Creative Missions For Drone Pilots

Our portfolio company Dronebase announced something interesting and fun this week. They have partnered with Getty Images to provide opportunities for drone pilots to fly “creative missions”:

Before today, DroneBase pilots had access to just two types of missions: client missions and panomissions,  both of which have unique photography specifications. Today, we’re excited to introduce Getty Creative Missions as a third opportunity for our pilot community.

For the first time ever, drone pilots have an opportunity to flex their creative muscles for a chance to have their work to be featured on Getty Images for purchase.

If you are a drone pilot, amateur or pro, and want to fly these creative missions and sell your work via Getty, download the Dronebase iPhone App or log into their website and follow the “Get On Getty” links.

To kick off this partnership, Getty and Dronebase are running a campaign called Cityscapes:

We’re excited to kick off our Getty partnership with a “Cityscapes” theme, a call for the best metropolitan aerial submissions from around the world.

So if you are a drone pilot and live or work in or near a city, take your drone out and capture some amazing cityscapes and submit them to Dronebase. They may end up on Getty Images and start earning you money.

There are a lot of things that excite me about this partnership, but maybe the biggest thing for me is how it reveals the core mission of Dronebase which is to give drone pilots lots of fun and rewarding things to do with their drones. And this is just the beginning. If you have a drone and want to do more with it, get the iPhone app or join via their website and start doing fun and rewarding missions with Dronebase.

#drones

Comments (Archived):

  1. William Mougayar

    I hope that one day, these photos would also end up in a decentralized peer to peer marketplace, and not just on another centralized monopoly service.

    1. jason wright

      In Europe today William?

      1. William Mougayar

        Not. In my bed.Timely observation 😉

    2. awaldstein

      Serious question–I get what you are saying.In what way in your opinion is someplace like Steem a decentralized marketplace?I get the coin piece obviously. But from behaviors and behavioral benefits how does P2P change or manifest what you are dreaming of?

      1. jason wright

        ownership

        1. awaldstein

          I’ve given an example, Steem, be more specific and show me how that ownership is different, empowers and changes behaviors or group dynamics.Concepts are great and change the world.They mean nothing till they become part of emotional actions.

          1. jason wright

            shall we use Getty Images as an example? i’m not deeply familiar with GI but i suspect that there are certain ‘traditional values’ to be found there.why should the human spirit for creativity and the distribution of that creativity continue to be beholding to the singular profit motive of a private company and its shareholders…when it no longer needs to be?i might want to be my own means of production and not be subject to a distribution tax set by a network effect gatekeeper. i may not want to have to agree to the terms & conditions they set for the ‘privilege’ of distributing my creativity.

          2. awaldstein

            There is always a price. May be less but if you do not pay a gatekeeper like Etsy then you need to market and build the brand by yourself.There is simply no way to do this without the cost at one place or another.

      2. William Mougayar

        I wasn’t thinking of Steemit for this case. More like something that has an autonomous operation in taking the inventory & enabling buyers and sellers to transact without fees between each other. Maybe it’s closer to an Open Bazaar. Imagine if the drone photographers received 99% of the revenue, and not 40-60% due to Getty’s take rate.

        1. awaldstein

          Good one and thanks.Was talking to a cryto individual at the bar the other night over a bottle of natural wine actually and he was spouting the idea of Uber without Uber.A tired and this week a poor analogy but in that is where you are going I think.I’ll look at Open Bazaar but this is truly radical and I get the behavioral change of what ‘work’ is in this respect.

          1. mikenolan99

            The Uber of Uber…

        2. awaldstein

          And the truly heady question of course is that community by nature has a leader and through that leadership, the members benefit for obvious reasons.If your remove centralization do you mollify the idea of leadership and likewise then where does marketing as a group dynamics go.

        3. LE

          Your idea is good but you are paying getty money because that is where the buyers know to go for images and they have existing contracts with the usual purchasing suspects.

          1. William Mougayar

            Of course, that’s how many businesses are today: a central curator/service provider does all that. but maybe that could change in the future. Every centralized service will get some competition from a decentralized / p2p model, one day.

    3. pointsnfigures

      Yup, that would be good.

  2. prankeapple

    When’s the ICO for the AI-controlled drone blockchain image gallery marketplace?

