Pond5 is a marketplace where you can buy and sell video footage, stock photos, illustrations, music tracks, sound effects, project templates, After Effects templates and 3D models. Pond5 is a relatively young (2006) and rapidly growing company. In 2008 there was a big change, with a nice restyling of the site and an expansion of the services offered. Recently Pond5 bought the agency Pixmac, de facto challenging the bigger companies on the market of royalty-free images.
Becoming a contributor at Pond5 is pretty wasy: you just sign up for an account on the site and there?s no need to pass through an admission test or through any portfolio assessment. Once you created your account, you can start to upload your works immediately via webform or via FTP. The submission on the website requires the validation of the files one by one, but it is possible to use a template to speed up the process, and there?s no need to select categories for each file. Editorial images are welcome at Pond5, moreover without any additional requirement about captions and format.
Pond5 allows contributors to fix the selling price of their works with a single and unchangeable type of commission of 50%, one of the highest in circulation. It is not yet scheduled a subscription plan for buyers. Payments to the contributors are made on demand, but it?s possible to set them automatically once the minimum threshold ($25) is exceeded. Payments are sent through Skrill, Paypal or bank checks.
Pond5 looks very attractive for microstock photographers. If you haven?t uploaded to Pond5 because you don?t shoot video and only have stills, now is the time to submit!