Some Interesting Charts About Recent Sales

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Fascinating, especially the price ranges. Thank you for doing this. I hope you will continue to do it every once in a while so we can see how things trend, especially in the digital vs. painting category! What I wouldn't give for a summary from a couple years ago.

This is very informative, thank you for the time and effort.

Thanks for sharing this Konstantin. I have to say though that I'm not surprised and was something I unfortunately feared as a digital artist.

Interesting although ultimately meaningless as it fails to capture the essence of an art sale which is beyond price, medium, views, etc. People buy art when it speaks to them. Quality, style, subject, artist's brand name, artist's marketing, promotion via FAA, search ranking, artist's reputation etc etc.

Don't feel bad Valerie, I'm sure that digital art slice was nothing more than a sliver a couple years ago (she says, hopefully).

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing your hard work with the rest of us!

The medium slices reflect the number of items for sale. i.e. photography dominates by sheer volume. If anything the ratio of photography purchased vs offered is probably lower than other mediums say painting.

Thank you. It is very interesting. 95% of sales for the time period you measured were for under $40.

Hmmm... I wonder if artists' own purchases for third party sales are included in this, and if not (as I suspect) how that would change the stats.

Nice work, thanks for that.

I have been thinking of doing the same analysis, so its very useful info :)

Rob.

I would think this would be interesting. Unfortunately, all I get is a small orange icon with two gears in it. Page does not resolve. I checked permissions and have nothing blocked. Still, could be browser-specific. Perhaps it's available in dowmloadable pdf format?

You do the same with subjects and come to some useful conclusions such as - hmmm 50% of the subjects today were butts and feet. I will now become a butt and foot artist.

It now resolves

be aware that the page only shows a sampling. if a user got a dozen sales that day not all will show and others will show in a sampling.

and are you really capturing everything? that price guide only is showing the small prints right? most of mine are medium, large to huge prints. the small ones don't sell as often. i think you had $10 as a mark up - but the min is $13. so is that a mark up list? or total price? is it the mark up of a print? or the canvas if that was what sold? otherwise that one is rather confusing.

i don't see a listing of the material sold, and that makes a difference.

and what is your sampling rate? and is it counting the same people twice? every refresh puts some new people in, and keeps others that was in the last batch.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

I love it when Mike asks the popcorn questions :::munch:::

Looking at the sales page, it doesn't actually give you the price of the actual sale does it? Just the price of the cheapest print for that image?

the sales list shows the medium and size? i think, i try not to go there if possible. from there he would have to look up the canvas price and the size of that, then show the price. i think it would be more interesting if it showed that canvas with black edges sold a lot more than something else. or if 30" prints sold well and what prices those were. some people under price the small ones thinking it will bring in sales. when in fact his $13 mini poster didn't sell, but it his $1200 mega poster did.

but in the end i'm not sure how these stats help me that much. the price of something doesn't matter so much as what the picture is. and if they bought it themselves (which is impossible to know).

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

So the sample is less then 24 hours long?

I'm not sure how useful such a short sample period is.

Konstantin,

No good. Your price chart on the data shows prices only up to $69. You are missing most of the data needed to make this a valid set of studies.

I wish your efforts panned out. It would have been very interesting. Sean probably has thrown a few algorithms into the mix.

Dave

As far as digital art Valerie, keep in mind, there is less digital art/artists on FAA than traditional and photography.

and not everything is properly labeled. people that make digital art often call them paintings, mixed media and other things.


i'm also not sure what the point of when it was uploaded, and how that helps to know that. the year shouldn't really matter.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

a more interesting chart to make, and impossible to make is - what kind of art sells best, which is not covered in any of these. not a painting but by theme. but even then all this info won't help you to sell better. unless you have something to sell.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

David, that chart with prices only going up to $69 is for art at it's smallest size. Not sure why he chose to track that at all rather then the actual prices that items sold at.

Joshua,

I did not know that, but doing it that way means he charted nothing at all.

Still throws away all the data. The charts need a certain congruity to make sense of the larger picture. That is missing.

Dave

Thanks for the effort put into this.

