Stockfootage as a side income?

[Hurcan Yilmazer]

Hi
I have been selling some stock footage through shutterstock and curious if it can grow to a real income. I know it is must be threated a an investment and had to give it a lot of time. Should i try to sell every footage on every stock site?
Or just concentrate on one site?
Any suggestions will be very valuable.

best regards
Hurcan

 

[Zack Birlew]

I sell stock footage through Pond5.com and it's not something that I would consider to be a full income kind of thing. I'm currently uploading around 150 new clips and I've just been so busy with other things that I haven't had the time to enter in all the descriptive data, tags, pricing, etc. but, even though I'll upload around 150 clips, I know that only a few will sell anytime soon, even at my reasonable pricing ($10-30 depending on the clip). I would love it if more people bought my footage but it's just one of those things you can't tell what your audience wants or when they need it. On our website we even have a contact e-mail in case anyone has stock footage requests but it hasn't been used as of yet. I travel quite a bit and I film as much as I can and I try to film things to be as flexible as possible and not be too baked in. I even do sound effects and photos but those don't sell as often as the footage. I'm just kind of throwing things out there to let you know what I've found. But even though I won't make much over $30 for a long, long, long stretch of time, I'll still keep filming and uploading another 100+ clips over the coming months and then 100+ more after that because it's fun and creative and if I can make at least a little something from it then that's awesome. New equipment factors into it as well. Now that I have an A7S, I'm thinking of doing a whole bunch of low light experiments and, eventually, 4K work too. As for selling to multiple places, well, I've considered it but Pond5 has a 50-50 split and they make it very easy to upload media and don't have any weird "gotcha" items in their terms and agreements. For exposure's sake, it would be helpful to expand but it would be a lot of work to put up my backlog and some of it doesn't even exist anymore, save for the original unedited non-Prores clips. One big problem is that pricing is sometimes not completely in my control with some places and I worry about customers feeling a little spurned that they'd have to pay a good deal more from one site when they could have simply gone to our Pond5 page and gotten the fair price I intended. As a filmmaker myself, one of the things I hate the most is when I need a piece of stock media, even just a clip, and that single 10-second clip is listed at something like $100 or more. That's just ridiculous, but the way some of these stock websites make it, you almost have to price higher just to get anything out of it. I do intend to expand the outlets for our stock media offerings at some point but I'll have to do a good deal of research to figure out the best place or places to expand to as even the stock media landscape is always changing and evolving.