Earn Before You Delete Videos
Meet Blackbox: the app that pays you for your useless videos.
WHAT IS BLACKBOX
So, it’s basically an app that combines the earnings of selling on Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Pond5, and VimeoStock. And it’s free.
Free as in free beer. No strings attached type of free, which is rare nowadays.
HISTORY
And also, Blackbox is a no-nonsense, one-time setup for all of those 4 marketplaces. I discovered Blackbox Global way back in 2018 and wanted to see for myself how much I could earn before I tweeted about this. I uploaded about 10 of my old handheld videos and totally forgot about it, until earlier this year when Paypal sent me a notification from a Blackbox sale.
To be honest, back in 2018, there wasn’t a lot of articles written about Blackbox. In fact, there was absolutely no influencer writing about this amazing service, but I love to dive into digital rabbit holes and so that’s how I got involved. That day, however, I immediately got excited when Paypal notified me about some random Blackbox earnings that I’ve totally forgotten about.
It was $14.88.
I know, I know.. it’s really not that much but when you learn that its possible to earn $14.88 from 10 old (and useless) videos, ideas started popping in my head, and in an instant, I was almost addicted to the idea of “mining” for more old videos, with a mental preparedness to race myself towards uploading about 2,000 videos.
I can’t help but think, what if I had uploaded 100 useless videos? 1,000?
10,000?
WHAT BLACKBOX ISN’T
Now I’ll tell you what Blackbox isn’t: an overnight money. Instead, it’s more of a long-term, passive income THAT YOU FORGET IN 3 YEARS and suddenly gets you $15 for every 10 videos.
Or about $14,880 for every 10,000 useless, unwanted videos (think huge ancient rocks).
On top of that, you earn repeatedly from a one-time setup because they never delete your videos.
SETTING UP BLACKBOX
Time for adulting. Signup here.
At first I was confused because Blackbox didn’t exactly come preinstalled with an UPLOAD button, unlike YouTube. Understandably though, it is still in its early form and there’s a lot of room for more exciting new features.
So, signing up was easy, but I needed to install a software named FileZilla in my laptop for it to work. Sorry Android users, this is a Windows-based software. So I downloaded > installed > and ran the app for the first time.
Pretty straightforward.
Then, based from the instructions of Blackbox on its page, this is important:
Never use the quick connect button. It sacrifices security for speed.
So instead, what I did was:
Select “File” > “Site Manager” > “New Site”
The “General” tab is where the following details should be:
HOST: portal.blackbox.global (double check; safer to manually type every letter)
PORT: (leave this blank)
ENCRYPTION: Select Use explicit FTP over TLS if available.
LOGON TYPE: Select Normal
USER — your Blackbox email address
PASSWORD — your Blackbox password
Next, I selected “TRANSFER SETTINGS” tab at the top and select the “Passive” option. If you wanna dive deeper into the descriptions of each modes, check their official site. Moving on:
Click “Connect” at the bottom of the panel.
Finally, I clicked on the checkbox Always trust certificate in future sessions at the bottom left of the panel to avoid seeing this prompt during future logins:
Click OK and it should be connected. Save this for easier logins next time.
Told ya.. its just a one-time setup. Now its time to make some money.
FOLDERS
The BlackBox team has created all the FOLDERS needed in our FTP directory.
These are the only folders that the Blackbox AI will recognize, so don’t create any additional folders. Else, it might be rejected.
Me being new to this, I’ve only ever used the ”stock_footage” folder inside the Blackbox network on Filezilla. It’s the safest way to upload footage, and dragging and dropping to this window from Windows is a piece of cake.
FILE FORMATS ACCEPTED
Oh and by the way, ONLY .MOV or .MP4 files can be uploaded. Also, I’ve noticed that there is a definite gap of a few minutes to a few hours before my footage was displayed on my dashboard, but I guess this will be improved in the future.
For now, this is what they have.
Some important notes though, after uploading, I’ve tagged the clips with anything to describe it so that the Blackbox AI can have a hint of what the clip is about. Also, clips have to be AT LEAST 10 seconds long. Give it a good title and hit “Submit” (on the website, not the Filezilla) when you’re done. At this point, all what’s left to do is to connect your Paypal and you’re good to go.
Keep doing this for all of your useless videos before you delete them. Pretty soon, you’ll have a plethora of future surprise earnings from Paypal like me. Happy earning!
Sources:
Notion
Blackbox FAQ