A 24 hour sample is not all that representative of a typical day. It is skewed because single buyer purchases of many pieces happen often. Some are buying for decorating projects and others buying stock for resale.

You have not defined small print. But regardless of that most of my sales are larger sizes. I am not sure how useful that stat is as so many other things affect the price. Define the methods a bit more and maybe that could be useful.

As pointed out already the distribution of sales by type is more useful if you look at what is actually being offered. My own tests show a painting reproduction is far more likely to sell than a photo. I run tests by using the search filters such as the best sellers sort as well as sort by medium.

but at the very end, how is this a marketing tool? the price range is probably the only real tool there. if you don't paint and so on, your not going to become a painter just so you can get a piece of the pie, it doesn't work like that.

knowing how old something was when it sold, is data that has no real value.

knowing how many views something had also doesn't really tell you anything, partly its due to bots, might be marketing, might be fake views and some people reset their views. knowing the number won't help because its not a magic number.

the only practical thing you can get from this is: if you do art shows, knowing the size, substrate and maybe the prices for those - could help. or if there was a way to know what subject was. but that is only relevant to the person that bought it, and how you made the image itself. i do wonder how many people were counted more than once and often the data was sampled.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

actually a good piece of data that you can track is the location from the person who bought it. knowing what part of the country or world buys in - people can focus efforts that way. like there may be more galleries or framers in a given state or town.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

David, I wasn't saying it was useful information, just explaining what it was he was showing there.

As I said, it's too small a time period to get anything really useful out of it, the chart showing views is somewhat interesting though, I'm surprised by the portion of sales with less then 100 views on Friday.

". . . four charts that shows data analysis of 12 hours period of fine art sales (approximated) at FineArtAmerica.com using open source of information."

Only FAA/Sean has ownership of the hard data to generate valid, detailed sales reports. And, even with hard data, results would be +/- because of category classification inaccuracies and other variables.

Joshua,

I am not surprised by the 100 view chart. I think the next segment the 101 to 199 should be rolled up into that.

Clearly the newbies sell a few prints early on. Who at this point has staying power matters more to me. That is not clear
for marketing purposes from those charts.

Also I can reasonably guess that the number of digital artist to sales ratio really favors digital artists....small 24 hour sample notwithstanding.
That has been developing and really come into its own.

Dave

I don't think the total # of views of an image is really related to someone being a newb, I've been here since 2011, but my last sale shows 75 views total. And it's an older image, not something posted in the last month or something.

I do not know how strong the correlation is. I expect there to be a correlation.

Dave

i wonder if the numbers were skewed because his chart bot pushed the numbers into the next bracket.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

the number of views won't make a difference. i have images with 10,000 views and lots of sales. i have some with 200 views and lots of sales. i have others that have high views and no sales and so on. it really depends how many people like to look at an image rather than buy it. but it won't help me to know how many views something had before it sold. its just not data i can use.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Interesting and valuable thanks.

This analysis assumes that the 'recent sales' page isn't heavily skewed towards big sellers, like the search results. FAA, of course, wants us to produce stuff like what we see on this page, because that's what sells. Well maybe they don't really need any more reprocessed photographs of Marilyn Monroe, but who knows.

The next level might be to categorize the sales by subject matter. Obviously I'm not really serious, there's no easy way to do that, but it's not totally impossible. It would require intensive parsing of title, description and keywords, and maybe some meaningful heuristics would emerge.

the recent page shows all sales... however they show all sales whether it can print or not. so its a bit deceptive.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Sampling

thanks for sharing this research. Very useful information I think.

Interesting! Thank you for taking the time to create these.

My first and immediate reaction is I am not sure you can really get any meaningful data when it is based on the views considering the bots.

I have yet to really look at the data but I will get around to it and compare it to some of the stuff I have done along these lines.

I might add that I have yet come up with anything that I find really useful that I can use for sales. I do get some stuff that is interesting but nothing in the way of useful for sales.

Thank you for doing this.

It would be fun to run some statistics on words in the title, description and keywords, and compare them to, for example, some enormous list of the names of tv/film/music celebrities, and sports heroes. What percentage of sales are paintings, or digitally altered photos, of celebs? It's gotta be huge.

