock out there. Thanks for a killer platform and the VIP treatment coming on board.. I noticed on you guys site it was setup for colaboration. What is this? I asume this is so company's can find video artist for special projects or am I completly mistaken?
 
n8ture said:
The other thing you need to decide is if you're in it for beer money or if you want to make a living at it.

If you're in it for beer money, about any stock house will do plus you can put up a few clips and you're good to go.

If you want to make a living at it then you need a lot of clips and constantly add clips to generate income.

You need to decide what business model you want to go with.

Do you need $45k a year to live on? How any clips do you need to sell to make that?

It doesn't matter if you're just looking for a little spending money but if you want to be serious about it then you need to figure out what the best route is for you to take.
Click to expand...

Well, not exactly beer money, more like GAS money :( With this said, would royaly-free be my best option? If I were to make a career out of it, I would assume that rights-managed would be the way to go just because the production value would be higher as well as time spent. It seems on the whole that royalty-free media is a little bit lower on the scale as far as content and artistic merit. True?

P.S. Pixellow and phloespace's language sounds suspiciously too close to spammer lingo. :huh:
 
It just depends. I lose sales because I don't sell RF, but then places like AT&T, Disney, NGO come along and think I figured up on one sale I had last quarter, I'd have to sell over 500 clips at a micro-stock house to make the same amount of money.


That's great that pixleflow has a lot of traffic but the name of the game is selling. If they don't have what clients want then what good is traffic?

There's nothing that says you can't have clips at in multiple places. Some agencies won't let you put similar clips with other stock agencies. But put a few hundred clips with a couple different agencies and see what they do for you. If they don't make you sales then drop them and try another one.

I have about 500 test clips with one of the top stock agencies in the country. They're not doing anything for me. So, when my contract runs out, I'll be taking all those clips to an agency that's kickin ass at selling my work.

You just need to crunch the numbers and see what will work for you.
Back in my still days they used to say that you'd make about $1 per year for each slide you had on file. So, if you wanted to make $50k, you needed to have 50,000 slides.

This doesn't mean you can have 49,900 slides of clouds and 100 great images and expect to make $50k you need to have some top notch stuff.

But, if you're cool with gas money then you can go about any place and make a few sales.
I know a lot of these micro stock agencies talk about 60%, 80% commission but if it's on a sale of $35 then how many do you have to sell to buy that new camera or to quit your day job.

If your footage is good enough to be on NGO or AP then why would you sell it for peanuts?

Crunch the numbers and look at the total column before you buy into huge commissions and tons of traffic., that's what's important.
 
I have nearly 1000 clips on Revostock and make about $4 per clip per year,
averaged out over all the clips.. However, only about one clip in 5 sells in a years time. On Istock, I have 50 clips, and the percentage is similar. Difference is 80% of my income on Istock is coming from one particular clip.

If you want to do microstock, you must decide if the time and effort is worth it. It probably takes 20 or more minutes to capture, encode, color correct, trim, upload, describe, add keywords, etc. for one clip. (I'm not including actual upload time - just time spent in front of the computer) Multiply that times the number of clips needed to generate income. Nice thing is, some of the clips will still be generating income years afterward.

You also mentioned TurnHere, which is a volume web video producer rather than
a stock house. I work for them too, and can honestly say that my favorite jobs are Turnhere jobs. Not because it pays a fortune (works out to $40-$50 an hour), but because it is extremely low pressure. No client breathing down your neck - clients are told by Yellow Pages rep what the video will look like. Just accept the job, go to
a small business and shoot a profile (hour and a half), come home, edit and prepare
the deliverables. Not a bad way to generate some gas money.
 
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Thanks for the great info guys. As of right now, I'm shooting with the DVX so I'm stuck with SD resolution. Also, I don't think I have the time to churn out high volumes of video so if I was able to sell at decent prices with a moderate commission, wouldn't that be ideal for me? The opposite of that it seems would be selling at a high commission like you guys said, but with a low pay turnout. Would any of you be willing to give a link to some of your work? I'd be most interested in seeing what your videos look like. Also, I haven't been able to find any sites that have a high payout/low commission combination, they're all low commission/low pay (istock, shutterstock, pond5, etc.)
 
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