Our new version of 800,000 Artists’ Homepages from the 4th century to the present day, bolsters the primary and preferred entry points to all of Artprice’s databases and services because artists indeed are the foundation on which the art market has been based since its origin.
With this new version – the most successful since Artprice’s creation – Artprice by Artmarket has received enthusiastic feedback over the past two months from a selection of target users throughout the global art market’s twelve principal countries. Our beta testing was accompanied by a methodical feedback retrieval based on rigorous specifications designed by the team of external consultants involved in the complete overhaul of Artprice.com over 18 months.
First of all, on a short data sample, Artprice observed a very significant increase in visits to its site, as well as an extension of the average connexion time (ACT), especially on its databases, all good signs for the future of Artmarket.com.
Similarly, according to official Google stats for November 2022, Googlebots have indicated that its user-agents over one month indexed 28.8 million pages in the Artprice by Artmarket databases, i.e. 960,000 per day.
As a result of this major deployment and the opening of Artprice databases to crawling Googlebots (exploration process), the number of Artists’ Homepages and their works (which are the heart of Artprice by Artmarket) crawled has risen from 0.96 to 2.5 million per day in evergreen content mode (Googlebot user-agent allowing it to execute javascript).
A direct result of a well-considered business and legal decision to open its non-paying directories to indexing engines, this increase represents, in SEO terms, a major boost to our online indexation.
The consequence will therefore be a very substantial contribution to turnover in 2023 because Artprice by Artmarket.com, as the world leader in Art Market information, has by far the largest number of artists and artworks in its databases, numbering in the tens of millions.
According to thierry Ehrmann, Founder of Artprice and CEO of Artmarket.com:
“Any major network deployment on our different sites/countries is never a foregone conclusion and it’s always an adrenaline rush for our different teams (myself included) when we switch to such a substantially new version of Artmarket.com. Everything went remarkably well and this new version is now 100% operational.”
See the new version of the Artist Homepage: https://www.artprice.com/artist/15079/wassily-kandinsky
Thus, Artprice customers and members will discover, from the Artists’ Homepages, several centuries of knowledge that have been organized for 25 years by the historians and editors of Artprice by Artmarket. In a perfectly intuitive and natural way, they will now be able to immerse themselves in the exceptional and complex history of the Art Market, via a human and straightforward pedagogy that is specific to the identity of Artprice. This will give them a level of confidence, which is often lacking in the world of GAFAs.
These Artists’ Homepages will allow users access to very relevant and personalized recommendations to pursue their discovery of the Art Market and thus generate more sophisticated subscriptions and therefore more turnover for Artmarket.com.
As previously announced, this change – implemented after extensive UI/UX research – comes ahead of a substantial price increase at the beginning of 2023 and is aimed at boosting Artmarket.com’s revenue.
Following a request for proposals with demanding and precise specifications at the end of 2019, Artprice by Artmarket selected a team of very high-level external consultants with references from major accounts with similar processes to those of Artprice. This team has played a key role in the audit and development of this major Artprice overhaul, using a solid UI/UX approach.
The quality and efficiency of the work conducted by our consultants have prompted Artprice by Artmarket to extend the partnership to 2023, which will mark Artprice’s 25th anniversary.
As a result of the UI/UX approach, new users of Artprice by Artmarket will be able to explore a vast educational resource quickly and intuitively via innovative ergonomics designed per the expectations and needs of users.
The experience now involves “Artprice tutorials” that constantly guide navigation by providing information on the essential points to be discovered. These tutorials represent a highly sophisticated system of signposts that allow the user the best possible navigation as quickly as possible.
As a result, customers and members of Artprice by Artmarket will intuitively dive into the heart of Art Market news and will feel like privileged players.
We used User Experience (UX) design to enhance the experience of Artprice customers and members as much as possible; to make it as pleasant and intuitive as possible, whether on mobile, tablet, or PC/Mac.
Thanks to UX Design, navigation on our site is now more fluid and more efficient. UX Design is particularly sensitive to eliminating the feeling of being lost, and this has involved a careful analysis of the irrational and emotive aspects of navigation within the Artprice universe.
We used UI Design (User Interface design) to enhance users’ interaction with Artprice databases and services. UI analysis has been involved in all stages of development up to final deployment and will continue to play a role in the permanent monitoring of the public operation phase.
