Stable market, slower online sales, but HNW Millennials that buy online are growing.
The report revealed The Art Market 2020 by Art Basel and UBS.
In the last Art Market Report 2020 just published by Art Basel and UBS, we can get an overview of the value of the world art market: 64.1 billion dollars.
The online market stands at $ 5.9 billion, a slowdown after more than five years of continuous growth, now with a 2% year-on-year decline.
But if the online market drops slowly, despite important milestones such as the distance between buyers and sellers less than 500 kilometers from each other, new and young buyers are growing more and more, attracted by the online: in fact, for dealers who made online sales in 2019, 57% were destined for new buyers and for smaller auction houses these new buyers accounted for 34% of their online sales.
Based on the survey conducted on HNW (High Net Worth Collectors) collectors, millennial collectors are growing strongly. Among these, 92% declare that they have purchased works online, through the use of sales platforms and Instagram. Among these, 36% bought online paying over $ 50,000 for a work of art, while 9% spent more than $ 1 million.
Unlike online platforms that work as actual e-commerces, Instagram presents different dynamics.
Instagram promotes sales, expands the market and increases the exposure of artists and galleries. The influence of social media does not have a statistical response on online sales, since direct sales with monetary transactions do not take place on these channels. But social media, especially Instagram, are tools to promote sales through offline negotiations, to reach new buyers, build relationships, develop trust in galleries, artists or their works also thanks to gatekeepers and sector experts.
Although social media directs users to the company’s website, traffic to websites generated by social media is very low in the art sector. With the exception of artsation.com – which gets 15% of its traffic from social media of which 72% comes from Instagram – large companies such as Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Gagosian have very low traffic to the website from social networks and Pinterest, not Instagram is the most important source.
The future challenge will be to find solutions to convert more website accesses to active buyers.
Despite the published data, the online art market is growing because it makes art more accessible, thanks to the use of new technologies that allow to go beyond geographical limits, improve the online sales experience and protect buyers. In addition to improving the online shopping experience, new technologies offer interesting developments for the management, archiving and certification of artworks.
Among the technological solutions available in favor of artists, gallery owners, collectors, but not only, we find Art Rights, a platform that offers the opportunity to manage, track and enhance your art collection, in complete safety, privacy and autonomy, thanks to Blockchain technology and Artificial Intelligence.
