Listing Platforms

Recently I have posted on digital auction platforms and listing services, such as Paddle8 and Barneby's.  Skates just published an art e-commerce report which shows some of the more traditional independent auctions, such as Sotheby's and Christie's are gaining back previously lost ground. Examples of listing platforms like Liveauctioneers and Invaluable  now have more competition from goups lie eBay's Live Auctions as well as live auction sites such as Auctionata and cooperative platforms such as Bidssquare. The article also notes that many major galleries will start soon start to expand and develop more independent digital strategies.

Follow the source link below for the full article with charts

Skates reports

Auctions/Galleries Listing Platforms See Their Marketing Power Weakening

Sotheby’s Is Still Lagging Behind but Catching Up Quickly

eBay and Auctions’ Own Digital Strategies Hit Where It Hurts Most: In the USA

Auctions/galleries listing platforms are under increasing competitive pressure from eBay and the independent digital strategies of their own clients—this is the key finding of the Skate’s Art E-Commerce & Media Report (Summer Edition).

Significant efforts made by many auction houses to get their act together on digital marketing are paying off and starting to shift the power balance away from listing platforms (of which Invaluable and Live Auctioneers are the largest in terms of revenue) to the auctions.

Following an aggressive marketing campaign during this auction season, eBay seems to be getting more and more traction, with its Live Auctions developing into the sound alternative to listing platforms. Lavishly funded by venture capital firms in 2013–2014, listing platforms have to respond quickly or see their business model driven to extinction in the very near future.

Given dynamics observed in the art e-commerce and media space, Skate’s expects the following developments:

1) There has to be consolidation across all the segments—we expect a series of mergers and acquisitions in art-media and art-listing platforms already this year, to be immediately followed by consolidation in online art-trading space.

2) Major auctions will continue to invest in their digital marketing—we expect Sotheby’s to take the second place after Christie’s in terms of digital audience size in Q3 2015 at the latest, and at least eight auction houses to get to 1 million digital audience mark this year.

3) We expect major galleries to respond to the digital challenge exactly in the same way major auctions already did—by investing in their own digital strategies. We note Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner stepping up their digital marketing efforts, with Gagosian to cross 0.5 million monthly digital audience mark already in Q2 2015.

4) Eleven leading art auctions and galleries generated a total of 7.5 million unique visitors to their web sites in April—this is less than 5% of eBay web traffic for the same month. eBay is pushing into art-auction listing space and gaining traction; based on what we see (or rather, based on not seeing any meaningful response from incumbents like Live Auctioneers and Invaluable), eBay will strengthen its market share and listing-space dominance further this year as it strikes where it hurts competition the most: in the US.

Source: Skates