ellipticalpointofview

I still have to scratch that itch about the ways contemporary/visual/fine artists can network professionally and also be found by (and interact with) collectors and the general public…my post reviewing the quantity profiles of artists on LinkedIn in various locations didn’t completely satisfy my curiosity.

Soon I’ll be looking at representation on the more research-focussed networking platforms (e.g. Academia.edu and ResearchGate.net), but in the meantime I thought I would have a look at what else is out there…

For this post, I am looking at artist profile sites/platforms with a portfolio/gallery/directory focus and/or elements (as opposed to an overview of sites with a networking or collaboration focus).

Most are more passive gallery-style sites, but since they can help artists get found and some offer free ways of presenting artists’ portfolio of work and develop opportunities to connect with collectors and provide ways of selling artworks. With that in mind, it’s important to consider them.

SaatchiOnline.com

SaatchiOnline.com is more of a portfolio site and enables artists to sell direct to collectors.

Obviously it has the strength of the Saatchi brand as it relates to art.

From the website:

Count of Artist profiles on the site:

• Anywhere: 46,308 www.saatchionline.com/artist-directory
• Australia: ~336

Note on Australian Artists:

As at 9 September 2013, there is no easy/direct/exact way of filtering artist profiles by location. I queried SaatchiOnline, the suggestion was: Click “Shop for Art” on the homepage and filter the search by “Location.”

As at 3 September, there were 3130 works of art by Australian artists, that’s 87 pages of results ( in case you wondered), when filtered by Originals Only and viewed as full images. That number grew to 3157 by the time I finished going through each of those 87 pages (today 9 September 2013).

To get the number of ~336 artists profiles, I I trawled through those 87 pages of results, collating a list of artists currently with work for sale; then I removed duplicates to get that number. It will only ever be an approximation as there is scope for a couple of issues:

• Manual error on my part if I missed a particular arts (87 pages of search results people…I am only human)
• If the artist doesn’t yet have work for sale or has sold all their work (Will have to see if sold works are kept active in the portfolio, but that’s for another day)
• There were 27 new results in the search results from the time I started to the time I completed. These could be new works by existing artists, or they could have been completely new artists…until there is a filter within SaatchiOnline’s artist directory, I will never be able to get an exact count.

I now have list of those 336 artists and links to each of their profiles which I am tempted to post in case anyone is interested…

	Count of Profiles
Letter	Global
A	2334
B	3804
C	3076
D	2419
E	837
F	1615
G	2447
H	2338
I	461
J	1060
K	2473
L	2294
M	4187
N	1024
O	788
P	2524
Q	96
R	2287
S	4282
T	1646
U	184
V	1407
W	1735
X	49
Y	365
Z	576
Total	46,308

Looking at visitors to the site:

Cavaet: tools like Quantcast, Compete et al are perhaps more useful at giving a broad brush stroke picture rather than being authorative statements of data that is definitively, unquestionably accurate. They are more useful at indicating growth trends and seasonal trends, as the exact numbers cited vary.  Numbers are more likely to be focused on a US visitor audience and smaller sites may not register.

Compete data

Rolling graph (this will update as Compete release new data ):

Notes:

• UV = Unique visitors
• Compete reflects US data only

Because the above is a rolling total, I have included a screen shot of the past 12 months so you can compare it to Quantcast data (an alternate competitor traffic analysis tool):

 

Quantcast data

 

Artslant.com

Artslant.com is mentioned in Artpromotivate’s post on social networks for artists:

…the #1 contemporary art network, has comprehensive calendars for openings, exhibits and events, a worldwide community of professional artists, and local city editions for the art lover.

Features: You can add profiles, display an exhibition history and archive, plus display up to 60 artworks displayed in a rotating slideshow. The site goes beyond profiling artists, with curators, writers, art lovers, artists, art professionals and more also able to add profiles.

Count of Artist profiles on the site

• Anywhere: 20,319 www.artslant.com/ew/artists/profilelist
• Australia: 391 www.artslant.com/ew/artists/profilelist?allcities=1&letter=a&listtype=artists&locationbox=Australia&page=1&tag=

Note – it is particularly painful to get a count of artist profiles on this site:

• While you can filter profiles to only display artists in an A-Z list, you have to navigate A through Z to see profiles for each letter (no overall total and no total within each letter).
• Plus the pagination of the results for each letter is not dependent on a count of results: there will always be 20 pages for each letter regardless of amount of profiles within that letter.

What this means:

• For letters where there are nowhere near 1000 artists (e.g. with a surname starting with Q, X, or Z):  you have to trawl back through the 20 pages to find the last page of results (I was only interested in the last page of results as I wanted a count of all profiles for that letter).
• For popular letters: you can only navigate through 20 pages of artist profiles (50 profiles per page). Based on some of the surnames on that 20th page, I suspect that there are more artist profiles for some letters, but there is no way of navigating to them using the site navigation*. With that in mind, what I could find may not be the full count.

