Only one entry worth showing in this week’s Money Mondays this week…
They say: “ArtistsOnline enables visual artists, illustrators, craft makers, photographers and the like to promote and sell their work. ArtistsOnline has two customers, firstly, artists wanting to promote and sell their artwork. There is a free account that will enable them to do this. There is also a subscription account that adds more features like a CV, advanced watermarking for images, highlighted listings and more. Secondly, the art and craft buying public. The site was launched in July, e-commerce side launched last week. Built and designed by one person.
We say: “There were 93,200 commercial artists according to the 1991 Census. Given people like Damien Hirst, I dare say there are a lot more than that today – and they all need somewhere to show their works. And this doesn’t include the many tens of thousands of people that make, sell and exhibit artwork as a hobby. Ok, so etsy.com last year sold $10million worth of goods and deviantart.com has a lot of traffic. The latter has over 28m artworks. But… This is not an easy space to crack and not necessarily hugely profitable, at least given the size of the UK market. Plus, ArtistsOnline doesn’t exactly sell itself. The FAQ item about selling art online is only 3rd in line and simply says “To be able to sell artwork online, artists must first apply to ArtistsOnline to do so.” Not exactly helpful. However, there is the seed of something interesting here. Click on an artist’s image for instance and you’ll get a beautiful Ajaxified image pop-up. That’s a lot more than you get out of a site like eyestorm. The site also has tagging, tag clouds, profiles and RSS feeds for individual artists, etc. You get the feeling that with just the right push in the right direction, this could actually be a truly great site. Heck, that’s what Money Mondays are for, right? And there is nothing to stop it being applied to a wider market than the UK.”
Contact: Ed Lea, ed [@] artistsonline.org.uk
Background: See here for more info on how Money Mondays works.