Deconstructing Purpose

The realization hit me like a freight train about 6 months ago.  I was still working at Manning Productions, my former employer, and we had just wrapped an edit for a client of ours.  It was a video project, full HD 1080 30p in all its glory, yet we had not picked up a camera, spent a single day in the field, or hired any sort of production crew.  Besides the content we created in Adobe After Effects, the rest of it we acquired from stock video sources, such as www.pond5.com and www.istock.com.

I started looking through all the clips we downloaded and noticed that each 30 - 60 second clip cost $50 to $100.  Since the only thing the stock video agency really has to do is host the files,  I knew that the margins on these clips had to be quite high.  The photographers had to be making a killing.

On average, for  every clip that is downloaded, the photographer gets about 50%.  When our project was all said and done we downloaded about 75 clips, totaling about $3,000 for the completed project.  So, $1500 of this went to the photographers.  Why wasn’t I in on this?!

I immediately went home and found some old archived footage Lauren and I had lying around that seemed like it might be useful to someone. I uploaded two clips to Pond5 just to see how this whole stock photography game works.  The clips were slightly outdated, and shot in standard definition, so it wasn’t the most sought after footage.  The point was, I got it up online.  I was excited, hopeful, and really pumped to start rolling in the dough.  I checked the site everyday. Day after day… nothing.

Here is what we uploaded:

After six months, we made our first sale!  We were making money while on vacation, in San Francisco, enjoying lunch overlooking the fisherman’s wharf.  Soon after, we made two more sales, three times in three weeks, and we are still on vacation, making money.  And that’s the best part.  It may take a few hours to go shoot a location, edit the footage and upload it to the site, but then the work is done.  All you have to do is sit back and relax while your clip is sold again and again.  Passive income at its finest.

I did a little math to figure out what we need to do to make a sale every day.

We’ve made 3 sales in 6 months (26 weeks) all the while having only had 2 clips online.

So to make a sale every week we need we need to upload 15 more clips

And, to make a sale every day we need 60 clips online.

It looks like we have a little work to do!

Tagged: passive income, stock photography, stock video