* Some examples of truncation of artist profiles for popular letters:

• “D” truncates at Devine, too bad if you are an artist with a surname like Dix, Duchamp or Dufy
• “G” truncates at Godoy, too bad if your are an artist with a surname like Gris, Gros, Grosz or Guston

	Count of Profiles
Letter	Global	Australia
A	1000**	19
B	1000**	37
C	1000**	18
D	1000**	27
E	688	16
F	1000**	15
G	1000**	23
H	1000**	21
I	387	3
J	879	11
K	1000**	15
L	1000**	14
M	1000**	34
N	817	3
O	622	5
P	1000**	21
Q	87	1
R	1000**	23
S	1000**	30
T	1000**	17
U	130	1
V	997	10
W	1000**	21
X	36	0
Y	302	3
Z	374	3
Total	20,319	391

** Letters where there may actually be more results, but design of search results in site prevents navigation to those results.

Looking at visitors to the site:

Cavaet: tools like Quantcast, Compete et al are perhaps more useful at giving a broad brush stroke picture rather than being authorative statements of data that is definitively, unquestionably accurate. They are more useful at indicating growth trends and seasonal trends, as the exact numbers cited vary.  Numbers are more likely to be focused on a US visitor audience and smaller sites may not register.

Compete data

Rolling graph (this will update as Compete release new data ):

Notes:

• UV = Unique visitors
• Compete reflects US data only

Because the above is a rolling total, I have included a screen shot of the past 12 months so you can compare it to Quantcast data (an alternate competitor traffic analysis tool):

 

Quantcast data

 

Rhizome.org

Rhizome.org is mentioned in Artpromotivate’s post on social networks for artists:

The [Rhizome] ArtBase encompasses a vast range of projects by artists all over the world that employ materials such as software, code, websites, moving images, games and browsers to aesthetics and critical ends. We welcome submissions to the ArtBase; they are reviewed by our curatorial staff on a monthly basis.

 

Count of Artist profiles on the site:

• Anywhere: ~43800 rhizome.org/community/profiles/

I could find no way of drilling down to a particular region.

Looking at visitors to the site:

Cavaet: tools like Quantcast, Compete et al are perhaps more useful at giving a broad brush stroke picture rather than being authorative statements of data that is definitively, unquestionably accurate. They are more useful at indicating growth trends and seasonal trends, as the exact numbers cited vary.  Numbers are more likely to be focused on a US visitor audience and smaller sites may not register.

Compete data

Rolling graph (this will update as Compete release new data ):

Notes:

• UV = Unique visitors
• Compete reflects US data only

Because the above is a rolling total, I have included a screen shot of the past 12 months so you can compare it to Quantcast data (an alternate competitor traffic analysis tool):

 

Quantcast data

 

CultureInside.com

CultureInside.com is mentioned in Artpromotivate’s post on social networks for artists:

…an international multilingual online social network for the arts community

Features: Set up a profile, find friends, upload work, sell work and more.

Count of Artist profiles on the site:

• Anywhere: 352 profiles www.cultureinside.com/homeen/artists-espace/artists.aspx
• Australia: 52 Profiles www.cultureinside.com/homeen/artists-espace/artists.aspx/Australia/

Looking at visitors to the site:

Cavaet: tools like Quantcast, Compete et al are perhaps more useful at giving a broad brush stroke picture rather than being authorative statements of data that is definitively, unquestionably accurate. They are more useful at indicating growth trends and seasonal trends, as the exact numbers cited vary.  Numbers are more likely to be focused on a US visitor audience and smaller sites may not register.

Compete data

Rolling graph (this will update as Compete release new data ):

Notes:

• UV = Unique visitors
• Compete reflects US data only

Because the above is a rolling total, I have included a screen shot of the past 12 months so you can compare it to Quantcast data (an alternate competitor traffic analysis tool):

 

Quantcast data

 

Artists2Artists.net

Artists2Artists.net is mentioned in Artpromotivate’s post on social networks for artists:

Keep up with fellow artists, curators, art gallery owners and other art community reps.  Exhibit your own artwork and videos, create your own groups, blogs and forums. Share your links and even embed your portfolio into other websites, Facebook, and more.

 

Count of Artist profiles:

• Anywhere: 1835 members www.artists2artists.net/profiles/members/
• Australia: 15 members www.artists2artists.net/profiles/members/search?name=&country=AU&location=

Looking at visitors to the site:

No results retrieved for Artists2Artists on compete: siteanalytics.compete.com/artists2artists.net/ as at 4 September 2013.

