In 2023, I made $8,327.16 by selling stock footage online, and I want to show you exactly how I did it and help you do it too.
I made a similar video last year, and just like last year, this is not clickbait, and I don’t want it to be some weird flex where I talk about how much money I’m making. No, I want this to be an encouragement to you and to help you get started selling stock footage yourself.
I’ve put together a free Stock Footage Jump Start Guide that shows you everything you need to know to get your first stock footage clips uploaded online and have you making money in your first 30 days. So if you want to take a huge shortcut to making passive income, you can download it for free.
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Now let’s talk details. I’m going to break down where these eight thousand plus dollars came from, and give you my updated recommendations for where you should start selling stock footage. I’m going from the platform that paid me the least to the one that paid me the most.
Pond5
Pond5 is one of the longer running stock footage websites, and they have literally millions upon millions of videos on their platform. With the 279 videos I’ve uploaded there, I made a whopping $77.01, which is $5 more than the $72 I made from Pond5 in 2022.
Now, if you watched my video from last year, you may notice that I did not upload any more videos to Pond5 this year, and that was not fully intentional on my part. Let me explain.
Near the beginning of 2023 my wife and I had our second child, so this year has been nuts from a filmmaking standpoint, because children take a lot of time, and because stock footage creation is really more of a hobby for me than anything full time, it fell by the wayside.
In short, what you’re going to see is that a lot of this 2023 income has been me coasting on all the stock footage I uploaded in 2022. But don’t worry, I’m planning on getting back into creating more stock video and hopefully making even more in 2024.
Adobe Stock
The next site I made money from was Adobe Stock, and I’m so excited to tell you that I made over three times more than I did last year. I pulled in $314.39, up from only $97 in 2022. Not bad!
In total I have 746 clips uploaded to Adobe Stock, and I sold 32 of them. If you remember my video from last year, I compared every dollar of stock footage sales to getting a dollar taco. So with Adobe Stock I’ve made enough for 314 tacos this year, which is pretty darn delicious.
Lightstock
Next, let’s talk about where I made a lot more money, and that is Lightstock.
Lightstock is a stock footage site aimed mostly at licensing Christian themed stock footage to churches and the like, but what’s cool is that they accept pretty much any kind of stock footage, so I upload basically all of my stock videos there too.
With Lightstock I pulled in an impressive $920.06 this past year. Yes, that’s over twice as much as the $403 I made last year, and we’re getting close to a thousand tacos from Lightstock alone, which is kind of crazy.
And I’m sure you’re doing the math in your head, thinking, dang, he said he made over $8,000 selling stock footage and he’s only talked about a thousand bucks or so. So who paid him the other seven thousand?
Artgrid
I’m so glad you asked. If you watched last year’s video it should be no surprise, because the site where I made the bulk of my stock footage income was Artgrid.
If that name sounds familiar, I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about Artlist many times, which is one of my favorite music licensing websites. Well, Artlist is to music what Artgrid is to stock video. Just like how you can sign up for Artlist and download unlimited songs for a monthly fee, filmmakers can sign up to Artgrid and download an unlimited amount of stock footage for a monthly fee too.
And where do you think Artgrid gets their stock footage? Filmmakers like me who have uploaded many hundreds of clips for licensing. I then get paid whenever those clips get downloaded, and I can use that money to buy dollar tacos. $7,015.16 worth of tacos, to be precise.
Side note, I actually made $7,795.11 from Artgrid, but they withhold 10% for taxes, which is why I’m saying $7,015.16 here.
So that’s where my stock footage money came from in 2023. $77.01 from Pond5, $314.39 from Adobe Stock, $920.06 from Lightstock and $7,015.16 from Artgrid, for a grand total of $8,327.16. Or 8,327 tacos. Is that a lifetime worth of tacos? I don’t know. I think I could eat it in like half a lifetime.
So yeah, I’d say that’s a fantastic number, especially considering I barely filmed or uploaded any stock footage this past year because of having a baby. All of this growth, going from approximately $5,000 in 2022 to over $8,000 in 2023, was mostly me coasting, seeing a full year’s worth of sales from clips I’d already uploaded.
How To Get Started Selling Stock Footage
The thing I want you to keep in mind is that making money like this is entirely possible for you to do too. I am not over here uploading the world’s best stock video clips. Far from it.
So if you want to get into selling stock footage, I would definitely consider starting with the first three sites I talked about. Pond5 is great, and they’ll accept pretty much anybody, so you should be able to get in really easily. Same with Adobe. Lightstock may take a little bit more work to get into, but they’ll hopefully approve you and then you can start selling through them as well.
With Artgrid, in the past year I’ve heard it’s more difficult to get in, because they’ve had a lot of people sign up. Maybe because my video about selling stock footage with them did pretty well last year. So if you can get in with Artgrid, it’s fantastic, but it’s definitely kind of hard, and you’re going to need a really good portfolio of work.
Download My Stock Footage Jump Start Guide
If you want more guidance on how to get started, you need to download my free Stock Footage Jump Start Guide. It shows you literally everything you need to know to copy the strategy I’ve used to create this income. It’s completely free.
I’ve also got a whole playlist of my other videos about creating and selling stock footage if you want to go deeper.
And can you do me a favor? Let me know what other videos you’d like to see about stock footage. Heck, let me know what videos you want to see from me in general. It’s 2024 now, and I want to make videos that you actually want to see this year.
Thanks so much for reading, and have a great day!