How to be a successful Stock Footage Site

Posted on January 2nd, 2010

The business of stock footageBeing the outspoken person that I am, I run into a LOT of people who either run existing Stock Footage sites, or they are starting up new ones.  And I give them tons of (sometimes unsolicited) advice from my perspective.  And not just the perspective of an artist who is trying to earn a living at selling stock footage, but as someone who does a TON of research on the industry that is becoming my livelihood.  So, rather than repeating my advice individually over and over again, I figured I’d post my thoughts here so that I can just give out the link…

The first thing to remember about the “MicroStock” industry is that it has matured.  If you are contemplating a new startup, you have a VERY LONG and DIFFICULT road ahead of you.  The overwhelming majority of buyers have already settled on their favorite places to buy from.  The job of getting them to buy from you is going to be an extremely difficult one and you are likely going to fail.  Go into it with the expectation (and fear) of failing, and you might just make it despite the odds.

“Fear of failure” is one of the best motivators for any new business.  It drives you to innovate and do non-traditional things that can help to make you a success.  And in a mature industry innovation is key.  But even more important is a strong desire to beat the odds and be the best.  If you set your goal to “make enough money to pay my mortgage” then you are doomed to fail.  You are not going to have the drive to take risks.  If you start down this road then you need to have the attitude and desire to be number 1 and take the established sites down.  Otherwise, don’t even bother… seriously you need to find something else you are passionate about because at this stage of the game passion is the only thing that will bring you success in this industry.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and buying Google/Yahoo ad placement is not going to drive a significant amount of traffic to your new site.  Most of the buyers have picked their sites and no longer use search engines.  Sure, there are always “new people” coming in to the industry that don’t know about Pond5, RevoStock, ShutterStock, Artbeats, Digital Juice or iStock… but they represent a very tiny part of the stock buyer community.  So plan on spending both time and MONEY on more traditional advertising like trade magazines and web ads on industry related sites.

Pick a niche.  The above mentioned sites target all buyers and accept all types of clips.  Footage, animation, HD, web sizes, etc…  But there are some successful niche sites that specialize in Nature Footage, Motion Graphics, or Very Small Rocks.  Find a niche that you don’t see being well served and fill that gap.  By concentrating on a small niche you’ll find it easier to stand out and attract buyers who have the need for your clips.

Tags: , , | Category: MicroStock, Stock Video | Leave a comment

Shades of the past

Posted on December 31st, 2009

A little less than a year ago I upgraded most of the components of my computer, including a new quad core processor and 8 gigs of RAM.  Prior to my upgrade many of my animations would take two to four days to render.  But with the new machine even when rendering in Cinema 4D with Global Illumination, I could render most projects in 12 hours or less.

Then Maxon comes out with Cinema 4D v11.5 with the MoGraph Dynamics engine.  Essentially making it easier to create animations with mostly realistic real-world physics.  Suddenly “the internets” was full of animations with everything being dropped or rolled.  However, the first thing that popped into my head when I saw what it could do was a long-time desire to create some popcorn related animations.  Popcorn falling into a bucket.  A popcorn machine going nuts, etc…

So, 11.5 upgrade installed and off I go:

http://www.vimeo.com/8451486

There are over 20,000 kernels of popcorn in this animation.  And this version does not include motion blur (but I did use GI).  The popcorn was placed into a very large grid array and dropped into the bucket.  This version took 3 days to render.  I have another version with motion blur still rendering and so far it’s taken 4 days (102 hours actually) and I’m just past the half-way mark.

Of course, I’ve learned some things since I first created this animation.  And my next one with a popcorn machine will use a lot of the new things I learned.  Even with 3 times the dynamic objects it should still render quite a bit faster.