Artrise.com

Artrise.com is mentioned in Artpromotivate’s post on social networks for artists:

 

Count of Artist profiles:

• Anywhere: 5226 artrise.com/artists/

I could find no way of drilling down to a particular region.

Looking at visitors to the site:

No results retrieved for Artrise.com on compete: siteanalytics.compete.com/artrise.com/ as at 4 September 2013.

Conclusions and notes

Evaluating whether a site is a best fit to profile your work is very subjective and can depend on the nature of your work as well as your brand as an artist.

The primary driver should be whether the site/platform is the most effective way of meeting your goals. So it is important you consider what are your primary and secondary goals in setting up a  profile for yourself on any site (is it to interact with other artists, sell work, build a profile beyond your physical location).

These goals should set your priorities in terms of “must have” features and “nice but not as necessary” features, allowing you to be more strategic in considering whether different platforms meet your needs

Don’t adopt based on profile counts alone

While profile numbers are good tool to indicate adoption amongst the community of artists and they can give an overview of competitors and competition on the site, if we were to only use profile count as the measure of success, then consider the following:

If you considered platforms based on amount of profiles along, we would probably choose LinkedIn…

However given

• We don’t know the primary motivators for artists joining LinkedIn, and
• LinkedIn was not build as a creative portfolio/profile tool (it has more of a professional CV and business networking focus)

It may not necessarily be the best choice if your primary aim is to promote and profile your creative body of work to potential collectors, within the arts industry (internationally, nationally or locally) and the wider community.

Don’t forget that some of these sites are niche

Consider that some of the sites reviewed above are quite specialist in terms of the types of art and artists that they profile:

• SaatchiOnline.com focuses on the more static visual arts, e.g. painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, sculpting and installations
• Rhizome.org focuses on the more dynamic visual arts and electronic arts, e.g. artists using software, code, websites, moving images, games and browsers

Others with lower profile counts, may be very popular amongst niche audiences – consider that CultureInside.com also allows writers, curators, art professionals and others to join. It could be an alternate route to building your profile and developing connections and networks beyond artist/collector sphere.

Traffic does not equal desired action

Did you note that the traffic figures estimated for each site by Compete and Quantcast varied? Both were considering US traffic only.

You will note, however, that although the traffic numbers varied, the overall trends indicated seem comparable – the peaks and troughs of Quantcast’s data are more extreme but overall the two charts, for the same time period, show the same rough shape – this is especially noticeable when looking at the estimates charted for SaatchiOnline.

We know the tools for competitor site analysis do have some flaws, so external traffic measures should also not be the only measure of success:

• If your intention is to sell work, then you should consider the sales record of the site. The sales that is more likely to indicate the site’s success in terms of converting visitors into money in your pocket (minus a reasonable commission of course)
• Reviews by other users will also help you make the most optimal decision
• Evaluations of others experiences on different sites is also good (they may recommend alternatives you have not yet considered).

Sites not covered:

There were a couple of sites I had to put into the not relevant basket for various reasons (not as relevant to an Australian audience, not aiming at professional artists as the core audience or portfolios were not accessible to visitors):

• LabforCulture.org: European focus
• ArtReview: Public access end is a magazine/blog format. The post states it’s possible to participate in groups/forums and create a portfolio – but artist profiles not searchable (or not obviously searchable to the outsider, i.e. me) and I am not willing to pay the subscription fee to find out what you can and can’t do as a subscriber.
• ArtBistro: Appears to be aimed more at Secondary School/College market (helping them choose art institutes) and early career arts/design grads (helping them find jobs and start careers in industry). There are groups and discussions available on joining, but artist profiles are not searchable (or not obviously searchable to the outsider, i.e. me)
• Artlog: Public access end is a magazine/blog format. The post states it’s possible to participate in groups/forums and create a portfolio – but artist profiles not searchable (or not obviously searchable to the outsider, i.e. me)
• Ugallery: While it does have an “International” location filter, there is primarily a USA focus

And two I put into the too hard-to-search-today basket for now:

• Behance.net is very pretty and very explorative and very much for serious creatives (profiles of some amazing and reknowned people on there), but it hurt my brain in terms of searching.
  There appears to be no publically accessible “directory” of artists outside of searching on terms or specific filters, and the search results don’t return a count…making it a little difficult to get actual figures for locations.
• DeviantArt.com is an online network for artists and art enthusiasts, The About deviantArt.com states “Proudly showing 265 million pieces of art from over 28 million registered artists and art appreciators”. There also appeared to be no publically accessible “directory” of artists, and I am not sure it has the credibility amongst serious contemporary/visual/fine artists…(that may change after I conduct the straw-poll-becoming-a-survey mentioned in Where are all the artists…on LinkedIn?)