$400 clips seem to be selling just fine (at Pond5 and elsewhere) and many sites have been selling $8 footage for years already. Sure, I would rather have Pond5 remove the membership too but I don't think it's the end of the world...

At VB it works really well pulling in lots and lots of customers (they now have about the same traffic as P5) who don't seem to mind at all paying $49-200 for marketplace clips.

15-20% for EXCLUSIVE material is a horrible, horrible, shameful even, deal. Even for non-exclusive it is seriously bad.

Surely, Getty is a big player, but I have found that I increase my earnings 4-5 times by spreading out my material. This is also a good safety net for dips and close-downs (hello Revo). You place high in the search engines at some sites, lower on others, but you never know until you try.

In some fields, like selling Wordpress themes at Envato, exclusivity pays off (70% cut, huge customer base), but in most cases it doesn't.

As you said, content is king, which means that good content will most likely sell well everywhere. Which it usually also does, with natural variations.

Yeah I think they only go by # of sales. Which is completely useless of course if you're also doing video.

After a couple less than stellar months at P5 I raised my prices this month and had a very good month.

To what level? I'm experimenting a bit myself.

For airports/airplanes I would pick 400 instead of 200 + 1.4. Or 600 if you can. 

The extenders tend to disappoint on zoom lenses and only really work well (good sharpness) on the nice Canon primes (300, 400, 500, 600 etc.). But that will be much, much more than 500 euros...

You mean with the brands still there, is that what you're saying?

88,000 editorial airplane shots on SS out of 200,000+ total. I would say there's a lot around and yes, airplane photos sell but competition is incredibly high.

It all depends on whether you're doing it just to make money, or if it's something that feels like a hobby that you would do anyway, but nice to make money as well.

I spent around $18,000 on equipment and traveling over the last year or so, and it will probably be another 6 months before I break even.

But I would still have traveled, and I love standing on top of a mountain making a time-lapse. It's exciting when they sell, but it's not like it felt like I HAD to do that for work.

You have to be food stylist, photographer and editing genius all in one.

Yes, which is true for most studio photography. It is not easy to create "perfect" pictures - it takes a lot of skill and work. Post-processing is a big part and if you want to get serious I would get Photoshop. Lightroom only goes so far when it comes to editing details.

The further away you are, with a longer lens, the straighter it will be.

Thank you for the explaination, very clear.
By the way, I was not saying that the files from the membership are put up in the search engine, I was talking about files from people who contribute to membership

Yes, I understand what you mean. I don't have time to check out all the thousands of authors but a quick search for "berlin timelapse" shows that NONE of the authors of the top 5 results have anything in the membership program.

I simply don't think that's how it works.

I am not sure we are talking about the same thing.
I am referring to the search within P5. Are you talking about results in search engines like Google?
Can you develop about working on the SEO? The only thing I know is to enter the title, descriptio and keywords>

But anyway my own files that have sold well and used to appear at the top of the relative searches by popularity until a few weeks ago now are buried several pages down

Yes, I'm talking about the P5 internal search (Best match, which is default). I haven't noticed a difference in search placement. Sales will bring up the rank, time will bring it down.

A simple search like "typing laptop" yields 23,745 results and I find some of my clips (with sales) right away. The membership content consists of 1,547 files and are mixed in well with the standard marketplace content (none above row 4). The top results aren't any different if you choose "Core Library", although for some reason it's easier to find Membership content below if you do.

If you order results by Popular the membership content comes even further down.

I absolutely do not believe they favor membership content in general search (because I can see that just by searching), but of course, if you ONLY want to find membership content if you're part of the program you will filter out the rest.

It is totally dead now outside the membershipp area, which has killed the video market.
They only few sales still appearing are reserved for people participating to the scheme, anybody else is pushed way down the bottom of the search.

That is simply not true. Work on your SEO instead. I am not in the membership program and only have a little over 500 files but some of my clips show up in the second row on VERY common searches with 36,000+ results.

Other clips with 0 sales show up at place 80 out of 2,100 results for another pretty common search term so that really doesn't look like they're "pushed down" in the results...

Dissolve don't even use titles (unlike Pond5, Dreamstime and Depositphotos). They only require descriptions, which in my opinion should be a few sentences, closing in on the standard 250 characters that most sites limit them too. It will definitely benefit SEO to have longer (accurate) descriptions (more or less depending on the site of course, Fotolia = 0 importance).

At VB and SS they are very important, at Fotolia completely useless (not used in search), and at Pond5 of medium importance.