Unlike UX, UI is more focused on the visual aspect to attract the user’s eye and to encourage Artprice users to remain on the various databases and services.
The UI approach has facilitated navigation through all of Artprice’s decision support tools. Its primary objective is to attract new prospects and customers, enthusiasts, collectors, and art market professionals. Thus, Artprice has modified its R&D policy by collaborating in a highly selective manner with the very best consultants in the field to acquire new market share.
thierry Ehrmann: “This new policy of collaborating with specialized consultants with fresh perspectives provides a definite gain in time and competitiveness for Artprice which, until recently, has always managed its new developments internally. In this digital century, you have to know how to adapt and change very quickly. Of course, Artprice’s original computer programming is not subject to any outsourcing.”
The new deployment implies a complete change in our economic model, notably by fully integrating paying advertisers into our databases and services.
These are essentially the 6,500 auction houses around the world – affiliated with Artprice for over two decades – and which now spend 98% of their communication budgets (to announce upcoming sales) on Internet advertising.
These 6,500 historical partner Auction Houses actively collaborated over the last 18 months development phase of this latest version of Artprice. They are of course aware that it is in their interest to collaborate with Artprice as it will draw attention with discreet and effective prestige to their future sales. This in turn will generate new recurring income for Artprice via its proprietary Intranet – a real reference tool for Auction Houses around the world for 25 years used to appraise, price and edit their digital and paper sales catalogs.
They can now benefit by being featured on the Artists Homepage as a paying advertiser and with the aid of search criteria of 7.2 million Artprice clients and members, be able to promote their future sales with extremely relevant targeting, while being in perfect compliance with European and American regulations on confidentiality and the protection of personal data.
Indeed, a ‘public sale’ is above all dependent on a very precise corpus of artists whose works ‘ultimately’ form the basis of the catalog of the public sale.
On average over the past 50 years, auction houses have spent 34% of their overall costs on advertising future sales at public auctions, regardless of the country or the size of the auction business.
As auctions are now advertised almost exclusively on the Internet, pressure from Artprice-affiliated auction houses in 2022 to promote their future sales for a fee has found the best response with this successful new deployment of our Artists’ Homepages.
Indeed, the auction houses consider it perfectly logical to spend their future sales advertising budgets (amounting to 34% of the costs of the sale) on the Internet, rather than on expensive and non-computer-targeted newspaper advertising, as the former targets specifically the profiles of collectors who follow specific artists.
Sellers of art are willing to invest 34% of their overall budgets on advertising because they want the works they offer for sale to fetch the best prices. Above all, they want to avoid unsold lots which can undermine the value of the works in future sales.
In the past, Artprice considered online advertising (banners, etc.) as incompatible with its databases, in terms of readability and reputation. It was therefore a major challenge to respond to the demand from Auction Houses while maintaining Artprice’s original DNA.
In this new successful deployment, for the announcement of their future sales, the 6,500 Auction Houses will be able to integrate and merge into the entire industrial process of Artprice by Artmarket, via the new Artists Homepages and via the alerts sent to Artprice’s 7.2 million customers and members (by SMS, RSS, instant messaging, e-mail, my artists’ page, etc.).
It is now possible that future revenue generated from the promotion of upcoming sales by the 6,500 auction houses (advertisers affiliated with Artprice since 1997) will ultimately generate higher revenue than subscriptions, which currently represent 90% of Artprice’s revenue. Artprice by Artmarket.com’s plan is clearly to double its revenue by responding to a long-standing demand from its partner auction houses.
It should be noted that Artprice’s economic outlook is primarily based on incoming requests from auction houses/auctioneers, and not outgoing in prospecting mode, which makes all the difference in terms of human resources and financial costs.
The success of this major deployment will therefore substantially contribute to a smooth acceptance of the significant increase in prices of subscriptions and services at the beginning of January 2023.
With this major revamp of our website and our economic model, Artprice also aims to reposition artists at the heart of the art market by introducing the production of Art NFTs, which are one of the foundations of Web 3.0.
This tremendous overhaul of Artprice by Artmarket.com will also highlight Artprice’s proprietary archive of manuscripts and original printed auction catalogs (the largest in the world) dating back to 1700. This archive, in turn, legitimizes its digital standardization of the Art Market and bolsters its position as World Leader in Art Market Information for 25 years.