27% Jim

Non scientific sampling of course.

Floyd, I meant all celebrities, not just Hendrix and Marilyn :-)

I don't think that this stats are so meaningless. I can read 3 things out of it:

1. The great number of uploaded photographs does not show in the small difference to sold paintings. Paintings seem to sell better.
One reason may be that the fast upload of bad snapshots is a mass phenomena.

2. The small size print prizes seem to have a abnormally break over $40. That should be compared with all set prizes but may be a limit not to be exceeded.

3. The distribution of the year of upload seems to reflect the upload of the specific year. So the year seems not to have any influence which also is a interesting (but for me expectable) result.

All numbers would be much more useful if there would be a ratio to the whole uploaded artwork.

"Floyd, I meant all celebrities, not just Hendrix and Marilyn :-) "

That is a sampling of over 2500-3000 sales.

This was all discussed in a thread about 6 months back.

Someone actually looked at thousand of recent sales and came up with 27% being celebrities?

Yes, I did. Celebrities and things like cooperate logos etc,etc. The number is/was 27% in the informal poll.

Thanks for taking the time to put this together!

Lots of work and very interesting results. Unfortunately going to be full of holes though.

The real proof in the pudding would be if we received some kind of results like this from the horses mouth here at FAA. It could be done without revealing too many secrets.

Thanks for posting this. As far as I understand sales are only published if the artist does it. I am sure that very succesful artists probably would rather see their sales NOT published.

The findings on price correlate to what I found out a couple of years ago when I did an analysis about 100 great performers on Etsy. Most items were sold below $ 50.- and the vast majority below $ 25.- . From the stats about views I would conclude that sales are not that strongly correlated with traffic quantities, especially when we keep in mind that the stats are strongly influenced by robot visits for many of us. I think these are not surprising facts but a confirmation that some known mechanics also apply for FAA.

What would you rather be? A "great performer" or the owner of a substantial business? Anyone can compete on low price, but few can be successful selling the high volume a low price strategy requires.

If you have trouble selling now, just imagine the challenge of a high volume strategy.

"When you compete on price, it’s extremely difficult to provide exceptional customer service and a quality product – in turn damaging the perception of your products or services in the eyes of consumers. Instead, businesses need to focus on conveying why their product is worth more. "

etsy is a bit different though. wall art sells for a higher price. most of my things, when they sell, are well over $50.

it might be even more interesting to see what size of what kind of work sold and how much that cost. like will people spend XX on prints of paintings, will they spend XXX on photos, will they spend XXXX on digital art and so on? however even that stat won't help all that much, except maybe knowing the limit of what someone might pay for at a given size, material and what the image is.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

If only selling art was a math equation.

charts usually just confuse the heck out of me. even in the end though, all the stats in the world won't help unless you have art people want. where people buy from is really my only interest but even then it may depend on the style they want.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

"If you have trouble selling now, just imagine the challenge of a high volume strategy. "

Yes, that stradegy is obviously a loser. I expect Wal Mart, K-Mart, Target, all of the dollar stores to be gone within the week!

"What would you rather be? A "great performer" or the owner of a substantial business? Anyone can compete on low price, but few can be successful selling the high volume a low price strategy requires."

All things are relative. First, if you want to make decent sales and decent money, it is a business. It is about how much money you get to keep at the end of the year.

To use arbitrary figures as an example, I would would much rather sell 100 items for $1000 dollars than two or there for $2000.

A sound business plan has to include a sound pricing structure. Not simply jack up your prices because that is what I am worth, even if I don't sell much of anything.

That is fine if you want to practice art for the sake of art. But it makes for a lousy business plan.

"it might be even more interesting to see what size of what kind of work sold and how much that cost. like will people spend XX on prints of paintings, will they spend XXX on photos, will they spend XXXX on digital art and so on? however even that stat won't help all that much, except maybe knowing the limit of what someone might pay for at a given size, material and what the image is."

I agree, having those stats would be of interest.

If you sell digital art and you see the prices, on average on a 24 x 36 digital is $100 and you have your price set at $20 or $500, that should tell you something.


If you sell landscape photography and you see that an images with horses in them sell at a rate of ten times faster then ones that are similar without horses, that would worth knowing.

