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Video: How to Make Money Selling Stock Drone Footage15137

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Video: How to Make Money Selling Stock Drone Footage } Video courtesy of UAV Coach (Drone Pilot Ground School) YouTube Channel | 21 June 2021

From the UAV Coach (Drone Pilot Ground School) YouTube Channel

In this video, we'll give you pro tips on selling your drone images and videos on stock media websites. We'll also tell you which websites our students have found the easiest to get up and running on and walk you through setting up an account and how much money you can earn each month.

💻 Top Stock Media Websites
Shutterstock: https://www.shutterstock.com/
Getty Images: https://www.gettyimages.com/
Pond5: https://www.pond5.com/
Adobe Stock: https://stock.adobe.com/
Storyblocks: https://www.storyblocks.com/

🎬 Jump to Section
0:00​ B-Roll Footage & Introduction
2:00 Five stock media websites to submit your drone work
2:41​ How to set up an account on stock media websites
4:34 How much money you can earn with your stock footage
5:53 Pro tips on how to make the most of your footage online

Source: UAV Coach (Drone Pilot Ground School) YouTube Channel

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Your thoughts?

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Post 1 IP   flag post
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Transcript (video above)

Selling your footage through stock media websites. Working with clients is great, but it requires constant management. You've got to be proactive to stay on top of your projects and to keep an open line of communication going with your clients.

Now, what if I told you that there's another revenue stream that you can add to your drone business that's more passive, meaning, you set it up and then it basically runs itself. What I'm talking about are stock media websites.

When you hear stock media, you probably think about some pretty cheesy shots of people smiling and awkward poses and really bad commercial content. But you might be surprised, nowadays, stock media is looking better than ever. It looks way more natural and it's currently being used everywhere.

I'd even personally used a ton of stock footage for cutting mood films for different advertising clients. Stock is all over the place, from films to TV shows, from commercials to online content, and even in courses just like this one.

How it works is that stock media websites will sell other people's photo and video content, and they'll sell it to companies and individuals with the rights to use it in their own projects. These sites make it way easier to buy high-quality off the shelf footage, which saves valuable time and cuts down on production costs. It allows the buyer to download the high-res content and simply splice that stock media into their work for very professional-looking final products.

Who are the people that are providing the content? This is where you come in. You can sell your drone photos and videos on stock media websites.

In fact, I do this all the time. In this lesson, I'll talk about the five different stock media websites where you can submit your drone work. We'll cover how to set up an account on these sites, how much money you can expect to make from your stock footage. Finally, some pro tips on how to make the most of your footage online.

All right, let's jump into it. What are some of the top stock media websites right now? Our current recommended options are Shutterstock, Getty Images, POND5, Adobe Stock, and Storyblocks. These are all well-known brands, they get a lot of people visiting their sights on a daily basis. Of course, there are other options out there, but these five are the ones that our UAV coach students have found the easiest to get up and running.

They're also the ones that seem to have the most transactional activity. Now, each of these websites make it extremely easy to search for great quality drone related media content which their customers can then pay for, download, and use in their projects. Here's how it works. Each of these sites lets you set up a profile as a contributor.

Sometimes, it can be a bit tricky to find where this specific contributor section is on the website, so be aware that you may need to scroll all the way down or search a little to find the appropriate links for contributors like us.

Once you've found this portal and you've created a contributor profile on each one of these websites, next, you want to begin uploading and categorizing both your best drone pictures and videos. Once this is complete and you've built a portfolio or library on the websites, this is when your work will then become searchable on their site and available for people to purchase from all over the world. When someone does purchase your work, you'll earn a small cut of what they pay.

Now, be aware that each one of these websites has its own terms and conditions. What do I mean by this? Well, some platforms will actually set the pricing for you, whereas other platforms allow you to set your own pricing. There may also be different commission structures that are associated with each individual platform or website.

Let's take Shutterstock as an example. They offer their customers, not contributors, a fixed pricing model or a la carte purchases.

They also have the option for customers to buy a monthly or annual membership, which includes a certain number of downloads. When it comes to how much you get paid as the original creator and contributor, here's their breakdown of the current commission rates.

Their commission rates at the time of filming this video are in different tiers that start at 15 percent and can go all the way up to 40 percent based on volume.

We'll link to each one of these five stock media websites below this lesson so that you can compare them on your own. Also, this comparison will give you a better understanding of how the different licensing and payment options work. Selling stock footage will not get you rich, trust me. Here are a couple of rough examples of payments that I've personally received from Adobe.

Now, however, with that said, it is still possible to make good passive income through stock. Here are a couple of ways of how you can do this.

For one, you'll need a fairly large portfolio of high-quality images and video footage before you can expect to see good results. You might need to upload dozens, hundreds, and honestly, even thousands of clips across multiple different categories and platforms.

But if you're persistent, over time, you will begin to get results. One of the advantages of this strategy is that you can make money on the same footage that's being sold over and over again indefinitely. When people say passive income, this is what they're talking about. How much money can you actually make? A modest goal would be an extra $100-$250 per month.

Now, some drone pilots can bring in more like $1,000 per month if they've got a ton of great clips in their stock portfolio. With that said, there is the possibility of good residual income to be made if you're creative and persistent over time. Let's go over a couple of pro tips to help you get started. First off, we recommend focusing on video over still photography. With video, there's a bit less competition, and the rates are generally higher.

As a best practice, your stock video clips should be one continuous shot that is smooth and has no inconsistencies. It should also be about 10-20 seconds long. Our second pro tip is that if you have a drone that can shoot in in 4K, use it.

Also, if you have a drone that can be pre-programmed to shoot time-lapse videos, use that feature as well. You can even set this feature to shoot a hyperlapse videos which, if done correctly, also sell very well on stock. This is because aerial time-lapse and hyperlapse footage is not as common as other types of drone footage.

By utilizing the time-lapse and hyperlapse feature well plus capturing very specific scenes, you'll hopefully then see this stock footage sell more often.

A couple of good examples of drone time-lapse and hyperlapse work could be capturing something like moving clouds, sunrises and sunsets, boats coming in and out of a harbor, etc. These are all really great examples of different elements to work into a time-lapse or hyperlapse drone video specifically designed for stock purposes. Consider using footage that you captured for your clients.

You can kill two birds with one stone by selling stock footage that you've already captured when doing work for one of your clients. Of course, you'd want to clear this with your client up first, but if you do state this appropriately within your contract agreement, then it should be no issue at all. Look into BlackBox Global as a contributor. BlackBox is a global online platform that helps creators tap into multiple stock markets at once.

How BlackBox differs from the other five sites that we mentioned earlier in this video is that they will curate and distribute your stock content for you. This service is especially useful because you only need to upload your footage plus adding the tags in the descriptions one time instead of having to repeat the same process across multiple different sites.

This saves you, as the contributor and creator, a ton of time because you no longer have to create multiple different accounts in order to access all of these different stock markets. All right, that's it for selling your footage through stock media websites.

I know it can be a bit of a daunting challenge to set up your contributor portfolio, but take it from us, once you've built a strong enough stock footage library, hopefully, the content will begin to sell itself and you'll have successfully created a new passive income stream.
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I would suggest trying to sell through https://www.alamy.com/ I think they are the only one who pays quite a lot.. in some cases more than 50% goes to a photographer/videographer. They even offer something like 70-80% if you sell your media through them only.
You can sell 360 photos there too. I think the minimum price tag for them is about $100 so you may get $50 or even $80 for yourself.
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