I’ve been selling stock footage online since 2015, and last year I made approximately $10,000 in passive income from it. I’ve also been making yearly videos sharing how much I’ve made and giving tips for how you can start selling stock footage yourself, plus I’ve made a Stock Footage Jump Start Guide you can download for free if you’re interested in getting started.
The Question
Recently I’ve been getting the same question from multiple filmmakers, which is usually a sign I should make a video answering it. The question is: how many video clips do you need to film and upload before you start making money?
If you uploaded 100 clips, how much could you expect to make? What about 500 clips, or 1000? I want to help you get an idea of how much work you’re going to need to do before you can start seeing passive income roll into your bank account, which is a great feeling.
Before we start talking hard numbers though, I have two caveats for you.
Caveat one: it’s a numbers game, but not only a numbers game. Yes, if you upload more clips you’re more likely to get more sales and more downloads. At the same time, filmmaking is inherently a creative endeavor, and if you’re filming clips that are boring, uninspired, derivative, or that look like a lot of the footage already available on a stock site, the odds are you’re not going to make much at all, because nobody is going to want to download them.
Whenever it comes to stock footage I’m trying to film, I’m always looking for unique cinematic moments that don’t necessarily look the same as what’s already on most licensing sites. I’m also very careful in how I color grade, because I want to give it a look that isn’t over the top. Side note, I use my own color presets on my stock footage, which give it vibrant and true to life colors that people appreciate while downloading.
Caveat two: how the site is structured matters more than you’d think. The amount you sell is not only dependent on how many clips you have available. The biggest factor I’ve found is the business model of the licensing site itself.
Unlimited Downloads
For multiple decades of stock footage selling, there was really only one business model. A filmmaker uploads clips to a site like Shutterstock or Pond5, and then people who want to license clips create an account, purchase credits or some other virtual currency, and every clip they download costs a certain number of credits.
Understandably, that made buyers very selective about how many clips they downloaded. And for filmmakers uploading, it meant your work had to be really unique and stand out, or you had to have signed up early enough to establish yourself before there was much competition.
In the last several years a lot of that has been changing. Filmmakers still upload footage as normal, but whenever a user signs up to download, instead of purchasing credits they have the option, or even the requirement, of signing up for a subscription where they pay a certain amount per month and get a lot of downloads, or even unlimited downloads.
These unlimited download sites are polarizing, but I’ve found them to be potentially very lucrative. I remember whenever sites like Artgrid announced they were offering unlimited downloads, a lot of stock footage filmmakers were complaining and very upset about it, because they worried it was devaluing their work and they weren’t going to make nearly as much money.
Strangely enough, at least in my case, I’ve found the opposite. Instead of somebody signing up and being very selective about downloading only a few clips they paid for, they’ll now go in and download a lot of my clips. Dozens. It doesn’t matter. And when it comes time for me to be paid, I’m paid more, because more people downloaded more of my clips. The client has less pressure to pick the perfect clip, so they download more.
While I may not be making as much per clip as if they had directly purchased every single one, the odds are they would not have downloaded that many in the first place, so I don’t see myself losing money because someone can download an unlimited amount. I’m still getting paid at the end whenever they download them.
If you disagree with me about this or have another perspective, I’d love to hear it.
Adobe Stock
Let’s start with a traditional pay per clip site, which also happens to be the one I made the most from under that model. That’s Adobe Stock. Here are my 2024 numbers.
- 746 clips uploaded
- 49 clips licensed and downloaded
- $539.36 earned
- $11.01 average per clip
That average isn’t entirely accurate, because for some I was paid more and for some less. But we need to look at the data a bit closer, because while I had 746 clips uploaded and 49 sales, only 31 clips were actually purchased, with a good chunk of my sales coming from just three video clips. Isn’t that crazy?
This goes back to what I said earlier. You may upload a ton of clips and hope for a nice clean line between the amount you’ve uploaded and the amount you’ll make. Arguably more important than the number of clips is the quality of them, because if you’re not uploading footage people want to license, you’re not going to make any money.
ArtGrid
Now let’s look at Artgrid, which is where I’ve made the bulk of my income as a stock footage filmmaker. Going back to what I said about subscriptions, if people can download an unlimited amount, they’ll be far less selective and download as many as they want, which can make you more money.
- 1,440 clips uploaded
- 940 of them downloaded at least once
- 19,160 downloads in total
- $9,956.99 earned in 2024
Yes, I have way more clips uploaded to Artgrid than to Adobe Stock, but those clips also have a dramatically higher number of downloads, and from all of those downloads I made significantly more money.
Do some quick math and you can see I was paid approximately $10.59 per clip that got downloaded. Or, if you throw in the extra 500 clips I uploaded that never got downloaded at all, you’re looking at $6.91 per clip uploaded.
Of course the numbers are not everything, but remember, just like with Adobe Stock where a small number of clips were responsible for the bulk of my income, the same is true on Artgrid, just to a lesser degree. If you look at my downloads over the past year, some clips were downloaded literally hundreds of times, while others had one or two downloads, or none at all.
Conclusion
Yet again, this comes back to quality over quantity, where you are inevitably going to have certain clips that do better than others. So I’d try to film as high quality of clips as possible, but keep in mind there’s really no predicting which of your clips are going to do better than the others.
So yes, it is a numbers game of uploading as many clips as you can to these services. But the higher the quality of the clips you upload at the same time, the better your chances of getting more downloads and making more sales.
I really hope this breakdown has been helpful to you on your stock footage journey. If you haven’t downloaded my Stock Footage Jump Start Guide yet, even if you’re already uploading, I built it to be incredibly helpful whether you’re brand new or you’ve been at this a while. It’s completely free. My color presets are here, and like I said, I use those to color all of my stock footage.