Thanks Will, I have watched all your video's, the one which covers your editing and workflow is excellent. I recently paid $99 for a course on how to sell stock footage and editing but, I have learnt more watching your video's than I did from the course, so thank you for the time you take to produce your video's, by the way you now have a new subscriber. Just got myself a Mavic Air so I am going to start shooting stock footage with it. All the best and thanks again.
Thanks for being frank about this. It seems like this is better suited for those that have a ton of content sitting on a hard drive, or, like you mentioned, your already on a job, why not take some extra clips for the work your doing, do better for the client, and sell off whatever else that might. But to do it as a job? Forget about it. The equipment costs, time and labor multiplied by 1000's of clips, even if they are short, just wont add up to anything unless your time and equipment is already being paid for. Stock Video is passive income to add a little extra gravy to the work your already doing. Thanks for managing my expectations. :)
Thanks, Will. I'm at the 350 clip mark on Shutterstock and I am seeing some sales! My goal is 1,700 high quality high variety of clips on Shutterstock and Pond 5.
Great video, very realistic. Have to agree with last comment. Getty selling video clips for peanuts. I moved to Pond 5 and low and behold $60 a clip, you get half. no brainer.
To grade, or not to grade? That is the question.... seriously, will ungraded footage sell better, so the consumers can grade it themselves, or do they just want maximum prettiness like amateurs and lazy people?
Thanks for the feedback! Yes keep going with the uploads for sure, it always gets hard around the 300-500 mark but keep going! Is there anything you'd have liked me to talk about in this video that I didn't :) ?
Second consecutive video I just watched. Helpful, insightful, and genuine. I feel guilty for having 25k subs, while you only 3.7k. Considering the quality of info you provide, I feel like you should have many more than I do. In any case, looking forward to getting started with stock footage. I have over 10 yrs worth of footage from all over the world, and haven't once considered selling it. Your videos have me reconsidering it. Thank you again & looking forward to more!
umm...average of 42 cent/month?? so I would say $5/month is way above average. imo $5 is nothing, especially that BlockBox works with Filezilla which doesn't for many people.
Hi William, Just came across your channel and I'm finding it very informative. I'm just thinking of starting out with stock footage and the thought of having to come up 1000+ clips is a bit daunting but I'm recently retired so I have a bit of time on my hands. Can I assume that if you upload a clip to Blackbox there is nothing stopping you selling the same clip on your own website for whatever price you see fit?
$5 is a joke, videographers are seriously under selling their work , put on pond5 and sell for minimum of $50 don't race to the bottom like the photo stock market.
Hi Ark! I think you misunderstood mate, $5 is net average across all clips. I.e I had a sale the other day for $50 but that one sale then equates to $5/clip/batch for the upload of 10. Hope that helps :) Some people make way more, some less. I know people doing over $30/clip/year with a port of 5000 clips and some doing $1/clip but they're aiming for 100K clips (Crazy right) My personal averages comes out around $6/clip/year :)
Thanks for the candid info. Not as much $$ as I expected but always good to know the realistic projections instead of inflated numbers. Btw, what is that music track at the end? I dig it.
Cool video, it helped me a lot. What do you think about making videos by phone + gimbal (osmo mobile 2) with using a good camera app like ProMovie. Is this setup good enough for stock footages?
The "royalty free" model is to be AVOIDED at ALL costs. Stay away from it. If you value your work, go EXCLUSIVE and go RIGHTS MANAGED. Of course you should shoot 4K and capture really nice compositions. 4K is getting cheaper every month, and practice really improves your skill. You can't licence a clip from my agency for less than $400 USD, and that's the corporate rate. Broadcast is more. Film is WAY more. I received a cheque for $1600 USD for one HD clip alone. That amount told me it went to a film. That same clip has sold several times to corporate and broadcast over the years. Some of my clips have been dormant for 9 years and then suddenly sell. My library has only 350 clips and yes, I agree, yes I need a much LARGER library, so that's my focus, along with 4K. Now...why does stock sell?...because it's cheaper than hiring a cameraman to get the shot. So, it's a growing market and a great one to pursue.
