SFX Trends

I thought maybe we could post audio clips that we find sell well in order to inspire other sound designers what types of sounds they can create and add sell online. Not only can it inspire us to move in certain directions with our sound design, but we can also critique and come up with alternatives to sounds that already exist in order to diversify the audio bank available for buyers on Pond5. It's kind of the parallel of video, i.e. timelapses of clouds; we don't want the same style duplicated 1,000 times by different people, we want 1,000 different styles or at least improved versions of existing elements.

Here is a clip I thought "maybe this will sell once or twice, as it is fairly obscure" but low and behold, I've had quite a few sales with this not-so-ordinary sound bite:

What were you playing backwards? :)

My voice doing some special vocalization, namely inhaling while speaking and giving my vocals a grumbly/monster type timbre. Hope this helps inspire!

This so far has been my highest priced audio clip at $15.00, and it just sold today, along with a $10 sound effect of another construction ambience I have on P5.

When I first came to P5 I looked at the price of sound effects, and on average, they were all going for somewhere between $2-$3. Needless to say, I was led to believe this was the "worth" of sound effects (and of course, very short SFX likes whooshes are usually bought in bulk, so one shouldn't expect the prices to be too high). Although even for more complex and well designed sounds, the prices were around that $2-$3 mark, ouch. For the effort and time and equipment and thought put into my recordings, I thought it was time to test out (duh duh duhhhhh) HIGHER PRICES. Alas! Buyers respect the clips and continue to purchase them at prices I think are more closer to their actual worth, and so I strongly encourage those who have spent large amounts of efforts into recording hard-to-obtain sounds to respect their worth so to speak, and don't be shy to price at a more-than-meager dollar-point. But again, this is always up to the contributor, and you should feel comfortable doing this. I just want to let those of you who were thinking of raising prices for sfx that, for me at least, sales stayed consistent (And income went up!).

Thats interesting my top clip is also construction



Followed by cafe sounds


I agree with your pricing strategy, Im moving away from the cheaper by the dozen mode as well but I am going to leave my 5.00 effects unchanges and just change prices on new clips.

Good to hear! Glad you are doing well with your sound sales!