In 2024 I made $9,916.18 selling stock footage across a handful of stock footage websites. And I don’t say that to brag or show off, I say it because I want you to know what’s possible if you want to start selling stock footage yourself, and also to prove to you that AI is not completely destroying the stock video market. As you’re about to see, you can still make a good amount of money from it.

So let’s break down exactly where that income came from, because I feel like a lot of people are not open about stuff like this, and I really want to be a person who is helpful and an encourager to you as a filmmaker. Here’s where the money landed, going from the site that paid me the least to the site that paid me the most:

• Pond5: $59.43 from 279 clips
• Lightstock: $356.10 from 1,445 clips
• Adobe Stock: $539.36 from 746 clips
• Artgrid: $8,961.29 from 1,401 clips

Pond5

Pond5 is one of the largest stock footage websites out there, with millions upon millions of clips available for licensing, and they get a ton of traffic, which means a lot of people are buying clips from them. But it also means there is a ton of competition, which makes it hard to stand out and get a ton of sales unless you have tens of thousands of clips that are really popular. Unfortunately I do not have tens of thousands of clips. I only have 279 uploaded there, and 2024 wasn’t a year I spent a ton of time uploading, so I was really just depending on sales of clips I’d already put up in previous years.

Even so, I still made $59.43 from Pond5, which is interesting, because none of that came from anybody actually buying a clip. According to my reports, nobody purchased anything. Instead Pond5 paid me what are known as dataset earnings, where they made my clips available to companies that have AI video generation tools, and those companies paid to use my clips to train their models.

And I didn’t actually know they were doing that, because they hadn’t done it in the past, and I don’t even know whether there’s a way to opt out of it. I really had no idea my work was being used for datasets at all until I logged in for basically the first time all year to check my earnings. So let me know in the comments how you feel about stock footage websites letting AI companies use your footage for machine learning, and whether you think $59 was enough to be paid for it.

Lightstock

Lightstock is a Christian faith based stock footage site, which may make you think of stock videos of crosses and babies laying in a manger and so on. But over the years Lightstock has turned out to be a really great website for me to make passive money from, because they do not require your clips to be Christian in nature. I have a ton of landscape clips uploaded there that have done really well with churches downloading them, and with other organizations that just need pretty shots of nature.

As a plus, Lightstock will also handle titling and tagging your footage for you, which makes uploading really simple and which I love. In total, with 1,445 clips uploaded, I made $356.10 there this year, which definitely wasn’t bad.

Adobe Stock

Overall I really like the Adobe Stock platform, especially how it’s integrated into their apps like Photoshop and Premiere Pro. They also make it pretty easy to upload and to use AI to tag your videos. Just like Pond5 though, I unfortunately did not get around to uploading anything new to them this past year. I promise I’ll try to do better in 2025. Regardless, with 746 clips uploaded in previous years, I still made a healthy $539.36 off older footage, so Adobe Stock was not bad at all.

Artgrid

Of course, there are still many thousands of dollars left and only one website to go, and if you’ve watched my previous how much I made selling stock footage videos, I’m betting you can guess where the rest of it came from, because this site has consistently paid me the most every single year by far. It’s Artgrid.

I think Artgrid does so well because they have a really nice interface and they’ve integrated it all very well into their popular Artlist music licensing platform. Plus, whenever you throw in access to log and raw video files as well as color graded clips, there’s a reason a lot of people have signed up to download footage from them, which has helped me make a lot of money.

Which brings us to the big enchilada. I made $8,961.29 from 1,401 clips on Artgrid in 2024. And to be clear, I actually made almost $10,000 from them, but because of taxes they take 10%, so we’re sitting right there at almost $9,000. Which is definitely not bad, and it’s almost $2,000 more than I made from them the year before.

The one factor I attribute that jump to is uploading about 250 more clips this past year, a good amount of which came from some staged weddings I filmed.

Film Everything Horizontal And Vertical

I was also very intentional whenever I filmed those staged clips, because Artgrid and the other stock footage sites have been pushing for you to upload vertical video as a way to potentially make more income, since so many people these days are looking for vertical stock they can use on Instagram, TikTok and so on.

So instead of just selling horizontal clips and letting the buyer crop them to vertical themselves, I filmed a lot of my stock this year in both aspect ratios. I would literally film a clip horizontal, then turn the camera vertical and film the same clip again to make it a native 4K vertical clip. That essentially doubled the number of clips I was able to record and sell, and it required very little extra work on my part.

If you’re planning on selling stock footage, I think filming horizontal and vertical is a complete no brainer, because it’s such an easy way to make some extra income. Please be aware though that sites like Artgrid have rules stating that you cannot just convert a horizontal clip to vertical by cropping it. They will check for that and they will not approve vertical clips that are identical to your horizontal ones. So you really do need to film them both ways.

A Future Video On Download Numbers

This past year I’ve had multiple filmmakers reach out asking for specifics on how many clips people actually downloaded from me on Artgrid, because if I made roughly $9,000 from them, then knowing the download count would give you a good idea of how much money you could potentially make. Answering that is a little outside the scope of this one, because there are a lot of factors that affect how much you can make, but I am planning on making a video that digs into the exact numbers.

Because if you can estimate “hey, I have 1,000 clips uploaded and I get this many downloads, so I can expect to make roughly this much money,” that’s really useful information. So subscribe if you want to see that in-depth, number crunching, nerdy video in the future. I can’t wait to make it for you.

If you want to see how this compares to previous years, here are my earlier breakdowns: how much I made selling stock footage in 2023, and how much I made in 2022.

Download My Free Stock Footage Jump Start Guide

Keep in mind that I really only spent about two days of work total on stock footage this year. I’d say about three hours filming and three hours editing new clips in 2024, and that resulted in almost $10,000, because the majority of what I’m making comes from footage I already filmed and edited. The work is already done. Stock footage is a really great passive income.

So if you want to make some passive income too, I’ve put together a free Stock Footage Jump Start Guide that shows you exactly how to get started, including what to film, how to film it, and how to actually start making an income as a stock footage filmmaker. If you’ve been considering selling stock footage, now is the time to jump in. I’ve been making more than I ever have before doing this, and it’s completely passive once you get the clips uploaded. Download the guide for free right here. Thanks so much for reading and have a great day!