How much is 'okay' if I may ask? I'm myself a videographer and photographer based in Bali, Indonesia. I have a huge archive of video and photo footage that is just laying around. I am thinking of uploading several varieties of footage. Takes a lot of work in the beginning and is more a long term rund than short term. Would appreciate your experiences.@@cyrusdavid6653
@@fabiankiby I gave a few numbers in my original post to underline my point about income within the Rights Managed Model. Right now, if you are sitting on your footage, you are making zero. If you decide to go with Footagebank you will ONLY need to send a hard drive. They will select your sell-able shots and keyword them for you. It's very transparent. They pay 50% which is the best in the industry. Give Paula a call and she can answer more of your questions. In an older article about Footagebank, they stated producers could make $50,000 usd annually. I don't have the link to the article but if you have a few thousand clips, expect income regularly. Also, at first be patient. Stock is a long tail game.
Interesting with the black box. If you already have an account on pond5 do they just connect to your account or does their account upload your content?
I am curious if the clips you uploaded and account for average per clip over a year.. 2 or 3 years later are still part of that average..and thus you continue to make more and more over the years.. or if a lot of the clips you shot/sold a couple years ago no longer sell much if at all.. thus leading to constantly trying to shoot and upload more and more clips? Also.. you really emphasize quality work. Based on the shear number of clips available on Pond5, it seems like I could get some amazing hard to find/get to locations, and yet.. it may never sell. A very important aspect of Pond5 and similar sites I would think is the metadata that allows your clip to bubble to the top. I am going to go out on a limb here and say like mobile apps, I would guess most people dont scroll through hundreds of clips of similar search criteria to find your clip.. if your clip is not pulling up in the first page or so of results it most likely wont get seen, much less purchased. This is the biggest problem with sites like this, as well as mobile app market.. it is like having a good lawyer get you off for murder.. if you have the right details/search metadata, your clip could get put in front of others and have a much better chance of being seen and thus purchased. I would hope Pond5 and other sites do some sort of rotation to give new clips the chance to be seen rather than purely based on search results.. but guessing probably not. The mobile app stores at least have things like newly added, recently updated, trending, etc. So that your app has a better shot of being seen/found more often. But there are plenty of fantastic apps for certain categories that have 0 sales.. and plenty of stories of developers out there talking about this issue. I dont know if it applies to the likes of pond5 and other sites either.. but I am concerned that if I shoot what I can and its not the most amazing never before seen footage, I may never see a sale of my footage. Last thing.. given that this video is posted in 2018.. and the massive plethora of high quality cameras today.. but most still record in highly compressed H.264 (e.g. gopro, drones, phones and even a lot of expensive cameras)... I record using HDMI out of my camera to a DNxHR format.. but the output of the HDMI is still 8-bit. To what extent are videos searched based on things like the camera (e.g. RED, Sony, Alexa, BlackMagic) with RAW/ProRes/DNxHR vs just the type of footage.. e.g. waterfalls, insects, etc? To clarify more.. how much (or little) attention is given to the quality of the codec (and resolution) first before the content... or would you say most people look for content first, and would take 8-bit h.264 videos over looking for RAW/ProRes first, then sub-searching for specific content? I personally am all about trying to use RAW or ProRes or DNxHR over h.264 because h.264 is already heavily compressed and is not ideal for adding to a video that will be compressed again for delivery. Thanks.
The agencies love ProRes if you can handle and afford the file size. I used to myself but due to my volume I had to move down to H264, this hasn't had any noticeable effect on sales. Your right that meta data helps a huge amount. The town, region, season and date for editorial are all key if relevant. Buyers want the best bang for their buck and will be happy to spend the time sifting through to the stuff they want in their production. That's my experience at least. Also, don't judge the Broll, you'd be amazed what subjects can sell. Hope it helps
Looks like the only way to make money on stock footage or photography is monetizing RU-vid videos about how much (or rather how little) you can make. A couple of years of hard work and you may start earning as much as $200 a month. Wow! Fantastic! Passive income my ass. How about getting a real job instead?
When typing up the tag lines, is there a way to do it quickly, since blackbox doesn’t let you copy and paste (for similar clips), and when uploading large volumes of clips...
