How much can you make selling stock footage?

How much you can make selling stock footage, per sale

Every agency pays the same way in principle: your share times the price of the license.

The share is the easy half. The price is the hard half: none of these pages gives an average price for a clip license, because it depends on the plan the buyer used. The comparison between agencies, beyond pay, is in the best sites to sell stock footage.

Shutterstock levels in detail

• The count restarts on January 1 every year.
• Video and images have separate levels. Image levels need far more licenses: level 2 starts at 101 image licenses.
• Each download is paid at the level you hold at the time of that download.
• Data licenses and Unlimited licenses do not count toward your level.
• Shutterstock emails you when you reach a new level, and the dashboard shows your current one.

Two channels sit outside the levels. Data licenses pay contributors a 20% average royalty on what Shutterstock receives. Shutterstock Unlimited, for invited contributors, shares 50% of each subscriber's net revenue among the contributors whose content that subscriber downloaded. You can opt out of both in your account settings.

What sets the price of a license

Shutterstock names three factors for each download: the type of plan the customer used (annual subscription, monthly subscription or on-demand pack), the type of license (Standard or Enhanced), and your level at the time of the download. Its own example, for images: a plan of 10 images a month at $49 makes the price per image $4.90, whatever the customer actually downloads, and your percentage applies to $4.90.

Adobe applies the same logic with its example for photos: a $29.99 monthly plan for 10 licenses gives $29.99 divided by 10, times 33%, so about $0.99 per photo. Video uses the same method at 35%.

Pond5 works differently. You enter a price, but footage sells on a tiered structure in which your price is one of several factors Pond5 uses to set the list price. Partner sales and subscriptions follow their own pricing, and Pond5's payout overview warns that some partner deals, with restricted rights and bulk commitments, license at lower prices than the marketplace. For reference, Pond5 points contributors to the median sold price per media type in the Data and Trends section of its portal.

Worked examples, on stated hypotheses

The figures below are arithmetic on a made-up price. $100 per license is a round number chosen to make the percentages easy to read. It is not an average, a typical price or a forecast.

Hypothesis B: 60 Shutterstock video licenses in one calendar year, each at $100. The first 10 are paid at level 1, the next 40 at level 2, the last 10 at level 3.

Hypothesis C: a download through a large subscription pack at $0.30, the top of the range Shutterstock gives in its article on the floor. That article does not say which media types sell at such prices; the case only shows the mechanism. At level 1, 15% of $0.30 is $0.045, so the payment is rounded up to $0.10.

What makes a portfolio's income vary

• The price of each license. Plan, license type and discounts, as above. You do not choose it on Shutterstock or Adobe Stock.
• Volume within the year. On Shutterstock, more licenses move you up a level, then the count resets on January 1.
• Exclusivity. On Pond5, exclusive video contributors get 40% instead of 30%.
• Other channels. Data licenses (about 20% on Shutterstock, 20% on Pond5), Shutterstock Unlimited, Pond5 partners and subscriptions, Adobe custom agreements paid at 35% of the attributable amount or a flat rate. On Adobe, a video placed in the Free Collection earns a single payment: 7 credits for a one-year free period in 2026, or 16 for a perpetual one.
• How fast you can add clips. Shutterstock accepts up to 100 clips per rolling 7 days. Adobe applies a weekly limit whose number it does not publish.
• What the clips show. Adobe's moderators weigh commercial value, meaning whether content meets current customer needs, and how distinct it is. See what stock footage sells.

Pay structures differ enough that the same clip can earn different amounts on each agency. The Pond5 and Shutterstock models are set side by side in Pond5 vs Shutterstock.

When the money arrives

Estimate your own numbers

The stock footage earnings calculator applies the published rates on this page to two numbers you supply for each agency: how many video licenses you expect per year and the average price you assume. It pays each Shutterstock license at the level reached at the time of the sale, as Shutterstock does.

The result is only as good as those two inputs. Run a low case and a high case rather than one figure, and once you have sales, replace the guesses with the averages from your own dashboards: Shutterstock's earnings summary breaks them down by date and by product type.