Worst enemy in stock video industry are contributors themselves

We can agree that prices are very low on almost all stock video agencies. Unless you are on stock agency such as Pond5 where you can value stock video footage by your own calculations, almost all sites are actually dumping footage value. Not to mention that Pond5 gives you 50% of all income per clip sale. All others mostly give you about 20-30% of income. But that wouldn’t be a problem, if agency wouldn’t lower prices. The lower they go, the less you as contributor get.

Car Driving At Sea Beach To Summer Vacation Aerial 4K

Worst enemy in stock video industry are sites that dump prices!

There is at least one bigger site that sell stock video footage for $49 (Videoblocks), which is so cheap that we question ourselves if it’s even worth shooting clips any further? It doesn’t matter if they give you “100%” of the income if it will destroy your sales on every other agencies you have your clips. We can only assume that contributors selling on low priced stock video agencies are not the quality ones. You can’t undervalue your footage if you work this professional full time. Not even to mention Videohive and similar pages that have practically giveaways for $5.

The cause for prices going down are contributors!

When making decisions where to sell own stock video footage clips, it’s important what will your strategy bring in the future. Valuing your footage will surely bring more funds to create new better stock files. But undervaluing your work will only bring own destruction. Undervaluing means desperation of selling own works by any means possible. Even for almost free of charge.

Uploading your stock video files to agencies that undervalue your work is a double edged sword. Even if they give you most of the income, you undervalue your work. Buyers will start to buy only undervalued footage and soon your sales on all other agencies will come to end.  And believe us, we made a calculation, that selling on more sites with bigger prices and lower income portions is more profitable than selling for lower price and getting a share of income on only one agency.

Let’s get to the calculator. If you sell your work on Pond5, Shutterstock and Dissolve, each agency gives you about from $23 to $39 if you priced them all right. That means all together about $85 per sale on each site. While if you start selling your clips on Videoblocks for $49 and you get $48 per sale, that’s almost twice less than you would get from other agencies.  If you think that sales will triple on Videoblocks, you are very wrong. When other agencies will have to lower the prices because of such agencies dumping prices on same files, you can only expect that this dumping agencies will start to lower their value of stock files again. That’s the “magic circle” that is going on for years now.

And here is the magic trick everyone should follow. Don’t let agencies dictate price wars, contributors should be the ones that must value their work. Leave undervalued agencies and keep your great works on sites that care.