Where To Sell Stock Video | Top 4 places to sell Stock video footage

STOCK AGENCIES WORTH YOUR TIME

When deciding where to invest your time, and upload your footage, we recommend these agencies in this order.

ADOBE STOCK (Previously Fotolia)

Adobe Stock has been growing their portfolio over the last few years. They acquired Fotolia which gave them a huge boost to the amount of content in their library. They have also taken advantage of the rest of the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem to tightly integrate Adobe Stock into all applications that could benefit from Stock Footage and image content. This seems to be paying off as the amount of stock footage sales coming from Adobe Stock continues to increase.

They have one of the easiest uploading and meta tagging processes and provide the best statistics for contributors to jump into regarding your stock video footage.

The revenue split has remained at 70/30 (in their favor) which puts them ahead of ShutterStock and just behind Pond5.

Sales velocity of stock video clips is still falls just behind ShutterStock in our experience, however that higher revenue split makes the total revenue earned higher.

Acceptance rate of stock video footage on Adobe Stock is in line with Pond5. Like any agency, only submit your best work, and avoid spamming the system with a number of almost identical clips. This should go without saying, but it is important to iterate that you should only upload stock video footage that you have taken and/or for which you are the intellectual property owner of.

They are a good place to begin building up your portfolio if you want a straight forward, easy process with decent returns at a fair commission.

Pond5 once led the way for selling stock video online. They have since taken a bit of a fall from grace and landed in second place for Stock Footage Agency to contribute to.

The sign up process is straight forward and allows you to begin uploading your footage. The upload process does have a learning curve (we have tips to speed that up here) and the review times are average with the rest of the market (Roughly one week review times.)

Pond5 updated their royalty structure last year for all new and existing contributors. There are now two contributor types, Exclusive and non-Exclusive, each with their own revenue split.

As a Exclusive contributor the royalty is split 60/40 with 60% going towards the contributor. As a non-Exclusive contributor, the split is 40/60 with the contributor now only claiming 20% of the royalty.

You are able to set your own price as an Exclusive contributor, while non-Exclusive accounts are required to set their price based on the lowest price of the other agencies the work is on.

It has been a full year since the changes to the Pond5 stock footage commission structure have taken place. Over that time it appears the quantity of stock clips sold has actually decreased instead of increasing as Pond5 predicted. This along with the lower commission per stock footage clip sold has reduced overall earnings at Pond5.

Although Pond5 may no longer be as good as it once was, it is still a solid place to begin contributing stock footage to make some sales.

BlackBox is the newest of the stock video marketplaces on the list, and its not actually a agency at all. BlackBox is a service that allows you to upload your content to a single source (them) and have it distributed amount a number of agencies. This provides huge time savings, and gets your content in front of a lot of agencies all at once.‍

The upload and meta data tagging process is not the most intuitive among the stock agencies, however once your content is on the major stock video agencies.

There are even options to have other users do that work for you, for a percentage of the selling price. This is a massive benefit if you are working with different people to make your stock footage. You can assign a percentage of a stock clip's ownership to your film crew, actors, producers or even ma and pa'. When starting out creating and selling stock video footage this can be a way to organize more people for bigger shoots and share in the excitement of selling content together.

BlackBox takes a 15% cut on the contributor's portion of a sale, which is very reasonable for the time savings. Another advantage of the BlackBox model is that because they are publishing to agencies on behalf of a large number of individual contributors, Level bases agencies such as ShutterStock will pay them (and you) higher commission.

One recent change making BlackBox slightly less contributor friendly is they've removed all referral bonuses for new accounts started with BlackBox. This previously offered the ability to earn revenue from stock footage sold from those you had referred to the program. We are hoping they bring this back in the future.

Shutterstock is one of the largest stock agencies out there and offers quite a bit. The upload process is average, with some new updates coming out that briefly made it almost unbearable. Now that they have ironed out the kinks, it has bumped to slightly above average. They are also the strictest agencies in terms of content, and highest in terms of rejections. We have a couple tips on how to make it easier here.