If I understand your question, just use a CVS spreadsheet. You can copy/paste from one cell to another for as many clips as it applies too. Upload the spreadsheet.
still waiting on my 1080p camcorder to come in the mail. black box only accepts 4k where as shutter stock will accept 1080p. I'll upgrade to 4K as soon as I can. Thanks for the advise. Good video.
@@WilliamHunter123 Thanks for letting me know got the cam but it was not what it was advertised. extremely poor quality I have to send it back. Thank you again.
whoa I am so surprised. Is that still the case as I just removed all my video from Getty/Istock for paying $8 a clip when Pond 5 paid me $55 for 2 clips. Maybe I have been a bit hasty?
5000 clips wtf do you know how much that is? Its like years of years of years of work and on top of that it needs to be a LOT of variety ? Haha just go and get a normal Job
he could be shouting a long video and splitting it into 30 seconds clips, the same clip can have diffrent color grading profiles, slow motion and normal footage
Vhanx Nox You can create accounts on the stock agency websites such as Shutterstock, Pond5, Adobe Stock, etc. Once you upload your stock footage video clips to your account at one of the agencies, you will add meta data and key words to the clip. You then submit the clip for review and their reviewers will either approve or reject the clip. The review process can take up to 72 hours. Once approved, the clip goes into your portfolio on your account and is then available for sale. You can do this separately for each agency or you can use a service that William Hunter mentions in his videos (and is linked in the video description) called Black Box that handles uploading and submitting your clips to all of the agencies for you. You upload your clips to black box and enter the meta data there and it handles sending them all out to all of the agencies and you can manage everything from the Black Box console page all in one place. Hope that helps a little.
Cool channel, I have completed a stock footage course and uploaded less than 30 clips and made one sale lol now I know I need to upload 1000 to make the gears work. Can you make money from editorial content is it worth only focusing on commercial content? Thanks keep up the interesting channel
Hi TheBeatManiac! Yes I'd say I have a fair few by now haha. I actually have a very small personal port on the agencies, a port with a business that I used to be a pat of and a collaborate portfolio through Black Box (info on them in description) where I basically curate for other shooters. I'd say my collective port size is around maybe 3000ish clips now. I am rapidly growing though, last month I did over 1000 of those 3000. My goal is to hit 20,000 eventually and see if it's enough to sustain me for a while :) How about yourself?
ok...a fair few...hmm.. i have no idea whats a fair few ;-) anyway. i sell a fair few a day. enough to pay the rent, food, drinks and some equipment. rapidly growing= uploading hundreds of similar clips? lots of ppl do that, but thats the wrong way (in my eyes). my port is quite small but very healthy. tip: get familar with grading, fx etc. stock customers want finished footage..
I've been using BlackBox for about a year now having uploaded around 150 clips. While I have consistently made a nice little chunk of extra income each month from it, it's ALOT of labor up front and is a frustrating process guessing what clips will be accepted or rejected. I've uploaded a clip of a certain subject and had it acceped only to have similar clips rejected. I sometimes will wait on rejected clips and resubmit them later without changing anything and have them accepted, etc. There's an inconsistency to the approval process that's incredibly obnoxious especially after you spend so much time shooting and editing said footage for it all to be for nothing. Hopefully they improve it because going and shooting new content they'll accept can feel like a guessing game but if you have lots of extra clips on hard drives you're doing nothing with then give it a shot.
I am confused. I just read on Blackbox’s site that you retain ownership of you stuff uploaded. He stated it was one of the reasons he started the company. ????????
5$ a year for a clip.....divide that by the time it took you to go on location and film that clip. Afterward divide it by the time of editing and color grate it and finaly by the time to download it on multiple sites and keyword it....= a quick ass salary of 2.50$ an hour...WOW Im all excited here
Hi Michal, I did a video recently about getting started in stock footage. Highly recommend you check that out camera wise as I do cover it in there. Almost any 4K camera will do :)
I started on 2013 with a Canon T3i and an iPod Touch. It wasn't the top selling files, but they would still sell. Quality is important, but I would definitely give focus to quantity. I just posted a video with a full report of my stock earnings in 2017. Check it out in my channel!
