How to make money on stock footage - my experience

You probably all know about stock image websites already. Some of them like stocksnap accumulate free images while others like shutterstock sell them. I don't know how the free websites get their images, but I know that everyone can try to sell their images and video footage through websites like shutterstock. 

How does it work?

To put it simply, you register on as many of stock photo and\or video websites as you feel like you want to. Some of them require to pass an exam first - just submit some of your best work and they'll tell you if it's good enough or not. 

Then you upload all of your good photo and video content and describe it with keywords. Curators will check every file again to make sure that your content is good. 

Then you wait until somebody finds and buys your photo and video; and depending on which website it happened you get paid from 15% to 99% of its price - that's about $20 - $50 for an HD video footage and about from 25 cents to a couple of dollars for a photograph. Now I'm talking about "microstock" websites here, there's also "macrostock" agencies where prices start at several hundred dollars, but they are much more strict about quality and I haven't even tried uploading anything there.

What you'll need to start

• Some camera that can make HD videos (1920*1080 pixels resolution) and\or about 12 megapixels photos. I think it’s near impossible to find some with a megapixel count of under 10 megapixels today;
• Some computer with internet connection;
• Some free time that you're willing to try spend on this (or lots of time if you want to become really good in this).

My first steps

First I tried to submit some photos to shutterstock, I made sure that they have the right white balance and resised them from full size to 3000*2000 pixels so that they loose any image noise they had. 

They are still there, you can check them out here. Here's my top performing photos, in 3 years they earned me some money enough for a decent bottle of tequila or whiskey 😁 :

I didn't feel like uploading more photos after the first 20, so next time I returned to microstock was when we decided to try upload some videos. Since videos are sold for a higher price it was more interesting to do. It's not like they sell right away - videos actually need more time to "settle" before somebody buys them, because people tend to download a video with a watermark first and, if it fits well in their project, then they buy it after some time. But we were patient and just kept uploading more and more. Now, a year of inconsistent uploads later, there's 1297 active files in our portfolio and we get money enough for about 8 bottles of Jack Daniels per month 😂

Here's a link to my portfolio

We just started to upload 4k videos recently and I wonder if they will make more profit, will tell you when I get some results :)

What can you shoot?

You don't have to travel around the world to make photos\videos that sell. Just look around - you can shoot pretty much anything that you can name, see my photo examples. All of them were sold a couple of times:

Now take a look at my video examples - here's the first three videos I uploaded, shot with Canon 650d:

Two of them was sold! Both of them were sold just once but it's still something!

Link to the first one that was sold 

Link to the second one that was sold 

Keep in mind that if you film people or some property with distinctive design then you will need to get them to sign model release or property release to sell that video. Though if you film something of value for news or documentary or something, then you can upload it with "editorial" tag without any releases, but it usually doesn't sell as good as model released content.

If you're interested in this, let me know in comments and I will make another post with ideas about what you can shoot without even leaving your home!

List of my favourite stock footage websites

Here's the bests video selling agencies in terms of sales, price and approval times in my opinion: 

• Pond5 - they accept almost all of my files and I get most of my sales there, they pay 50% of price to the creator of footage, and you can set the price yourself
• Shutterstock  - they accept quite a lot and pay about 30% of their footage price 
• Fotolia - they really like to ask for model and property releases of everything, but still accept quite a lot, they also pay about 30%
• VideoBlocks - accepts almost everything (like Pond5) and pay about 100% of the price to the author, but they are quite new and don't sell as much as others 

Some other websites that I work with:

• VideoHive - they are getting more and more strict with what they accept, and pay the author about $2 for HD video footage, but they can sell quite a lot
• iStock - just started uploading there
• DreamsTime - they never sold any of my footage
• Dissolve - quite strict about what to accept, just started uploading there, they gave me a limit of 25 videos per month, wow

Don't be too intimidated by this list - I use a software program called StockSubmitter to automatically upload all my files to all the wesites I choose, that saves lots of time.

Overall, 

this is definetily NOT a get-rich-quick scheme, you have to be patient and persistent, but it's possible to make some money this way.

I hope this post was interesting, please let me know what you think in the comments! I plan to share some of our stock footage shootings later, like filming our friends in a gym, which we did a couple of days ago, that was fun 😊

You can also reesteem this posts if you secretly want some of your friends to start selling stock footage 😉

Stay tuned for more!