Tags: , , , , , , | Category: 3D Animation, Cinema 4D | Leave a comment

A cold winter means less time outdoors…

Posted on December 28th, 2009

It’s a very cold winter here in Kansas right now.  And although I got several nice warm outdoor clothing items, I’m not crazy enough to go outside in 22-inches of snow.  So, I’m spending time learning more about using Cinema 4D.  A very nice and warm indoor activity that’s productive and cholesterol free.

My main computer is no slouch, it’s a 3.2 GHz quad-core system with 8 gigs of RAM.  Compared to my old single-core 2.4 GHz processor, I can literally render things 10 times faster.  So it’s been a VERY LONG time since I had any video renders take more than 7 or 8 hours.  But, I’m really getting into the new Mograph Dynamics engine in Cinema 4D 11.5.  You can do some really cool simulations with it.  Including my current work in progress, a movie popcorn bucket:

http://www.vimeo.com/8270921

This is just the first 4 seconds of  a 10 second clip and it was rendered at 640×360 for testing.  It took 9 hours to render.  The same 4 seconds at 1920×1080 took 3 days.  The culprit is motion blur.  I actually rendered the whole 10 seconds without motion blur in 11 hours at 1080p.  But it didn’t look right.  So I enabled motion blur.  And wouldn’t you know it… I had the settings too high which is why it’s taking so long.  For every frame, it renders 18 full passes.  Too much, but I didn’t understand how it worked.  Now I do… :)

Tags: , , , , | Category: 3D Animation, Cinema 4D | Leave a comment

What’s missing in Stock Footage?

Posted on December 7th, 2009

It seems that just about every week there is a new stock footage site popping up.  Lots of people/companies think they can get into the game and make money…  Perhaps they can, but you need a niche and you need to spend a LOT of money on marketing.

If you have ever wondered why many agencies take 50% or more of sales on your hard work, the primary answer is “marketing”.  It takes a lot of money to get buyers to come to your site.  Good search engine placement isn’t enough since most buyers already know who the “big boys” are and don’t even bother looking for new sites.  So you have to spend a lot of money on traditional marketing like trade magazines, web ads on industry related web sites, direct mail to studios, etc…  That’s why you can just upload your clips and move on to creating new material.  You don’t have to worry about the marketing.

Still, 50%, 60%, 70% is a lot to give up.  Especially to a new and unproven site.  Some of the new sites charge lower rates like 40% or even 30%, but it’s not sustainable.  It’s a gimmick to get you submitting now.  Once the site becomes more established and has a decent size portfolio available to buyers, they’ll take a bigger cut.

Some artists create their own web site for selling their clips.  But again, you have to attract buyers.  How do you get them to your site?  And how much is it costing you to host 20 gigabytes or even 200 gigabytes of files?  Can you sell enough to even cover your costs?

What’s missing in the stock footage market is a Vimeo or YouTube for stock.  You upload your footage.  Manage your portfolio.  Do all of your own marketing.  And people buy your footage.  It’s on a big site with thousands of clips from other artists which is more attractive than a personal site with 100 or even 400 clips.  And because you are doing your own marketing of your portfolio, the host site takes a small percentage to cover bank fees and make a profit.

SmugMug does this for images, but not for video.  And they charge a monster fee for the privilege.  It lets you create your personalized portfolio and all of your images are indexed with all the other images on the site.  So someone can go to SmugMug, search for “beer glass” and if you have one, it’ll show up in the search list along with the others.  If they like it, they can buy it from your at the price you set.  Plus, you can do your own marketing and completely manage your portfolio the way you want to.

We need this for stock video.  We need a site that doesn’t need a huge marketing budget.  A site that is willing to create an interface that allows each artist to set up their own little “online footage store” where they can sell their video.  And where buyers can search across all of the stores so that it’s appealing to buyers.  The host site handles all of the transactions and pays the artists once a month.  Since they don’t need a huge marketing budget, they can offer an 80/20 split and still make a hefty profit.  It’s up to the individual artists to do their own marketing and promote their own portfolios.

Make it so…

Tags: , , , | Category: MicroStock, Stock Video | One comment
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