How many make their full living from stock?

Hi,

just out of curiosity, how many here make their full living just from stock?

If you do, some questions:

1. How many clips do you have uploaded?

2. What's your average price per clip?

3. What other sites do you sell on?

4. What percentage do you sell from each of the various sites?

5. What is your average yearly per clip (across all sites)? For instance, if you make $50,000 from 5,000 clips, then the yearly would be $10/clip.

6. Most helpful tips to someone who wants to earn good income from stock?

Thanks,
Gray Jones.

Those are optimistic goals my friend.

I work more than full time for the military, so my collection does not expand at the rate of other people's here, but stock is very time consuming.

It takes a great deal of time to produce, edit, upload and keyword. It also takes a little while to learn what people want.

In my opinion, if you were to make a living at this, I wouldn't quit your day job for a few years until you have a very large and diverse collection.

I make my full living from shooting and selling footage.

This is probably a good thread for VaderVideo to jump in with a link to his e-book, it's all about making a living in the world of stock video. I agree with Physics points too, everything in stock video takes time and a good dose of patience too. It took me 3 years, a lot of effort shooting and a lot of money invested in gear and travel to get to what I'd call a comfortable earnings level.

My biggest tip would be find yourself a niche if you can and use that niche to help market your material. This is becoming a rapidly flooded market place so if you shoot footage of subjects which are unique or difficult to capture you'll have a good head start.

In response to your questions:

1. I have about 2400 clips here at P5, the most of any agency.

2. 95% of my material is priced between $110 - $399 .

3. Some of material, especially the rare and hard to shoot stuff, can be found at some of the well known RM agencies.

4. P5 will work out at about 20% of my calendar year income for 2012. This is by far my favourite agency and one which gets my most attention given it has the fairest royalty % in the industry and gives sellers total flexibility in pricing etc. 40% comes from licensing footage myself through my own website etc and the remaining 40% is from other stock agencies as well as a bit of freelance camera work here and there.

5. I can put an exact figure out here, but roughly 10% of my uploaded clips at P5 sell. (That seems to be about the ratio for the whole site too.)

Hope that's of some help. I'm most likely not representative of your average stock seller since I have a very specific field but it makes a living for me at the moment!

Think it's better ask this question in the artist forum ;-)

Thanks! Sorry, I didn't know this would be a better question for the artist forum. Should I close it here and move it there?

I do have VaderVideo's eBook as well as a couple of printed books and other eBooks... I'm just trying to broaden my advice pool a little.