No Sales Since Joining?

I am aware stock footage is a crowded market, and the content I have up is pretty niche. I'm just surprised that, after like a year or whatever of uploading regularly, I haven't sold a *single* thing. I've played around with prices, offered some clips for free/promotion. I expected it to be slow but gosh dang...

Great work, by the way. Lovely stuff.

Too few clips. 229 is barely getting going, even in the "good old days".

Taking a look at your clips and titles, make sure your titles are fully descriptive. I don't know about your keywords, but put in every little thing you can think of (that is not spamming, obviously).

Your prices are too low. You are working for the people with money. Don't price for poor YouTubers. Price for the rich ones, who want the shot they want, and you have it.

Many of us are having a very bad time right now (this December) as NO sales are happening, or being reported. But the only explanation for your lack of sales is that you need to add a zero o the end of your total clip count.

Thank you! Also- Oh dang, alright. The stuff I capture is kind of a side-effect of going hiking and travelling for photography, so I'll definitely keep at it, continuing to upload as I collect footage.

Same here. I'm new in Pond5 and i am not a professional photographer. I just luke to take a photos or short videos

Btw, sorry for my bad english. I'm from Indonesia

Dear Mizamook, what would you suggest for my pricing?

Some really nice work, but I honestly don't see anything unique that would jump out in a search for the subjects. Most searches I do tend to have tens of thousands of results and you have 229 out of millions of clips.

There are only two ways to make money with stock footage any more... Getting thousands of clips online and/or promoting your own work.

I have a relatively tiny portfolio myself, but over the many years I have been selling, I have built my own personal mailing list and I can tell that MOST of my sales come from promoting my work to my customers.

Thanks MidWest - good suggestions. I don't have many folks to market to, but, one of the things I do is keep in touch with the local film commissions and then add the initials of our regional districts (common usage here) to the keywords. So, for instance if you search TNRD on my videos you will get all the footage I have shot in the Thompson Nicola Regional District in B.C. (TNRD is the local usage) - even wildlife. Don't know if it works but what the heck. Perhaps some of the many films shot here will need a clip. What I sell is so random that it is hard to track - other than wildlife. And I am charging higher and higher prices.

I worked in broadcast news for a number of years and probably most of what I've shot is news related or if it's commercial, it's still influenced by my background in news. So I spent a weekend googling all of the news stations in a 500 mile radius of where I live. I then sent out about 400 custom post cards (cost me about $40 for the cards) with a link to my portfolios on the various places I sell through. Within a few months I noticed a marked increase in sales of "regional" footage. I kept it up for a number of years. I also added advertising firms to my mailing list as time went on. I haven't sent one out in a couple of years, but I'm probably going to do it again before mid march of next year.

Milescooper, thanks for the question; sorry for the delay in response. BTW there is a typo in your P5 Artist page.

This is only my opinion, of course. The "why" of my opinion is a long story. It has worked for me for almost the entire time selling stock, and I've never seen any evidence that lower prices make more sales ... only less money.

I do not believe you (or anyone) should be setting their prices lower than the supposed "industry standard" which, by the way, is a crock, but that is $79 for HD and $199 for 4K. Buyers do not buy clips just because they are cheap. They buy them because they have a need for them.

That said, (and I say this a lot) any HD resolution clip that was originally shot as 4K should NOT be denigrated to the low "standard" of $79 ... HD derived from 4K is almost always much higher quality video than HD shot natively.

Beyond that, I cannot advise you on prices. Take a look at mine, and make some guesses as to how I might price your clips, were I you.

Pond5 has, and will continue to secure sales, especially to bulk buyers, by offering discounts. Often, the discount is a percentage, and is applied equally to all the clips in the purchase. These will affect you less if your prices show some respect for your work. It also happens that some run-of-the-mill, standard, easy-to-come-by clips, priced moderately, or even high, will sell, and for extended or premium licenses, for staggering amounts.

Good luck, and report back.

p.s. Any "test" of pricing should be for at LEAST 6 months. Better a year. A paltry week or two is not a test at all, since there are so many variables in the market and sales patterns from one season, week, month, year, to the next, and toss in a world gone psychotic in so many ways, it's near-impossible to establish a baseline. You will never know if that clip you priced at $199, but never sold, has never sold because it was priced at $199, but you will also never know if that same clip, were it priced at $62, might have sold just as handily for $299.

Mizamook thank you very much for pointing that out! I have changed it now :)

Thanks again for your advice, I will experiment with 100 or so of my better clips and see how they do over 2023.

I completely agree we live in a crazy world, considering a pint of milk has almost doubled in england since 2020, I should really be upping my prices! I can't see inflation calming down in the next 2 years at any rate.

All the best,