    1. jason wright

      After the pre-sale.

      1. Chimpwithcans

        Which is after the angel funding

        1. jason wright

          There are no angels in crypto.There is Coinlist, AKA Coiningitlist.

  3. jason wright

    Get’the Image.

  4. David C. Baker

    I understand how this can be interpreted as good for amateur drone pilots, and I don’t want to throw water on that, but Getty Images has an enduring and widespread reputation for taking advantage of creatives. And their draconian IP rights enforcement has left their ubiquity as the only force powerful enough to overcome it. Did I just write that? 🙂

    1. LE

      We actually received a demand from getty for an image used on a website that came from a photodisc that was essentially clip art. The amount demanded was $600. Although the amount was not large it’s one of those letters that you get that can ruin your day (kind of the business version of a parking ticket).We figured it was ‘spray and pray’ because after ignoring it they never came back. The first demand was quite official looking an actual invoice and formal letter. A case could be made for postal fraud. See image below…. https://uploads.disquscdn.c

      1. David C. Baker

        Yes, they employ people who actually go to corporate waiting rooms and see if an annual report from, say, 2015 is displayed in the lobby. If it is displayed in any part of 2016, they get a demand letter like that because the fine print in the licensing states a specific usage in time.Everybody I know in the creative industry (and there are 26,000 people who get my weekly emails) pretty much despises them…but they have a monopoly and so they grudgingly use them.

        1. LE

          NFW! The license actually has that particular granularity?Is this where you can sign up for those emails? I will do that.https://www.recourses.com/a

          1. David C. Baker

            Yes. Any of the forms. Shoot me an email, too: [email protected] and I’ll send you something.

  5. LE

    They may end up on Getty Images and start earning you money.How much. That’s an important part of this.How is a dronebase pilot is supposed to evaluate this opportunity? There is nothing that I can find anywhere that indicates what you will actually earn if and when your videos or images are licensed by getty. Additionally I would wonder if by uploading images you are giving up your own rights to the images. Getty must have mapped out what they will sell images like this for. And what % will go to the photographer.Sure ‘it depends’. But there must be a rough guideline and metrics. Even with the appropriate ‘no guarantee’ caveats it’s important to disclose.I also wonder if anything in this partnership prevents dronebase (and/or the photographer) from offering the same images (from the dronebase site or otherwise).(See ETSY separate comment).

    1. Jim Peterson

      Excellent points. I referred a friend to Drone Base several months ago when he said he was doing drone work. Later, he told me he did several missions but the core of the opportunity is spec work like this- in his case they had him shoot real estate for sale in hopes of selling it to the real estate agent. No paying customer. Getty, through Dronebase, gets to pick what they like from all the spec work. So they are having the cities shot from the air for free. And of course Getty will receive lifetime residuals from the spec work.It’s all so exciting….millions get drones and want to chase the dream of making money with it. This is not the way. Race to the bottom.

  6. LE

    ETSY could sell some of these images as framed prints by teaming up with a photo printing company. I would buy an image like that priced correctly and ready to hang. Could be ‘the Dronebase store’ on ETSY (for photographers that don’t want to manage the store themselves.).

  7. Brian Barris

    You could also think a bit outside (above?) the box, and don’t just go with pictures for sale, but live streaming video. Then to monetize, don’t partner with a professional photo service, but think about YouNow’s micropayment direct payment model, so that viewers who like the content can pay pilots. How many more people would pay pilots $1 (or less…) for cool content than would pay hundreds of $ that it costs for a mission, or whatever photo rights cost? We’ve been offering this with SkyTubeLive (www.skytubelive.com) for a while now…I’m also interested why dronebase is iOS only. I assume it’s some combination of the fact that development is so much easier for a single standard platform, plus the fact that DJI offers a better feed for their iOS developers than for android developers. At any rate, we went with Android first. iOS would have been the better choice most likely.

  8. creative group

    CONTRIBUTORS:OFF TOPIC ALERT!Appeals court tosses out FCC cap on the gouging per minute phone calls of Prisoners. The companies in that space are backed by Hedge Funds.Really!http://abcnews.go.com/Busin

  9. Jared Anderson

    Now if only the FAA would make it easier to get licensed! There’s too much red tape in the process now even for someone like myself who already is a fixed wing airplane pilot.