Brad, thanks for the kind words. Italy was a blast.
Todd, Pond5 lets the person who uploads the clip set the price. I played around with some different price points to see if anything would work better than the other. Which would explain some of the more specific prices. Something cool to note. Some of the clips are 4k and HD. All you have to do is set the price for the 4k clip and then Pond5 will figure out the price for the HD clip for you. You just set the % difference once and then it set the percentage difference for you everytime you set a price or change a price down the road.
When I first looked at Pond5 years ago I agree with your observation that is was low-tier. Pond5 has come a long ways in the last few years. I used to only purchase my stock footage from iStockphoto because I felt they had the best quality footage. If they didn’t have what I needed I then went down the same road you do.
I just did a job for a big financial institution and bought a lot of business stock footage clips. I used Pond5, Dissolve, iStockPhoto and Shutterstock. I got most of my clips from Pond5 because I thought they had the best selection for the very specific type of shots I needed to find.
A cool side note about Pond5, they have thousands of public domain clips on their site that are free to download. That library saved my bacon a year ago on a project I needed to cover with old shots of New York.
As for your comment about finding the perfect clip on one of the other sources, and then checked Pond5 where the same clip was available. I do that all the time. Typically if you upload to multiple sites it is just too easy to copy and past the title of the clip and the tag data. So I always copy the title and see if I can find it on a different site for a cheaper price. One clip was $300 on Pond5 and I found it for $75 on Shutterstock. Other times I have found a clip on Shutterstock for $75 and found the same clip for $50 on Pond5.
Shutterstock and iStockphoto charge the same prices no matter the contributor so I keep those price points in the back of my head.
I think Pond5 is worth checking out the next time you need stock footage. They treat their contributors better than any of the other stock sites.
Stephen Smith
Utah Video Productions
Check out my Vimeo page