Are you a drone enthusiast looking for ways to make money from your aerial photography? You’re in luck! There are plenty of sites that specialize in collecting and selling multimedia content, acting as “marketplaces” for customers and content creators to meet. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the best sites for exposing your drone images to exactly the types of customers you need. Before you can focus on the content, you need your videos to be of acceptable quality. It would be best to use a drone with a 4K camera, although videos shot at 2.7 K or 1080p might still be acceptable.
You'll also need a drone that comes with a mechanical stabilizing gimbal. Beyond those requirements, excelling in a competitive field will depend on the level of your creativity and technical skill. The challenge of filming in these locations is that they tend to attract large crowds. Flying over crowds is normally restricted under the rules of Part 107, so you'll have to solve this particular problem.
You can fly when there are few people or fly with a Part 107 exemption. In any case, the safety of people on the ground is of utmost importance. For drone pilots, the best place to sell videos is one that specifically specializes in drone videos. This is the value proposition of Drone Stock, one of the most popular marketplaces that connects content creators and drone-based buyers. As one of the first websites to offer exclusive images of drones, they are often the favorites of content creators who are looking for aerial videos and don't want to examine other unnecessary media. Another great advantage of Drone Stock is the fact that they have already established a fairly solid name and a loyal customer base of some very important names in film and television production.
Even with a base in Hollywood, Drone Stock continues to focus a lot on social media ads, further expanding its presence in the industry. Drone Stock is also one of the highest-paying markets for contributing drone pilots. If you agree to host your drone videos exclusively with them, you'll get 50% of all sales of your content. On the other hand, non-exclusive hosting will provide you with 30% of sales. Drone Stock doesn't require a minimum number of sales to earn your royalties; you get your share of each and every transaction. Being well established works well for Drone Stock and its exclusive collaborators.
They generally receive requests from filmmakers, directors, and producers for specific shots. These requests are then sent to your group of taxpayers, thus providing them with opportunities that would not otherwise have been available. While sites that sell exclusively aerial videos are ideal for filmmakers who don't want to search for attention-distracting content, they're still not as popular as standard archival media sites. In this field, few names are as recognizable as Getty Images. Getty Images, a favorite of producers and filmmakers around the world, is best known as a stock image site. What most people don't know is that they also sell stock videos.
Its video gallery is much smaller than its image gallery, so drone pilots have the opportunity to quickly gain control over a huge potential market. Applying to be a Getty Images contributor is surprisingly simple. All you have to do is send YouTube links through the Getty Images smartphone app for their team of publishers to review your contributions. After approval, you can upload any content as long as it meets the site's standards.
All drone videos sent to Getty Images become exclusive to this company, which means that you will no longer be able to send them to other stock sites. In the case of royalty-free video clips, collaborators will get a 25% reduction in total sales. There's also the fact that Getty Images is one of the most renowned archival media sites. If you can create a really good stock video, it's not inconceivable that it will have hundreds of buyers.
Only basic calculations are needed to calculate how much you can earn by hosting your content on Getty Images. Shutterstock is another big name in the stock media industry. Their system works much like Getty Images, but it's a little simpler, so you can better forecast how much you can earn. Once again, Shutterstock is better known as a stock photo site.
Their marketing is even more inclined towards this reputation, to the point that finding the video section there is too complicated for our liking. However, they have a wide selection and even have a gallery dedicated to aerial videos. Shutterstock empowers its collaborators and helps them develop their skills through its content. They run a blog to which collaborators have exclusive access, with the aim of inspiring them and making their creativity flow.
They also provide a “short list” of the most in-demand content to help their content creators get more sales. For filmmakers, Shutterstock offers a video workshop organized by a group of experts. In a way, joining Shutterstock feels like being part of a real community. This community is something that Shutterstock is actively trying to grow with its partner referral program, which encourages collaborators who can recommend buyers or other collaborators.
One unique thing that BlackBox offers is that it can work as a collaboration platform. For example, a drone pilot can upload an aerial video for an editor to cut or color grade. The finished video is then sent to BlackBox for hosting on archive media sites. Everyone involved in the production receives a share of the profits from video sales.
This allows collaboration even for remotely located content creators, which seems to be increasingly relevant today. A disadvantage of using an “middleman” like BlackBox instead of uploading directly to stock media sites is that they also keep a portion of the transaction. For each sale, the multimedia trading site earns 60% of the profits, while Blackbox keeps 15%, leaving 25% for the content creator. Ever since drones became popular, drone cinema has always been one of the most cost-effective avenues for making money from aerial photography and videography.
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