You cannot pick the winners, so upload all of them

I went through every Getty royalty statement I have, three and a half years of them, 322 licenses to 167 different buyers, looking for the pattern I could repeat on purpose.

There isn't one. Not in the way I wanted. The clip that pays is almost never the clip I would have picked, and the only strategy that survives the data is to upload as much as I possibly can and keep every single file findable. That is exactly what MetaMule is for.

The biggest earner is the one I would never have bet on

My single best-earning file is a video of an owl. It has been licensed once. That one license is 16% of everything I have ever earned.

The file I have licensed the most is an annular solar eclipse. It has sold 59 times, far more than anything else I own, and all 59 of those sales together are 8% of my royalties. Half of what the owl made, from fifty-nine times the demand.

If you had shown me those two clips the day I uploaded them and asked which one would carry my portfolio, I would have been wrong. Everyone would have been wrong. The eclipse is obviously in demand. The owl is a nice quiet clip of a bird. That is the whole problem with trying to pick winners: demand and value are different things, and you can only see one of them in advance.

The money is stacked, and you can't see where before it lands

The concentration is steep once you look at it. Of everything I have uploaded, 86 files have ever earned anything at all. Among just those earners:

• The top file is 16% of all my royalties
• The top five are 47%
• The top ten are 61%
• The bottom half of them, combined, are 8%

Half of the files that have sold, added together, are less than a twelfth of the income. And that is the flattering view, because it ignores everything that has never sold at all. Most of what I upload never earns a cent, and that is not a sign I am doing it wrong. It is the normal shape. The question was never whether most of my work earns. It will not. The question is whether anything in it turns out to be someone's one large license, and I cannot tell which until it happens.

So I stopped trying to. I upload everything.

Why volume is the strategy, and which volume

Here is the part that took me three years and 322 sales to actually believe: the right move is to maximise the number of clips you have for sale, because each one is a lottery ticket you cannot price in advance. More tickets, more chances at the one license that pays like the owl. A clip that sits for two years earning nothing is not dead weight. It is the position you had to already hold for the day a broadcaster needs exactly that thing.

But be precise about which volume matters, because there are two and only one of them is worth chasing.

Upload volume is the strategy. The number of distinct, findable files you have listed.

Sales volume is not. The number of times you get licensed is the most visible number on your dashboard and the least connected to income. Here are my top buyers by how often they licensed me, against what each actually paid:

71% of my buyers have licensed exactly one thing, ever. The customers who come back most are platforms licensing at bulk rates, pennies a file, thousands of files. The income comes from the publisher or agency that needs one specific clip, once, and pays properly for it. So chase shots on goal, not repeat customers. They are not the same lever.

The catch that makes volume possible at all

There is a reason "upload everything" is advice people give and almost nobody follows. At real volume, the metadata is the job. Every clip needs a title, a description, and thirty to fifty keywords, matched to each marketplace's own controlled vocabulary, or it never surfaces in a search and the lottery ticket is blank. Do that by hand and a weekend of shooting becomes a week of typing, and you quietly start uploading less. The volume strategy dies not because it is wrong but because it is tedious.

That is the entire reason I built MetaMule. It writes the title, the description and the marketplace-ready keywords for a whole folder and exports the CSV each platform expects, so keeping every clip findable stops being the thing that caps how much you upload. The math only works if titling a clip that may never earn costs you seconds, not an hour.

Judge it by the year, and keep shooting the high-ceiling stuff

Two things the data is clear on once you commit to breadth.

Judge yearly, never monthly. With income this concentrated, month-to-month swings are noise. One quiet month with a single good license beats a busy one full of bulk pennies. My own annual totals have grown steadily, roughly three and a half times across these three years, while individual months lurch all over the place. The trend is real. The months are not a signal.

Shoot video where you can, for the ceiling, not the average. Video is about 5% of my sales and 23% of my income, and an average video license pays several times a stills one. That sounds like "switch to video," and I nearly did, until I checked the denominator: most of that 23% is one exceptional license, and per clip, video has not pulled ahead of stills for me. What video has is a higher ceiling. The best footage license is worth far more than the best stills license, and that is a real reason to point a camera at the thing. Just don't let one big sale reorganise everything you shoot.

For what it is worth, my income lands roughly 65% wildlife, 18% landscape, 13% sky and space, and 5% everything else (a close-up of water beads, a state capitol, a fly fisherman's hands). I did not plan that split and I would not have guessed it, which is the point of the whole piece.

The short version

• My biggest earner sold once and is 16% of my income. My most-licensed file sold 59 times and is 8%. You cannot pick the winners in advance.
• Among files that have earned at all, the top ten are 61% of income and the bottom half are 8%. Most of what you upload will never sell. That is normal, not failure.
• So upload everything. Breadth is the strategy, because every clip is a ticket you cannot price until it hits.
• Chase upload volume, not sales volume. 71% of buyers license once; the frequent buyers pay the least.
• Volume only works if keywording a clip is nearly free, which is the whole job MetaMule does.
• Judge by the year. Shoot video for the ceiling. Keep the ones that never sell.

Figures are from my own Getty contributor statements, February 2023 to August 2026, recomputed from every line and expressed as proportions. Buyers are described by category rather than named.