Starting a free stock video site

just want to get a gauge on what people think about starting a sites that gives away free or Creative Commons 0(no restrictions, attribution free) stock videos and get revenue from cpm ads. A site similar to mazwai and pexels , seems like it could be a good low maintenance hustle. Thoughts?

In my opinion there's no such thing as a low maintenance stock site. If you want to host video, you would need a good script (not cheap) and a powerful VPS with huge amounts of bandwidth, or better host the files in a cloud storage like AWS, which could be very costly. It is also a very competitive niche so you would need to pull out the big guns in order to get your site on the first page of the SERPS. I would suggest to start with keyword research and a rough estimate of your initial investment and monthly costs like VPS, the cloud storage, mail server, etc.

I don't have experience with cpm ads, but you can do the math and if you consider it is worth your time and overall investment, then go for it. Good luck!

A similar project would be very expensive to grow and maintain for what concern bandwidth and contents. For sure a CPM based ADV system isn't enough.

You could start something similar to freepik: giving premium content or affiliate links to payment stock sites.

keep 4 to 6 well optimized landing pages ready, run adwords for 2 weeks with daily budget of like say 50USD to 100 USD.
You will realize the potential then you decide if you are going to invest more to bank more, or drop it.
If you are not ready to test with some investment, then dont put more effort on this, this niche is very competitive.
If you can figure out a way to mass collect emails of potential buyers then do a wel planned email campaign you need nothing else to make money if you do email marketing well.

It sounds like a good idea IMO, specially if people use your stock content on a project that goes viral, like memes.

Agree with benito, not sure how low maintenance it would be but it definitely sounds like a great idea. I know plenty of people that would visit such a site. I wish you good luck on your venture.

As far as I remember, there is well-known website that has very recently closed their creative common website section justifying officially "people were not using it", but OTR because it did cost them a shit load of money for no revenues