Skate's just released its quarterly Art E-Commerce and Media Report. The full report is subscription based, but below is the executive summary and topics included in the report. One of the interesting points is the use of Kickstarter to fund start-up online art platforms.
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Skate's reports
Source: SkatesWelcome to the Spring Issue of Skate’s Art E-Commerce and Media Report.
Published quarterly, this report covers the world’s leading art e-commerce and media properties.
Skate’s Art E-Commerce and Media Report is available for free to all registered Skate’s members.
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Report Includes:
Art Industry Growth Leaders (Quarterly Audience Growth)
The Worst Performing Digital Offerings (Quarterly Web Audience Change)
Best Strategic Moves (December 2014 – February 2015)
Crowd Funding and Primary Art Market
Listing Models (Auction Aggregators and Gallery Networks)
Listing Models (Digital Audience)
Online Art Trading
World’s Leading Online Fine Art Auctions
Kickstarter 2014 Art Projects Funding by Category
Top 40 Online Art Trading Platforms: Digital Audience as of January 31, 2015
User-Generated Art Sharing and Image Licensing Sites
User-Generated Art-Sharing Platforms, Digital Audience as of January 31, 2015
Art Media
Pure Play Art Media Properties, Digital Audience as of January 31, 2015
Executive Summary
This year marks another milestone in the migration of art trading to digital platforms. We are on the eve of major announcements from the world’s leading art e-commerce platforms about their fresh equity rounds, and from digital powerhouses like eBay and Amazon about new initiatives in the online art trading field. The forthcoming Etsy IPO is the talk of the town. As shown in the Section 5 of this report and in our earlier piece, the average annual growth rate of major online art trading platforms reached 109.4% in 2014 (measured with Gross Merchandise Value sold, “GMV”). No wonder, then, that capital providers around the world have started paying attention to the “art vertical” in earnest. Finally, the art world is waking up to the power of digital commerce.
Our “very good morning!” goes to the art establishment of museum stores and book publishers. This Spring Issue focuses on the surge of online trading and digital audiences at the world’s leading museum stores and book publishers, reflecting a major investment some of them have recently made to increase their visibility and improve online product offerings. See Section 5 for more details, including the spectacular rise of the web audience at the MOMA online store by 96% and at the MET store by 79% — bringing both online stores in top 30 global art businesses by digital audience1.
Our “best strategic move” of the year award goes to Kickstarter. Skate’s research conducted on the basis of 2014 data reveals that Kickstarter is perhaps the most important art business in digital space today, with digital audience for the art segment of its offerings in the range of 1-2 million online users (as is the case for other general-interest multi-category web platforms, such as eBay and Amazon, the exact audience allocation between the verticals is hard to gauge). We have also learned that Kickstarter helped to underwrite more investments in art projects online in terms of dollar value ($184.7m based on our analysis of Kickstarter numbers) than the combined art sales of the world’s four leading online art trading platforms ($142.2m2).
Skate’s estimates that Kickstarter is now the fifth largest business in terms of online art e-commerce revenue behind Getty Images, Shutterstock, eBay and Adobe-owned Fotolia — but has a much more direct and powerful impact on the economics of artistic intellectual property than the image-licensing sites above it. Also, we are not aware of eBay arts & collectible trade volumes (eBay does not disclose GMV for these categories) but can estimate that they definitely place eBay anywhere above the $185 million of Kickstarter GMV equivalent (value of projects funded), and perhaps even above Shutterstock (2014 revenue was $328m).
Skate’s Art E-Commerce and Media Report traditionally highlights the quarterly change leaders in the digital audience for the industry players. Table 1 presents the top-growing art industry digital offerings by web traffic and social network audience, while Table 2 focuses on the losers.
Looking at the market leaders, it is important to keep in mind that this data reflects growth rates, not audience sizes, and many of the top-ranked growth leaders are here just because they start from a fairly low base. In a way, this allows registering after attention was paid to a firm’s their digital audience — this is clearly the case for Great Big Canvas (starting from a very low base), Invaluable (allocated dedicated marketing effort to all of its social network presences), Bonhams and Drouot (started to pay attention to their Facebook audience), and all of the museum stores listed in the Table 1 below. Spikes in Art Basel and The Armory web audience are clearly seasonal and driven by the timing of the respective shows.
Barneby’s is worth mentioning to a very robust digital audience growth (data includes both SimilarWeb and Google Analytics numbers disclosed by Barneby’s to Skate’s), fully in line with our prediction published in the winter report that this Swedish start up is on pace to challenge the dominant position of incumbents Invaluable, Live Auctioneers and the-saleroom. Barneby’s has perhaps the savviest digital marketing abilities, allowing for robust and sustainable traffic growth over the recent quarters.
Getty Images is also noteworthy, due to a major effort the firm assigned to Twitter marketing, where it has grown from mid-ranking to the 4th most popular Twitter presence within the art industry space, with 451 thousand followers.
FIAC was excluded from this ranking since their 76% quarterly web audience drop is solely explained by the FIAC fair being held in the preceding three months in Paris.
Skate’s provides for detailed digital audience changes analysis by segment of art industry in the Section 4 of this report.
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