ShutterStock recently changed their revenue structure with a Level approach. Each year, every contributor starts at Level 1 (15% commission for stock video sales) and works their way up through different based on stock footage clips licensed. The highest commission is when you reach Level 6. To get there you would need to sell over 25,000 Clips (in a single year) and would be rewarded with 40% commission. This will definitely favour the larger stock footage contributors with big portfolios and make it more challenging to those starting out. Shutter Stock announced these changes then over a couple weeks rolled them out to all Stock video and stock image contributors. Needless to say, this did not go over well with those contributing on their platform. Over the month that followed over 2 million stock video clips were removed by contributors upset over the change.

With the new level revenue model, It is very difficult to recommend ShutterStock for those just starting out. The sales volume on their Platform is good, however if you are starting with a small amount of stock clips to sell, the chances of making your way through the levels is very tough.

Another Challenging aspect of selling stock footage through ShutterStock is their upload process and acceptance rate. Throughout the industry they are considered the hardest to get your footage approved on. The appear to be using automated screening for most footage clips with can easily reject 90-95% of your footage right off the bat with generic responses such as "too much noise" on a video clip that is perfectly exposed. They have also recently begun posing a rate limit on clips submissions on a weekly basis. After submitting 100 clips in a 7 day period you will need to wait a day to begin submitting more. This can be extremely frustrating if you are looking to add a large amount of footage at once.

To make this worse, ShutterStock will fully delete stock clips uploaded but not submitted 14 days after they are uploaded onto your account.

With all of this in mind, ShutterStock is still a worth while place to contribute stock video footage. They may not be the leader in sales velocity anymore and continue to reduce commissions for stock clips sold, however you could still find a good amount of sales coming through their platform.

Story Blocks (formally known as Video Blocks) pioneered a different approach to selling stock video. Customers can purchase an annual subscription to their service and get unlimited amount of stock video clips. They later expanded into offering a traditional marketplace for those looking to purchase clips on a one-off basis. The major draw to contributing with them is that they off 100% (minus fees) of footage sold in their marketplace.

This was a big deal in the Stock footage contributor community as it was the largest commission offered by any of the agencies. Unfortunately this was short lived. In 2019 Story blocks shut down the Marketplace and once again only offered a subscription base option to purchase stock footage. In doing so they also removed a large amount of content from their portfolio and also removed Stock Video contributors all together!

StoryBlocks now only offers selected contributors the ability to sell on their platform. The commission structure is also a bit different as they are a membership service only. They pool all revenues made in a monthly period and divide that amount their contributors based on the percentage of contributors clips were downloaded. The benefit here is that all contributors are compensated proportionally based on how many of their clips are downloaded in a monthly period. This can quickly increase your monthly revenue through StoryBlocks as you add new, relevant content that their subscribers are likely to purchase.

As a whole, this would not be a agency to start selling stock video footage with. As your portfolio grows you may want to consider joining StoryBlocks if you wanted to add one more agency to your list of places to sell your stock video footage.

You will remember there was no road--not even a pathway--between the castle of the Wicked Witch and the Emerald City. When the four travelers went in search of the Witch she had seen them coming, and so sent the Winged Monkeys to bring them to her. It was much harder to find their way back through the big fields of buttercups and yellow daisies than it was being carried. They knew, of course, they must go straight east, toward the rising sun; and they started off in the right way.

OTHERS TO CONSIDER (COMING SOON)

Want us to review an Agency?

There are hundreds of stock video agencies out there. We've shorted the list to help you out in choosing the best ones. If there was an agency you've heard of and want more information about, just let us know below.

Nice to meet you! I own a boutique video production studio in Ottawa Ontario Canada called Big Bambi Productions.

I began selling stock video footage as a way to keep myself busy between jobs and to hone my skills behind the camera and in front of the editing bay. Making extra money from the footage I capture also doesn't hurt!

Sell Stock Footage Online is a place where we collect our experience selling Stock Footage so you have a leg up in getting started!

If you have any questions please reach out, we'd love to chat.

Jorden G.