Site Reviews
The Five Top Sites for Selling Stock Video
Here are my top earning sites based on actual income produced on a monthly basis. You can confirm these results independently on my Resources page.
If I were starting out, I would submit to these agencies for maximum cash return on your investment of time and effort. The percentage following the site is the royalty or commission to the artist.
They are, in proven income production order:
If you created a list based on percentage paid to the seller from some of the other stock sites it would look like this:
Don't base where you upload stock video on the percentage offered. These percentages above look great. Unfortunately, this is not the way it works. I uploaded 400 clips to Pixelflow.com where the percentage is 75%. I have, to date, earned zero dollars there. Stockfuel.com, a site with astonishing ease of submission and elegance of design, has no sales. MediaStock.ca (deceased) was a non-earner. AlwaysHD, a black hole of energy, wasted effort and personal ire. Aside from Pond5 and possibly ClipCanvas, the majority of sites offering generous royalties are not worth your effort.
iStockphoto gives the measly percentage of 16%, yet continually remains my third or second top income producing site. The number of downloads I get there, not the percentage, makes iStockphoto consistently a top earner. Many of the high royalty sites seem to do minimal or no marketing. Based on the sales I never or seldom get, apparently they have few customers and little internet traffic.
I have uploaded the same portfolio to many of them and experienced consistent results. I have researched the agency income comparisons on different blogs and am always exchanging in correspondence with serious stock video sellers who submit to multiple sites. They all confirm it. The verdict is in and the market is currently divided up between several serious competitors.
Your mileage may vary. The recommendations above may change and may not be true for everyone, depending on what you sell - for instance, Akbar Allana recommends Catooh for animators. Graphics and AE templates sell better on specialty sites. After you have been selling awhile, if you upload your most popular sellers to the minor sites - you may have some success with ROI over the long term.
Updated 02/2013
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