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Digital Artists

We are here to provide you with an alternative revenue mechanism. A radically different way of allowing you to sell your digital works of art. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a digital photographer selling a single photo, a team of games developers selling a game, or a pop group selling an album.

The Digital Art Auction costs you nothing to enter, and only a 1% commission on sale price. This covers our costs in administrating the auction and collecting the bids from a potentially vast audience. If you don’t sell, it costs you nothing.

It’s truly ‘opt in’. Right up until the final moment of sale, you are not committed – you can walk away at any time and pursue another means of selling your digital art. Indeed, because of this unique flexibility you may consider using The Digital Art Auction solely as a means of gauging interest in your art and thus obtaining leverage in pursuing a more conventional publishing deal. However, we believe that it will be extremely difficult for you to simply walk away from what is likely to be a substantial amount of very easy money with no strings attached.

All we’re really doing is switching things round: instead of retailing copies of your art one by one and waiting for the royalty cheques, you invite bids for your art one by one, and release the copies all in one go when the total revenue is sufficient. This means there’s no risk of widespread copying to damage sales. So you build up the market first, let the market make an offer, and then you decide whether to sell. You don’t release a single copy of your art until you’ve got the total revenue you require. Obviously, you need to be able to persuade your market that you have some digital art to sell, e.g. by providing a sample or a lower quality version.

Is The Digital Art Auction For You?

In order to determine if The Digital Art Auction is a suitable revenue mechanism for you, you’ll need to meet the following requirements:

·        You have, or will have, a unique and novel work of digital art

·        You are entitled to release copies of this art in exchange for money

·        You can supply perfect copies of this art to all successful bidders

In a Nutshell?

1.      You offer the release of your digital art in a digital art auction that we host for you.

2.      We both advertise this, and promote the sale as we see fit, without obligation, but obviously with a mutual interest in maximising the final sale price.

3.      At any time you may decide to accept the current sale price available to you from the current bids.

4.      If at this time you are able to satisfactorily supply your digital art, the auction is completed.

5.      Upon delivery of the digital art to successful bidders, we collect the sale price from those bidders and deliver it to you (minus our 1% commission).

What are its Advantages?

The key advantage of The Digital Art Auction is that it allows you to sell your digital art to markets in which copy prevention has become particularly difficult to enforce, whether through widespread disobedience of legal protections such as copyright, or wilful sabotage of encryption based mechanisms.

A key feature is that if you can sell directly to even a small proportion of your total potential audience in a single transaction, the immediate revenue is likely to be preferable to what you might expect from traditional per-copy based pricing. This is in spite of the latter being theoretically able to command sales to your complete potential audience.

Moreover, market-making is facilitated by the far lower friction in people expressing a low-commitment, monetary interest in a work of digital art than in making a final purchase decision. It is much easier for someone to say “I’d buy that for a dollar” on the first occasion that they become aware of a work of digital art than to think “I’m not sure I really want to spend ten dollars on this right now”. The trick is to capture the small decision cost of the ‘expression of interest’ in art, rather than ignore those and wait for the high decision cost of the actual purchase. People are making the former decision anyway, e.g. “Am I interested in this?”. It’s much more likely that this can be captured with a single-click than the more momentous decision of parting with cash “Do I want to buy this now?”.

From another perspective we are saying to the digital art lover “If you express a small monetary interest in this art now, there’s a chance you might just get it for that price or less. If you don’t, you’ll either not get the art or you’ll end up having to pay much more for it via conventional, copy-protected, retail channels”.

If online retail sites are already expecting some of their audience to voluntarily spend decision time using the “Rate This Product” rating facilities, what we are doing is allowing the audience to back that rating up with money, i.e. “I’d pay $X for this to be released”.

Limitations

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.