I own a Red Epic, a gimbal, an 18 foot crane, a 4000 dollar drone system with VR guidance, and I've uploaded well over 1000 clips to Pond 5. I would say I get an average payout of 20 dollars a month. Can you tell me in good conscience why I should refer people to a site that pays me less in 3 years than a high school dropout working construction makes in a weekend? I've spend years filling out your forums, driven thousands of miles to get shots all over my state, learned multiple CGI animation programs, filled out forums until my eyes bled, and my total income is around half of the poverty line. I know that taking a percentage cut from millions of collective sales is working out well for you, but for people like me, the stock footage industry is a nightmare. I'd like to film in better locations, but the payout is so low I can't afford to go on shoots. One day on one of these shoots I hit a pothole. The repair bill was more than my Pond 5 earnings across dozens of shoots.
I went to one of the world's last remaining tiger sanctuaries, and filmed them. Maybe I made 50-100 dollars from two weeks work. I tried to look up my own clips on your site under the search term tiger. I could not find any of my clips after searching through half a dozen pages. Here is a clip I found placed way higher in the search than my clips of actual tigers, filmed on a red epic, in slow motion, with pro color correction. It's a shakycam cell phone clip of a housecat, where the camera doesn't stay on the subject, and the person did 0 CC work.
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I can no longer afford to use my Red, because I can't afford to hire an assistant or rent a hotel room for a weekend with the money 3 of these stock sites pay me combined. It has a layer of dust on it an inch thick.
Here is a sample of some of the work I've uploaded to your site.
Here is a link to my Pond 5 account.
Search the world's largest HD & 4K stock video library plus millions of music tracks, SFX, motion graphics, and images. Professional quality, affordable prices.
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If you can show me that these abysmal earnings are my fault, and how I can correct the problem, I will refer 5 people to your site. You don't even have to give me another drone. I just want to get paid 10% as much for my work as a cinematographer as the guy next door to me makes for learning to hammer nails into boards.
Over the years, the process of uploading to stock sites has become so depressing that I have basically quit. Change my mind. I would welcome it. I've basically quit live action filmmaking from being so badly underpaid. If I started to have a good experience with your site, I would likely refer people to it all the time.
I doubt my case is unique, you don't need giveaways to get referrals, if creators made real money on your site, they would spread the word far and wide without prompting. I know I would have.
I now sell digital art paintings, because I have become too poor to drive anywhere and shoot.
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