You may generate passive money from your own visual or audio assets.
While the concept of "passive income" sounds appealing, the word is sometimes deceptive because developing passive income streams generally involves a significant amount of effort. While most passive income schemes involve starting a business or investing money, there are also ways to leverage your creative and artistic impulses. For example, if you enjoy music, photography, or shooting videos, you can turn those interests into income—even if you're not a professional—by selling your work to stock media sites.
Stock sites contain massive collections of media that individuals pay to license for use in podcasts, movies, websites, book covers, video games, and so on—basically, any product that employs music, sound effects, photos, or video almost certainly uses some amount of stock media (see the photo above as an example). And every time a photo or piece of music is licensed from a stock site, a creator somewhere gets compensated—and that artist might be you. If you have a collection of high-quality material sitting on a hard drive someplace, here's how you can turn it into cash.
How do you go about selling stock media?
The first question, of course, is whether the effort is worthwhile. How much money can you make from a snapshot or a piece of drone footage you recorded while on vacation?
The worth of a piece of media is determined by a variety of criteria, including its quality, uniqueness, and the popularity of the genre it belongs to. Stock media is mostly a volume business—stock sites want you to upload a significant amount of material, and the more you upload (and the more often you upload new stuff), the better you'll perform in their search engines, and therefore the better you'll do in sales. If you are not actively providing content, your work may fall out of the search results.
How much money can you make if you're willing to upload a lot of stuff and keep doing it?
How much money can you make selling stock photography?
Photos are the simplest form of material to sell and pay the least: on average, you may earn between $0.02 and $0.25 per image each month. The real revenues per image varies by site, ranging from $0.10 to up to $200. However, because the sites that pay the most have much lower traffic, you won't always make more money working with them—and there are other reasons you might skip the greatest possible payments, as we'll discover. You may also make a few bucks per image if your photos are newsworthy—if you take shots of significant events and post them on time, sites will pay extra due to demand.
How much money can you make with stock videography?
Selling stock footage may earn you anywhere from $11 to $400 depending on the number of movies you submit, the number of stock sites you upload to, the rates you set, and, of course, the popularity of your clip.
How much money can you make off of stock music?
If you're a songwriter, stock sites may pay you $8 to $15 per track—and tracks can often sell many times because you're selling a license to use the music rather than the rights yourself. However, if you have registered your work with a performance rights organization (PRO) such as ASCAP or BMI (more on that below), you will be paid each time your music is aired somewhere—this is a different cost from the initial license. And because you may be paid a performance fee every time your music is broadcast, if someone licenses your song for a commercial, you can make a lot of money—as much as $30,000 to $40,000 each year. Of course, most stock music isn't worth that much, but if your songs are licensed a few times a month, you may still make a few hundred dollars.
Here are a few things to bear in mind:
- There are no assurances. It should go without saying, but there is no assurance that you will make any money with stock media. You can submit 1,000 photographs and sell exactly none of them, so take these earnings projections with a grain of salt.
- Costs incurred up advance. If you have to rent studios, hire models, or pay other upfront expenditures, your real revenues from stock sales will be lower than if you just uploaded a batch of 4K drone video or old tunes you had laying around.
- Options for licensing You'll be paid more if you work solely with certain stock sites, and you'll frequently have a say in how your work is used once licensed, which might affect how much money you can make. Before you can estimate how much you may earn, you'll need to understand the conditions of a given site and make some judgments.
How to Sell Stock
So! You've established a library of media and want to turn those digital assets into digital riches. How precisely do you do that? First and foremost, if you intend to license music, consider becoming a member of a performance rights organization (PRO). The United States has three major ones: ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. If your music is utilized in broadcasts or played live as part of a production, registering your work with a PRO can help you earn more money.
When you're ready to sell your stock media, the first step is to decide which sites you'll sell on. There are several sites with which you might collaborate:
- iStock and Getty Images (images & footage)
- Shutterstock (pictures & footage) (images & footage)
- Envato (images, film, audio, etc) (images, footage, music, more)
- Pond5 (pictures, film, audio) (images, footage, music)
- Storyblocks (images, footage, music)
- Alamy (images)
- Dreamstime (pictures & film) (images & footage)
There are other additional sites, but these are the big ones where anyone may begin selling stock media. There are other aggregator services, like as BlackBox, that allow you to post your film to a single platform and then farm it out to various sites. This lowers the number of sites you must interact with to one, simplifying the procedure.
There's no reason not to join as many of these platforms as you want—you're licensing your work, not selling it to them, so the same video, music, or images can appear on several sites. Some sites will pay you more for unique content, which is worth considering, and some sites want a permanent license, which means you can't delete media afterwards.
TIPS
Consider the following to get the most out of your stock selling:
Quality over Quantity. While large volume can help you enhance your search results and earn more money, flooding sites with low-quality rubbish will not help you. Consider that a portion of the algorithm used by stock sites analyzes how frequently your work sells, so having a number of poor photographs that no one buys on a site would gradually bury you in the listings, lowering your odds of ever selling anything. Be selective, and keep in mind that higher-resolution photographs and movies will always perform better.
Find your specialty. If you search for "babies" on Shutterstock right now, you'll receive over 5 million results, so if you're attempting to sell some photographs of kids, you'd better have a hook that will make your material stand out. Higher still, look for a non-oversaturated category—the more particular and niche your work is, the better chance you'll have of sticking out in a crowded sector.
Complete the metadata. When you submit stock, you must provide information such as keywords and other descriptions. Don't scrimp on keywords; the more particular you are, the simpler it will be for customers to locate exactly what they're searching for. That being said, don't "stuff" keywords in there that have nothing to do with your material in order to appear in searches—it won't work and may harm your rankings with the site's algorithm.
Prepare yourself emotionally. Selling your work as stock may be a surprisingly emotional process if you're a creative type. It's mostly anonymous, and once licensed, individuals may do pretty much whatever they want with your work—editing, altering, and utilizing it in unexpected ways. Make certain that you are prepared.
If you're prolific, creative, and devoted, selling your images, music, and film as stock may earn you a nice living. It can be difficult to get started, as with any passive income, but it can also be rewarding.
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