Which Stock Video Sites Make You The Most Money?

basspig

basspig

Veteran
With the realization that general videography is not making me a living, I'm branching into selling my footage as stock footage.

I'm looking at some options, but would like to hear from others who've sold footage and the sites that are making you the most in sales.

I heard a rumor somewhere that RevoStock was selling better for one guy than Pond5. I'm also looking at ArtBeats. I filled out an application with them today.

I've got a couple dozen clips online so far, but have sold none to the general public so far. How many clips do you have online at the point where you start to see sales? Does it take 100, 500, or 1000 clips of diverse subject matter to begin to produce some sales? Or does the stock video site matter?

ArtBeats charges a substantial price per clip, whereas the other sites charge about 1/10th of that. However, I was unable to raise any stats on what clips are selling, unlike on RevoStock where it's possible to search most downloaded (sold) clips. Even there, the top sellers are only a handful of downloads.

With zero work as videographer and editor for hire since late November, I suspect the income potential lies in content, not services, now. Two things come to mind: make a movie or a TV series, or, sell stock footage. The latter being much more practical to implement.

The thing is that I wish to avoid wasting time with dead end stock footage sites that are just collectors of clips with little to no buyers. I'm seeking out the sites that are actually selling clips and making money for the license holders.

Comments and advice on this would be greatly appreciated!
 
I'm on Revostock and Istock and for the number of clips posted, am pretty consistent in sales on each. Over a years time, roughly one sold clip for every four posted. Many will never sell. One clip on Istock, though, has sold 40 times . Most one clip has sold on Revostock, about 10 times. Emergency vehicles, accidents, slow motion, nature time lapse, steadicam, etc. have done well. But it is somewhat unpredictable what will sell. I would recommend submitting at least 100 clips to a site before expecting many sales. You will find Istock about as easy to communicate with as Ebay or Paypal. Revostock, on the other hand, is a model business as far as helping its contributors. And your fellow shooters there are just as helpful.

Recently a major footage house, which handles footage for the motion picture studios and National Geographic, noticed my stuff on Revostock and signed me to a 5 year contract to submit exclusively to them. They mainly want "lifestyle" footage. No idea how my footage will sell there, but the prices top out at $800 a clip rather than $35. :thumbup:

I would also recommend TurnHere as a way to generate extra income for videographers. You basically go to a business , shoot a web video according to their particular format, edit it and Fedex it to them on DVDs. I actually enjoy shooting these more than almost anything else I do, and get paid for it. They have shooters all over the US .
 
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Fred, thank you for a fairly comprehensive reply. I gather that, in your case, iStock has been more lucrative than RevoStock. Would that be a correct assumption?

I've got about two dozen on RevoStock so far, but I'm having second thoughts about which stock footage site I should be submitting my most valuable footage. Nothing has sold yet, so I'm wondering how many clips online it takes to reach 'critical mass'.

The information about Turnhere is interesting. Sort of like Crews-control without the insane requirements that Cricket Capucci places on her contract videographers. I might have a shot at this, that is, if they have work in the wilderness of NW CT. I've just signed up with them and am awaiting a confirmation e-mail. Should be interesting to see what happens there.

I'm in a dialog with someone at ArtBeats at the moment, and, although it takes about 3 months to get up and running, according to their documentation, it looks like it may be profitable if I can generate enough quality material.

Thanks again for your valuable input. Looking forward to see what Turnhere has in store.

PS: What format do you find sells the best? 24P, 30P, 60i?
 
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basspig said:
With zero work as videographer and editor for hire since late November, I suspect the income potential lies in content, not services, now. Two things come to mind: make a movie or a TV series, or, sell stock footage. The latter being much more practical to implement.
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Hi,

This isn't easy to write in a non confrontational way, so please be easy on me. I am trying to help. Not sure why you're having trouble getting work as a videographer. I have only been doing this five years and am having the best months I've ever had over the past 6-8 months, consistently earning 6-10K a month, working, realistically, part time. My only advice is that stock footage isn't worth the trouble. Diversifying your work across clients with different budgets and requirements has been key for me to keeping busy and increasing my income. I'm not going to pretend that, where my income is now, is the perfect place to be. It's not. I still struggle financially. But, there's hope for better things in the future. And, this approach has been a steady buck during the recession.

