Stock Footage Profitability

[Kim Welch]

Stock footage must be very profitable if you do it right. It's expensive to buy good stock photos and footage.

Update, November 2026
Stock footage can earn money when you shoot what buyers need: clean, well-lit, well-tagged clips of common subjects in 4K. Sites like Pond5, Shutterstock and Adobe Stock pay royalties.

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[Maura N.]

What a coincidence! I was doing some research this morning about Stock Footage and there are people who made really good money from posting stock photos online. Not all of them and for most of them, it does not happen overnight, but it feels good to wake up one day and find out you have $25 000 from a photo you uploaded 7 years ago on a website that you forgot about That never happened to me, but I saw a few vlogs on YouTube from those who had such a happy surprise.

 

[Marianna Schmidt]

Yes but the problem is that if you upload stock footage these days, it is very hard to get your content viewed by others...because everyone and their brother is creating stock footage these days.