How to Make Money With a Drone?

Introduction

The rapid­ly devel­op­ing unmanned indus­try ini­tial­ly pre­de­ter­mined the emer­gence of promis­ing and inter­est­ing professions/hobbies. Already today, many suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies that use UAVs in busi­ness are expe­ri­enc­ing a short­age of UAV pilots/operators. And the need for these spe­cial­ists is con­stant­ly grow­ing. Despite the abun­dance of pho­to / video infor­ma­tion on the glob­al Inter­net, high-qual­i­ty and inter­est­ing con­tent is rare, but accord­ing to ana­lysts, it is drones that will be able to sig­nif­i­cant­ly change the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, as they often allow you to shoot where a per­son can­not reach, using cam­era angles for imple­men­ta­tion which in the near past required the use of expen­sive cin­e­mato­graph­ic equip­ment installed on civ­il avi­a­tion ships. Now a drone can do all this, and as prac­tice shows, it is not at all nec­es­sary that it be expen­sive and dif­fi­cult to use. This state of affairs leads many to the ques­tion: “Is it pos­si­ble today to make mon­ey on a drone from scratch?”.

prospects

The bar­ri­er to entry into the world of com­mer­cial drones is extreme­ly low. You can buy a drone capa­ble of tak­ing qual­i­ty photo/video footage for less than $1,000. But, do not assume that this will be an easy path to a high­ly paid pro­fes­sion. The real­i­ty is that aero con­tent that some­one wants to pay you for is a skill in itself. In oth­er words, most of the peo­ple who fly and shoot on order are pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers or video­g­ra­phers.

Some use drones in addi­tion to exist­ing tools to per­form sci­en­tif­ic, con­struc­tion or oth­er indus­tri­al tasks. And they are also high­ly qual­i­fied in var­i­ous fields of activ­i­ty. The train­ing course for these pilots cov­ers the areas of nat­ur­al resource man­age­ment, sur­vey­ing, mil­i­tary or police ser­vice, and more. The lev­el of such skills is far from the lev­el of train­ing of an ordi­nary user. Typ­i­cal­ly, when a con­sult­ing firm or a large indus­tri­al com­pa­ny needs a drone, they either look for a hired employ­ee suit­able for the job in their field of activ­i­ty, or pay for the train­ing and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of their staff, which is most often the case.

Let’s summarize

• If you think that buy­ing a drone will imme­di­ate­ly solve your finan­cial prob­lems, you are deeply mis­tak­en. Do not believe those who claim oth­er­wise.
• No skills in aer­i­al pho­tog­ra­phy — no earn­ings.
• In most cas­es, many poten­tial cus­tomers will pre­fer to pur­chase the nec­es­sary mate­r­i­al from large trust­ed com­pa­nies.
• Such an income tool will be inter­est­ing for those who already have a busi­ness that needs aer­i­al pho­tog­ra­phy.
• Do not rely on the indus­try as the only source of income. Appar­ent­ly, in the next few years we will be able to see oper­at­ing autonomous UAVs that will be able to receive the nec­es­sary pho­to / video mate­r­i­al on demand with­out the par­tic­i­pa­tion of an exter­nal pilot.

Where to begin?

If you have no expe­ri­ence, but you are deter­mined to make mon­ey with a drone and want to suc­ceed, you should start small:

1. There is a drone for each tar­get. Choose the most suit­able mod­el based on the direc­tion of the ser­vices offered (pho­to / video shoot­ing, adver­tis­ing, sports action shoot­ing, car­tog­ra­phy, inspec­tion, mon­i­tor­ing, etc.). Var­i­ous rat­ings and forums will help you make the right choice.
2. Learn to fly cor­rect­ly and safe­ly. The bet­ter you do it, the more like­ly you are to be noticed.
3. Learn how to edit photos/videos. The skill of work­ing in edi­tors (Adobe Pho­to­shop Lightroom/Adobe Pre­miere Pro and oth­er ana­logues) is required. YouTube is here to help.
4. Feel free to seek advice from pro­fes­sion­als through var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties, 99% of experts are always ready to help you.
5. Use all kinds of pho­to / video host­ing to pub­lish your work in order to express your­self as quick­ly as pos­si­ble.