Since 1997 Artprice’s primary ambition has been to foster art market transparency by expanding knowledge from a circle of insiders to the general population to facilitate its development and growth. The new presentation of Artprice by Artmarket will enhance this transparency through access to verified, verifiable, and above all contextualized data.
At the end of January 2023 when the redesigned homepage is online, Artprice customers and members will be able to virtually visit all of its ultra-secure document collections, manuscripts, and annotated catalogs. This section is currently being produced and filmed to showcase Artprice’s multiple skills.
In an all-digital era, this gives Artprice customers and members a unique layer of additional confidence. Artprice has been a Pure Internet Player since 1997 (with its parent company Serveur Groupe, which has been on the Internet since 1987), whose knowledge and processes are based on a core of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts and original auction catalogs going back over 300 years (and valued in Artmarket.com’s balance sheet at 16 million euros). These documents represent the entire History of the Art Market since its birth.
Artprice’s position as World Leader in Art Market Information has also been forged by our acquisition of a large number of well-known specialist art and art-price publishers, as well as numerous prestigious editorial archives in Europe and the USA during its first ten years of activity (see our Universal Registration Document (URD) filed each year with the AMF).
Our new Artists Homepages highlight the wealth and high-added value of Artmarket.com’s databases and services. The use of algorithmic AI (Artificial Intelligence) allows the 7.2 million customers and members of Artprice by Artmarket access to highly relevant and personalized recommendations, and it allows them to deepen their knowledge of the art market. It will therefore generate more sophisticated subscriptions and hence more revenue.
Artprice by Artmarket in 2023: toward the Grail of Art Market expertise
One of Artprice by Artmarket.com’s objectives is to roll out, in 2023, a premium professional subscription above €1,800. Artprice, with its globally unique editorial collection covering over 300 years of art market activity can use the repeat sales method to retrace the progression of a unique (and therefore homogeneous) work through the decades, centuries, countries, and current or past auction houses.
In terms of art valuation, this service represents an absolute grail and it will be the basis for a premium subscription that only Artprice by Artmarket is capable of producing, based on its editorial collection covering over 300 years of art market activity, combined with its Big Data analysis capacity and its highly sophisticated proprietary econometric tools.
Note that with just one single relevant request on Artprice, a subscriber can justify the price of an annual ‘premium’ subscription, which is not necessarily the case for all professional databases.
In addition, our new Artists Homepages bring Artprice by Artmarket customers and members fully into the world of Web 3.0 and – by extension – into the domain of Art NFTs, thereby giving Artmarket.com a considerable lead in its core business.
With cryptocurrencies, Art NFTs, and the Metaverse, new collectors and art enthusiasts have arrived, often considerably younger than their predecessors. There are now more than 450 million potential buyers of Art NFTs. These art enthusiasts and collectors have no intention of abandoning their Web 3.0 crypto-universe, which is indisputably the future of the Internet.
This overhaul includes, of course, the arrival of Art NFTs, the growth of which is exponential and constitutes a paradigm shift for artists in the art market who find themselves once again masters of their destiny, as was the case during the Renaissance.
All of the art market’s market-makers, and in particular the majority of its auction houses around the world, now have an NFT department for cataloged and online sales throughout the year. Likewise, all the major structures in the museum/art galleries industry are starting to publish their own NFTs.
With its globally unique specificities, Artprice now has ambitions to capture the market for the certification of primary issues of Art NFTs via legitimate and fair market competition.
In preparation for this major and successful revamp of our site and our model Artprice and its consultants had the opportunity to conduct a series of interviews and user tests (so-called ‘UX/UI guerilla testing’) with its historical clients and its new customers and members. This opportunity was provided by the Covid lockdowns since many of our customers found themselves with more time on their hands than usual.
thierry Ehrmann, Founder of Artprice and CEO of Artmarket.com, also emphasizes the eco-responsible aspect of Artprice’s latest deployments: “Since 2017 we have been developing processes to optimize the use of our servers by adapting the energy requirement and reducing the energy consumption of Artprice’s Data Centers worldwide by 40% in 2022, and a target of a 50% reduction in 2023. This has been achieved by using the principle of micro-grids which allow better exploitation of production units (a multiple technologies decision) and the use of mainly renewable energies.