My work consists of:
videographer for production companies 20%
videographer for advertising agencies 30%
video editing for advertising agencies 15%
video editor for in-house videos at hospital 5%
video assist / DIT guy on higher budget shoots 20%
video editor / tape logger for entertainment production co 5%
self produced videos of school singing programs for parents on DVD 5%

Here's my secret: A lot of the "videography" work I get comes from, essentially, partnering up with other shooters and tackling jobs together as a team, instead of trying to keep everyone else away from "my" clients. You wouldn't believe it, but there are a GREAT number of still shooters out there trying to claw their way into the video business and will pay good money to an advisor, who will shoot a second camera with them, and edit all of their stuff together. It's a mutually beneficial relationship that gets both of us work that neither of us would have had otherwise. I have successfully used this model with 2 still shooters, and it's working out fabulously. I don't rely entirely on this method, of course. But, if you already own a couple cameras, some lights, and mic's, you can stay busy by letting other people do the work of finding the jobs for you and then you simply show up with the gear and your expertise in knowing what to do with that gear. It's not always about being "the" main guy on a job. If you're paid well, it's easy to let ego slide, for a while. For a fee.

Anyway. This is a comfortable mix for me. And, if the any of these categories slide downhill, I still have the other sources of income. Being diversified is key.

Hope this helps you in some way.
 
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Thanks for contributing your thoughts to this topic. No, it didn't come across confrontationally. In fact, I thought it was quite compassionate of you to take the time to share your experience and apportionment of business activities as a percentage division of your work.

I have been giving a lot of thought to the problem of why I have such a hard time obtaining clients for the past 25 years, since I've been self-employed in one form or another. I've boiled it down to several possible factors, including my advancing age (this is a young person's career--you don't see many videographers over 60 in this field) energy levels, personality and body language. I'm rather introverted and don't make friends easily. Talking to strangers often ends up in disaster, so I don't do well in cold-calling/sales. I attempted to do Amway in 1971 and an insurance/financial services company in 2006, failing miserably at both. (It is the last time I'll be suckered in to any "opportunity" that claims I can earn money without doing sales.) Maybe I look like an axe murderer, I dunno.. but it also affected my personal life, and I didn't get married til after I retired and went overseas looking for a better life at the end of the last century. I finally did meet someone who didn't care about my age or looks, and so I've started a family. My wife says I'll live to 120. Go figure! At any rate, I've done color prepress in the '80s/90s, dabbled in video production from '87 onward, but the equipment was expensive and quality was poor, watched my color prepress business decline to zero by 1997, with kids with Mac computers taking all my work at prices a fraction of my rates. I went back into electronics for 12 years, serving as chief engineer for many of the radio stations in the New England region, until radio hit hard times and studio construction, transmitter maintenance and facilities upkeep became unimportant to a new breed of pencil-pushing owners.
In 2005, I recorded a symphony pops concert for a longtime client, and had an ephiphany: for the first time in my entire life, I ENJOYED what I was doing and felt a satisfaction I had never felt, ever, at any job or self-employed venture I'd done up til then. That's when I decided to drop everything else and pursue video productions as my business venture.
Unfortunately, I find myself in a world of people who could care less about the quality of the video and where price and doing it cheaply (meaning a couple hundred bucks) is king. Craigslist is saturated with ads asking for a videographer with a full kit, willing to work for $100-200/day--it's downright insulting.
I ran ads for wedding videography on the radio for ten weeks last spring. Didn't get even ONE phonecall from it. The few prospects I do talk to hang up as soon as I quote a price--they want something to $150 that typically costs $900 or more. I can't believe I'm living in the richest state in the US and people here will not pay a fair rate for video services.
My friends tell me I'm the best-kept secret in Connecticut. I have a vast array of skills and an unrelenting level of quality that I put into all my projects, but that's not what people care about. They want cheap, cheap, or free. Some local bands advertise on CL and want a videographer for $50 to film their concert. Give me a break!
I find it paradoxical that a person with my array of skills in audio, video, editing, FX, packaging design, etc., can't find lots of clients. I spend nearly all of my time marketing, instead of actually doing client work. This month, most of my time has been devoted to figuring my taxes for last year. I'm still not done with that, btw.

