Which are the top 3 best selling stock video sites in general at the moment? Shutterstock, Pond 5, and?

pond5 or distribution via blackboxglobal

Or just keep it smart and simple by joining Pond5 exclusive. 60% royalties, still maintain exposure to Adobe customers through the partner program, keep all your earnings by not splitting them with a third party distributor, and support the future integrity of this business by not supporting the companies that are actively destroying it and treat their contributors with contempt, ie Shutterstock.

Thank you all for the kind feedback. All well noted. And what about StoryBlocks, complete waste of time?

Stay away from that, that is an unlimited sub site...

One question... it is convenient to upload to Blackbox ? considering that my clips r already on Shutterstock, Adobe and p5, except Vimeo Stock which is exclusive right now....so just for Vimeo Stock ? thank u

Blackbox only takes exclusive content to distribute. So if the files are already somewhere the content cannot go to blackbox. You cannot selectively just agencies to distribute to.

But you can have a look at wirecard, they have beta test program for video distribution, maybe vimeo is on their list, I don't know.

I doubt that blackbox only takes exclusive content or they actually do not control it .  I know this because i approach the youtuber  that made this clip which upload to P5 and blackbox.  He was claiming that he sold "Picking Up A French Frie Poutine"  in P5.
i will give you the example:
Name of clip "Picking Up A French Frie Poutine"
P5 Item ID: 118732623
P5 / blackbox Item ID: 118434293

They don't require exclusive content. I mean they kind of do in that you can't submit content to them that is already on Shutterstock, Pond5, Adobe or Vimeo... and once you've submitted it then can't submit it to those sites in the future... but thats not so much an exclusivity clause. It's just like saying you can't upload the same image to Shutterstock twice... which makes sense.

You're welcome to upload the content to sites that BB don't work with though... iStock, Alamy, 123RF, Storyblocks, Dreamstime, Envato etc etc.

Successful sites are the ones that have content variety and quality. I give you the results of a search with 2 keywords: spain castle

POND5: 14102
ADOBE: 13431
SHUTTERSTOCK: 9589


DREAMSTINE: 2196
ISTOCKPHOTO: 1808
123RF: 1802
GETYYIMAGES: 1227
VIDEOHIVE: 235
ENVATO ELEMENTS: 72
VIDEOBLOCKS: 133
STOCKSY: 13


You can replicated different searches and you will nearly always get similar results. There are 3 large players in video and the distance is growing larger and faster every day from the minor players. Those try to compete with low priced subscriptions but I think the industry will consolidate. The large player can destroy those little ones with the push of a button. Shutterstock has already gone this route. Getty the same with royalties most of the time under 5$. We are fortunate that the two other large players have kept ground and I guess that is the reason they are getting much more content nowadays.

Quote from: cobalt on December 05, 2020, 02:41

You are right, you can upload to places they do not have agreements with, but from my standpoint, for practical purposes they are exclusive for the agencies they deliver to.

Taking yet another 15% of net royalties further diluting already pathetic royalty rates. In addition who really wants their work on Shutterstock?

Almost everybody does. As they submit extremely large amount of videos of many contributors and, therefore, achieve high sales, they are probably at high levels with high percentages very very very soon (they have 884 thousands videos there!). Something majority of people will never achieve by themselves (the success of other people at BBG account at SS is also improving your level even though you have not sold anything yet).

On the other hand, lack of control, lack of monitoring where the videos are, what was the reason of rejection, inability to resubmit or even delete the videos easily is the reason why I am not submitting to BB anymore (any they are probably not taking 15%, the truth is approx. 17% as there is 2% fee for procesing a payment). And I have also deleted all my video content from Shutterstock.

I stopped uploading BB because they don't sell me the videos. In the beginning, they sold me 1 video almost every month. They haven't sold anything for 7 months. There is no transparency there. The authors do not know what is happening. I stopped my sales at SS, but I can't stop the videos that BB sells at SS.

Has anyone tried the Depositphotos website? I am thinking about using it for my work. I have an assignment where I have to use a lot of videos, and a friend told me to go there and newbielink:https://depositphotos.com/stock-videos.html [nonactive]. They have a nice offer, 4k videos for $19. I just wanted to check it out with people who know more about this.
I am fairly new to this, but the first few assignments I did went great. I wanted to get more videos and make my works even better. I will have to check out other websites that were mentioned in this thread. There might be a better option here.

Has anyone tried the Depositphotos website?

I uploaded a bunch of clips a few years back and haven't had a single sale. And this is stuff that usually gets multiple sales a month at the other sites.