Through its commitment to the micro-grid, the Artprice by Artmarket Data Centers are part of a responsible and shared environmental logic (without risk for Artprice’s processing requirements) which involves analyzing the evolution of renewable energies concerning new applied sciences and ongoing research according to the principle of “formativity” (notion coined by Luigi Pareyson).
Given the generous geography of our head office (Domaine de la Source, built in 1630), we are developing, with partners, a ‘climatic’ system based on the technique of artesian wells which capture water from deep layers of subsoil. This system will be protected by patents that will be filed by Artprice and Groupe Serveur, and it will respond in an ecologically responsible manner to the current energy crisis which is far more serious than the two oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 and is only just beginning.
As a global leader, Artprice considers eco-responsibility a philosophical and moral obligation. It is coherent with our market position, our corporate culture, and the sentiments of our customers and shareholders.
Artprice by Artmarket’s offer will remain highly competitive even after the January 2023 price increase, with a further margin for additional price rises in the future.
Artprice’s databases are today unquestionably the most comprehensive in the world with nearly 800,000 artists referenced with their biographies, auction results, indices, decision-making help tools, signatures & monograms, and information about past and future sales. In total, this adds up to several tens of millions of inter-connected and high-value-added data logs, all protected by various intellectual property rights.
Artmarket.com has been profitable for a decade, so the bulk of the additional revenue will translate into additional net income because under the French fiscal regime, we can generate up to 90 million euros p/a without incurring additional tax charges.
Despite the substantial price increase, Artprice by Artmarket’s offer remains by far the best-placed compared with the slowly evolving offer from our competition which offers limited-search annual professional subscriptions (e.g. 150 queries for €350/year, 450 queries for €975/year and, in the event of overrun, €2.45 per search). (Information certified by Court Bailiff in November 2022).
In the world of “unlimited” offers, these offers are quite simply anachronistic. Moreover, the competition’s offer is based on data regarding only 330,000 artists and from a selection of only 1,600 auction houses, whereas Artprice by Artmarket covers 800,000 artists and 6,400 auction houses, with unlimited subscriptions from €265 to €529/year including a range of indices, decision-making tools and signatures & monograms that is unique in the world.
In short, Artprice’s offer will remain highly competitive even after the fee increase and with a further margin for additional price rises in the future.
Going forward, our indisputable position as World Leader in Art Market Information since 1997 should enable Artprice to generate additional income through annual price increases, justified as required, notably by the constant enrichment of its various databases with at least one million ultra-qualified data logs added every year for its customers. Because Artprice provides its customers with essential data that cannot be found anywhere else.
The Art Market is displaying insolent health, with regular records hammered across all artistic periods during recent sales in 2022 and, very likely, in future sales during 2023.
Somewhat counter-intuitively – given the geopolitical and economic context – the global art market is displaying insolent health, with regular auction records being hammered for works from all artistic periods, regardless of the country, during recent sales sessions. And there have been no cancellations of classic and/or prestige cataloged sales for 2022 or 2023 which are the main indicators of the Art Market.
The major auction houses and investors are well aware that art is a safe-haven investment, as shown by the Artprice100© index, which has outperformed traditional stock market indices. The current period of stock market jitters has channeled new funds and investments into the art market.
Artprice had already noted that during the main crises of the past (the Nasdaq crash in 2000, 9/11 in 2001, the Afghan war in 2001, the Iraq war in 2003, the subprime and CDS crises in 2007, the negative rates crisis in 2011, the 2019 Covid crisis, etc.) the art market was less impacted than other markets and the economy.
Christie’s recent dispersal of the Paul Allen collection proves this point very firmly by turning a new page in the history of auctions. It was the first private collection to generate over one billion dollars at auction ($1.62 billion) with five works selling above the $100 million threshold.
This new record follows one set by Christie’s competitor Sotheby’s when it took $922 million from the sale of the Macklowe Collection between autumn 2021 and spring 2022.
Thanks to the dispersion of these exceptional American collections, the year 2022 has become an outstanding year in the history of public sales.
As we approach the end of 2022, it is abundantly clear that the war on European soil and fears of a recession have not got the better of the Art Market.
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Copyright 1987-2022 thierry Ehrmann www.artprice.com – www.artmarket.com
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