Now, I have on extremely rare occasions been hired as a sub to be a second shooter, but these are rare events. Mostly, I scoop up a job or two by floating around the town greens and city centers where events like concerts are taking place. Other shooters know I'm available, but the work just isn't there. With local television giving away the production services as part of the spot costs, that pretty much kills the market for advertising production. And yes, I've contacted ad agencies all over the US, offering my services. The few that were kind enough to respond to my included return-postage-paid survey cards cited that they already had what I had to offer in-house. Other marketing firms were not dealing with television, but print ads only.

I tried looking into firms that hire videographers from all over the US. Costco Connection ran an article on Crews-control a couple of years ago, so I contacted them. They didn't respond at first, so I contacted them a second time and they sent me their list of requirements. They only work with videographers that have won awards, have a Sony 350 or 500 series shoulder mount cam and a portfolio of at least ten different interviews that they lit in various ways. It was impossible to break into any real work because of these barriers to entry. So I've continued to slog it alone, taking whatever scraps I could find and negotiating pitifal rates, rather than sit in the office doing cold-calling. It occured to me that people have what I call "selective stupidity"--they can be brilliant in some areas and grossly deficient in others. I realized that my area of selective stupidity is dealing with other people. After 25 years of working on improving that skill, I've only made a little progress. I can only speak if it's rehearsed. If someone derails my sales pitch, I'm unable to think on my feet and come up with a new angle. It's game-over once that happens. That boils down to intelligence. I'm only good IN the editing suite or behind the camera. When it comes to people skills, forget it. I need people out there to be the buffer between me and the clients. And I've sought those people out in the past, but no one wants to work on commission only.
The crazy thing is, I've got all the tools to make just about any production--the cameras, the editing, FX, 3D CGI, music production facilities, the works... but it seems like there's a 'glass ceiling' in the biz and outsiders can't get into the inner circle where the good gigs are.
I've pretty much realized that I do not have the inter-personal skills, appearance or ability to commiserate with the potential market of today. I'm at odds, both in interests and philosophically with most of the demographic that hires videographers. I'm sorry, but I could care less about the latest football game, or the latest episode of Dancing with the Stars. If it's video that someone wants, I can discuss, but people today live in a different world, socially, than I do.
In light of this, I think that content has a better chance of earning me a living than trying to hawk my services to others. And frankly, I wouldn't care if I made money at this, except for the fact that I gotta' pay the property taxes on my domicile twice a year and it's my single largest expense, greater than all other expenses combined.
I don't know how much I will earn with stock footage, but I suspect it's more than I earned doing video work for clients. Sure, I have some clients, and they are excellent people, but the projects they have are too few and far between. And most of my clients are Chinese or Japanese--I just seem to get along with them better than I do most Americans, as my own sensibilities are more closely matched to those of Asian thinking than to American thinking. I met my wife in Asia. She worked in Taiwan at the time. Part of me wants to live in rural Japan, but it's just not practical.
It would be nice if there were more clearing houses for videographers, so we could all find work assignments and spend our time WORKING instead of marketing. Selling stock footage seems like the next best thing.
 
I understand. One business model I learned about and think makes a TON of sense is the one that Richard Boddington used for his company, "Time Image" whose site is www.timeimage.com.

