Looking for the best stock video library for breadth, depth, and quality? Try Pond5. In 2006, Pond5 became the world’s first royalty-free video marketplace. Most other stock media sites started as stock photo sites. Our focus was on video first, and we’ve never looked back. In the years since, we’ve added HD video and 4K video, as well as royalty-free music, motion graphics, sound effects, visual effects templates, images, and 3D models, but even these improvements have always first served the needs of filmmakers and video creators.
Today, Pond5 is the largest stock video site in the world, with over 36 million videos and counting.
How Pond5 has Grown
When we started in 2006, little did we know that over the next 16 years, we’d become the go-to choice for the top Hollywood film studios and independent filmmakers worldwide. Stick around to watch the credits, and you may be surprised at just how many major feature films, documentaries, and TV productions feature Pond5 footage and other media assets.
Pond5 has become the “secret weapon” of Hollywood. Previously, a film production might spend thousands of dollars to deploy additional units to shoot expensive B-roll. Now they simply search on Pond5 and find the perfect video clip to complete their story. Often it looks just as good–or in many cases better–than if they’d shot it themselves, at a fraction of that cost.
As the use of video has become more ubiquitous, creators outside of Hollywood began using Pond5 content to fill their creative needs for their personal and commercial projects. Pond5 video clips are found in commercials, video games, YouTube and TikTok posts, background videos for concert venues, and so much more.
The real credit goes to our customers’ creativity and our contributors’ artistry. From day one, we’ve done our best to provide our community with a library that offers an unsurpassed depth, breadth, and quality of content.
Unsurpassed Depth
In recent years there has been an influx of stock media websites that either give away free stock video clips or offer “unlimited downloads” from a small set of videos for a nominal fee. In the latter case, the company often just resells assets they have previously purchased themselves.
Can you find high-quality videos on these sites? Sometimes, yes. However, the pool of videos on these sites is so tiny that the highest quality videos get downloaded and reused to the point of over-saturation.
Hundreds of websites have used this free stock photo of a woman chewing her pencil.Here you can see one of many examples of a stock image downloaded from a free site and then used hundreds of times on websites and in print, including major companies who should better understand the risks of using stock content from free sites. These companies may have saved a few dollars by not having to pay an artist for the right to use a photo. But at what cost? Eventually, this kind of practice will cause a dilution of their message and their brand once their customers realize how little they value unique content.
In the photography world, having your audience recognize this kind of repetition can be embarrassing, but it can be catastrophic for video productions. Imagine working years on a feature film only to release it and have users recognize a scene from another production or a commercial.
Accessible to Everyone
Pond5 democratizes the process of both buying and selling stock videos.
We have over 115,000 artists worldwide (and counting) who place their work on our marketplace. Other sites often have only a handful of artists producing all their videos. At Pond5 we welcome a broad spectrum of contributors, from professional filmmakers selling extra B-roll footage on their hard drives to talented hobbyists shooting scenes on their iPhones. And unlike “free sites” and “all-you-can-eat subscription sites,” Pond5 passes 40% to 90% of the sale price back to the artist, further incentivizing them to produce higher quality work. This results in a staggering number of high-quality videos for you to choose from in the Pond5 library, with thousands of videos added every day.
As a shopper for stock video you’ll find plenty of options for any subject from a diverse set of skilled artists with unique composition, framing, and lighting that aligns with your creative vision. Try a search on our site vs. a free site or any other “unlimited download” site and see for yourself. And unlike other stock video websites, we give you flexibility in payment. You can purchase a standard license to any of the stock videos on our site individually or save month by purchasing a credit pack. Or if you refer, you can pay a recurring fee for a annual subscription service that gives you unlimited access to a select pool of over 4 million videos.
Unsurpassed Breadth
Another benefit to having a community of so many video artists spanning the world is the breadth of the “long tail” of our subject matter.
This review from a filmmaker searching for Australasian Darters nesting is typical of the feedback we receive.
Every day, we see similarly obscure searches that will hit a dead end on any other site. In this case, an artist uploaded footage of a little-known bird native to a small region in the South Pacific, and was able to connect with a creator on another part of the globe and bring important detail to their project.
Other companies focus on curating a few videos in a handful of popular categories. Our mission is to attract as much work from as diverse subject matter as possible and connect them with filmmakers and production teams.
We couldn’t put it better than Bruce F., who left this review about Pond5:
Unsurpassed Quality
Every video in our marketplace has been screened and reviewed by a human being for quality. And we don’t have just a few thousand videos for you to choose from; we have millions. Many submissions get rejected if they fail to meet our quality standards. While artists are sometimes discouraged if we reject work that might be accepted elsewhere, after 16+ years in the business, we clearly understand what buyers want and don’t want. Once we filter for quality, it’s up to the buyer to choose the perfect fit for their production, whether they’re producing a multi-million dollar feature film, a pre-roll ad, a short YouTube or TikTok video, or any other creative vision.
We’re proud to count among our artists some of the top cinematographers and videographers in the world, many of whom shoot on top-of-the-line gear and use camera techniques and composition usually reserved only for the highest-end productions.
But don’t take our word for it. Here’s a sample of more than 12,000 Trustpilot reviews raving about the quality of videos they find on Pond5. All of these customer reviews are completely unsolicited and are a testament to the value we put on our collection.
As proud as we are with our Trustpilot reviews, we’re even more delighted when watching TV or sitting in a movie theater and seeing Pond5 in the closing credits (you can see a small sample on IMDB here and here). Since the top filmmakers in the world trust our quality, we hope you will, too, whether you’re an aspiring filmmaker, a video producer, a social media personality, or an online marketer.
Search That Works
We understand that having the world’s largest video library with industry-leading breadth, depth, and quality means nothing if you can’t find what you need. That’s why we’re equally proud of our Search functionality, built from the ground up with video searchers’ needs in mind. Learn more about Pond5’s video search, built from the ground up for video content.