Spotlight: Vreel—Stockholm Royalty-Free Drone Video Footage
We connected with Emelie and Edward, two Stockholm-based digital entrepreneurs, to learn more about their royalty-free drone video footage database. Find out how they are revolutionizing the way drone footage is used.
Can you explain how you came up with the idea for a drone stock video database?
We were running a small digital marketing agency, working exclusively with small and growing businesses. As part of our services, we offered content creation and video making. However, when we searched for drone footage to enhance our clients’ video productions, we
At the same time, Edward was really keen to buy his own drone to solve this issue. We identified that a lot of content creators were trying to address the same problem by offering drone services themselves, but struggled to make money back on their investment. We wanted to give them an extra way to earn revenue.
How do some of the features of your business model disrupt the traditional stock video market?
In order to give our contributors more creative freedom, we encourage them to upload both unique and commercial clips to make our platform stand out.
We offer our drone photographers two types of commission: 1) the standard commission if their clip gets bought “one-off”, and 2) a share in our total subscription revenues if they upload a certain number of clips per month. The number of downloads of their videos does not affect their commission.
We believe in this model because uploading to a stock site should be fun. Our contributing pilots are building our business together with us. We want them to be rewarded for and really feel that we value their time and contributions.
Are there any locations in Stockholm (or Sweden) that you’d love drone footage of that you don’t already have?
We’re always on the lookout for great footage from all locations. So far, we actually don’t have any footage from the west coast or southern parts of Sweden (except Österlen). We would love to find some great contributors from those areas to be our ambassadors.
What advice would you give to a photographer (or drone enthusiast) who is looking to contribute?
Oh, just send us an email! We’re super happy to have a chat with anyone who could be interested and has a good eye. We are handpicking all of our pilots to ensure top quality footage on our platform, and to make sure we’re a good fit for one another.
We also want to have a good geographical spread, but that doesn’t mean that we only pick professional pilots, we have both hobby filmers and full-time pilots in our community.
What is your long-term vision for Vreel? Are there any dream locations you want to have in your library?
We have big dreams to grow VReel into the best drone services platform in the world. Right now we’re starting with Sweden and slowly expanding across Europe.
As we grow, it’s essential for us to keep our feeling of community and to stay true to our mission of ensuring that everybody gets value from VReel.
It would be fantastic to start seeing contributors signing up from different locations across Europe that bring with them a whole variety of environments. There isn’t a specific ‘dream’ location for us. We’re looking for footage from any location that can add value to the platform.
To learn more about contributing as a photographer or accessing the database for video usage, please visit vreel.co
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