Basically, about ten years ago, this guy, Richard, quit his job at a Canadian TV station and picked up an old, used Russian 35mm motion picture camera, from eBay. Then, he spent the next few years building up a library of 35mm motion picture footage and selling it -- royalty free -- in pre packaged bundles on his website for a few hundred dollars each. This was in stark contrast to the majority of FILM stock footage at the time. Since most producers were accustomed to paying $50-100 per SECOND for 35mm stock footage, paying $300 for a HALF HOUR of it seemed like a huge bargain.

And, it is. His Statue Of Liberty aerial shot eventually aired as the Superbowl Opening Shot in 2003. His travels have even taking him to places like Antarctica, for an entire month. He has parlayed the hundreds of thousands of dollars he's earned selling stock footage, into producing and directing his own feature films. That's a successful business, if you ask me. One I would LOVE to emulate one day. Just a thought.

High quality for a fair price, always wins. Always :thumbup:
 
He sounds young, energetic and ambitious. ;-) Not that aerial video did not cross my mind a few times. 8 years ago, a client of mine rented a helicopter for $360 for an hour flight over his radio transmitter site for some photos. The thought of doing aerial videos intrigued me somewhat, but the cost of flying and the proprietary mounts to the aircraft, FAA regs and all the complications of strapping a camera on an aircraft are not trivial, nor cheap. Plus, the fact that RevoStock has tons of aerial footage of LA that has 0 downloads (sales), doesn't instill confidence in this as a popular seller. One has to go to far away and nearly impossible to reach places to get the kind of footage that people will buy. Anyone can rent a bird and fly over Connecticut.
The guy in your example was clever and had the brains to parlay that old Russian camera into something that eventually made him some money. Although the idea of selling the SuperBowl a film for $300 just strikes me as being taken advantage of by a wealthy industry.
 
basspig said:
He sounds young, energetic and ambitious. ;-) Not that aerial video did not cross my mind a few times. 8 years ago, a client of mine rented a helicopter for $360 for an hour flight over his radio transmitter site for some photos. The thought of doing aerial videos intrigued me somewhat, but the cost of flying and the proprietary mounts to the aircraft, FAA regs and all the complications of strapping a camera on an aircraft are not trivial, nor cheap. Plus, the fact that RevoStock has tons of aerial footage of LA that has 0 downloads (sales), doesn't instill confidence in this as a popular seller. One has to go to far away and nearly impossible to reach places to get the kind of footage that people will buy. Anyone can rent a bird and fly over Connecticut.
The guy in your example was clever and had the brains to parlay that old Russian camera into something that eventually made him some money. Although the idea of selling the SuperBowl a film for $300 just strikes me as being taken advantage of by a wealthy industry.
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I think my point may have been lost in my previous post. To be clear, what is unique about his business model, is NOT that he used a helicopter or 35mm film. His Unique Selling Proposition is offering the footage in (reasonably priced) Bundles, instead of (overpriced) Individual Shots.

And, he offers tremendous discounts when you buy more than one bundle at a time. For instance, one bundle cost $299, but when you buy three, the price drops to $116 each. When you buy all 45 bundles, the price drops to $31 each. So, you see, he's clearly going after the budget minded producer and/or pack rat community. Your choice. Either way, I think it's a brilliant strategy. Or at the very least, it's contrarian to most of what we see today. Out of the box, I think. Hope this helps...
 
" RevoStock has tons of aerial footage of LA that has 0 downloads (sales), doesn't instill confidence in this as a popular seller. One has to go to far away and nearly impossible to reach places to get the kind of footage that people will buy. Anyone can rent a bird and fly over Connecticut."

Wow - aerial footage with no dowloads- never noticed that. I have a slow motion clip of toast popping out of a toaster that sells well. Guess unique is what works.
 
The trick is to be good at guessing what big $$$ editors are looking for. I suppose sometimes it doesn't have to be footage taken with a camera dangling from a hang glider over Niagara Falls. :-)
 
i'm a big money editor. huge. :) and i can tell you that generally speaking... the more dynamic the clip, the happier the client, and the less friction for me to deal with.
 
More dynamic, in what respect? Action? "Impossible" feats of physical agility? Destruction? Mayhem? Enquiring minds want to know!

BTW, I was under the impression that the real big money guys don't have time to post on internet forums, as they're too busy flying from location shot to location shot in their private jets, and being entertained by a bunch of dames the whole trip. :-)
 
basspig said:
More dynamic, in what respect? Action? "Impossible" feats of physical agility? Destruction? Mayhem? Enquiring minds want to know!

BTW, I was under the impression that the real big money guys don't have time to post on internet forums, as they're too busy flying from location shot to location shot in their private jets, and being entertained by a bunch of dames the whole trip. :-)
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:) that's a misconception. the more money you command, the less actual work you do. that's been my experience, anyway. and i have time to get down with my friends on dvxuser because I only work half the year so I can spend the other six months on personal projects. but during those working months, yes, permanently jet lagged.

dynamic = compelling, moving, iconic, not what one usually thinks of as "stock".

disclaimer: my experience with using stock footage is limited to cutting theatrical trailers for the studios, nothing more. that colors my perception of what's useful to a client.
 
Hmmmm.... well, that makes me think of politicians--folks who do very little actual work but command large amounts of money. :-)

Compelling footage.. moving, iconic... yes, I see your point. I think of historical footage, like the burning of the Hindenberg, or the Jews being marched to the gas chambers, in old, B&W film that shows its age. Not like I'm going to be shooting any film like that (oh, wait, with the crisis our nation is in, almost anything may happen!) But in the very near term, if tasked with the job of creating such footage, what would you seek out?
 
haha, well... politicians are driven by ego. not me. far from it.

and i can't be any more specific than the "how", because it's the projects that dictate the "what". in studio trailers, i can say i've never needed shots of people. last ones were a daytime NYC skyline and some "creepy" woods footage. we used a shot that had a slow push on it.
 
That's interesting.. there must have been SOMETHING about that footage that was more compelling than the tons of NYC skyline footage on stock video sites.

I'm taking an active role in getting more 'compelling' footage now. Friday, I was in the swamp, getting footage of the mating frogs (they're only out for a couple days a year). Saturday, I hiked up to the top of a waterfall with my EX1 and tripod. Shot footage along the way, but my aim was to get to the top and shot DOWN from the top. I got close. I now know that I'll need rubber hip boots to wade in that river to the edge of the falls, so that's the followup plan. I'll hang the cam over the top of the falls and get the dizzying perspective from the top down. Maybe a small jib would make this even better. But I've assessed the task and will return soon. I already shot some nice footage up there this weekend. But I aim to take it to the limit with wading out to the precipice, planting the tripod in the water and shooting for as long as 30 minutes with every conceivable combination of overcrank, normal and various exposure and shutter angle settings.

I'm looking at trains as another project this spring. Good locomotive footage with great audio, so when the engineer blows that horn, it makes the viewer jump out of their skin. Every clip I create has to be unique and unlike anything else that is already for sale. This exercise has taught me to be more observant in daily life--looking for situations/places for good shooting opportunities.
 
Just mentioning stock footage in a big money session would end it.
Because stock footage is generic, it will never be a perfect match with any piece so stock footage is looked at globally as a last resort and is usually egg on the face of whoever did not get the required shots. I'm generalizing of course. Sometimes a brother needs a quick shot of the vatican and aint gonna buy a plane ticket. Library stuff aint what an editor whould ever try to sell though. It should just be leaned on in a pinch.
 
I shoot with a HMC 150 for iStock and make a full-time living at it! I love shooting stock and try to create footage that will be useful in a lot of different areas. I will post my link but don't want to break forum rules.
 
I had a pretty good thing going for a while selling extreme sports clips to all these ridiculous cable countdown shows, even had a shot on Leno that paid for my HVX, RedRock/lens and Cartoni. I had 10 shots on iStock pay the car payments on my Honda Civic for 2 years. I must say though that lately it has dropped off considerably.
 
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