I get it, no one wants to do art for the masses. They want to do art that they want to do. But maybe if you know that kind of information, you don't crop the horse out of the next shot where it can be left in.

Information, the more the better is worth gold, imho.

"Yes, that stradegy is obviously a loser. I expect Wal Mart, K-Mart, Target, all of the dollar stores to be gone within the week!"

Are you selling a commodity like boxes of crackers?

"Are you selling a commodity like boxes of crackers?"

Yes, and so are you when you sell on a POD site.

But that is not the point. The point is, selling "art" is no different than selling any other product. But we are not really selling art. We are selling Fine Art Reproductions and the competition is enormous!

The people with the best business plans that include the best marketing, adverting and pricing plans will, and constantly do, out sell the best art.

The continued denial in here by some does not make it any less a fact.

The mother lode, of course, is keywords. And that information is never given out because FAA would be flooded with them the next day. But we can't even find out what keywords led a buyer to our photo and resulted in a sale - that doesn't seem like too much to ask. Dreamstime - a microstock agency - gives me that information on every sale.

Agree Jim, and that is exactly the reason I don't play the search game.

Links back to specific images on my AW. They have nothing to do with search. Not FAA or Google search.

They have to do with getting them links in front of millions of potential buyers.

FB, Twitter, emails, banner ads, bounce backs pieces and reciprocal links. The have zero dependence on the search.

Anything I get from the search is a bonus as far as I am concerned.

Many posts I did read here let me ask: why is there so less information/stats from FAA ? And I am NOT speaking about keywords Jim.

Thank you. There is hope for a sale yet! Interesting that paintings sell so well, I assume that there are far fewer of them up for sale than photographs

FAA, like all of the online selling platforms take the position that the clients, the buyers, belong to the them, not the selling artists. For different reasons they chose to hold that information close to the vest. FAA much closer then anyone else for some reason.

Even as strict as eBay is on a lot of stuff, they supply all the contact data to the sellers about all of the buyers that buy from you. The make it available for 60 or 90 days, I forget what it is.

They also tell you that if you abuse that information, they will close your account. The abuse is trigger when the buyer contacts eBay and complains that they are getting bombarded with telephone calls, spam or anything that ticks them off.

eBay recognizes the value of that information to the seller and they potential that used properly by the seller, will increase sales for both the buyer and eBay. That is also a two way street. If a seller is abused by a buyer, same thing, the account gets closed. I have had to report only a couple of nut jobs over the years. Their accounts were closed.

I would love to see FAA adopt a similar policy.

"Thank you. There is hope for a sale yet! Interesting that paintings sell so well, I assume that there are far fewer of them up for sale than photographs."

As I pointed out here and other threads its quite easy to see that painting reproductions outperform photo prints. A simple sort of a search by best sellers or recent sales provides a nice snapshot of that. And compare it to sorts on the same keyword for all mediums and for just paintings. That is basic data that we all have available. It takes a few seconds. Same for those doing digital art or any medium. Its not hard to do a search and use the filters to see what sells best and what proportion of the work for sale is photos, paintings, digital etc.

According to some study on the internet I got when I googled what art sells best the answer was landscapes. One also showed women buy more art than men. Another even showed the most popular sizes by country.

what ever happened to the OP? did we scare him off?


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

"Yes, that stradegy is obviously a loser. I expect Wal Mart, K-Mart, Target, all of the dollar stores to be gone within the week!"


Floyd,

I agree with you, but I have to say it. K-Mart is out of business or going out business year by year.

Walmart and Target use people on welfare and disability to make their profit. A case can be made particular to Walmart that subsidized
workers account for all of their profits. There net margin is low.

That said there are only two approaches. Broad based marketing or targeted marketing. You have more experience than the rest of us put together, and
you are not shy about studying still more on marketing. Which is why you are right here.

You have a substantial email list that no one here can come close to in proven results. Targeted marketing.

The broad based stuff on FB and Twitter are gravy as well. And most people here believe wrongly FB and Twitter are dead ends before they really begin.
Again the advantage of your experience tells you other wise.

Folks start with the premise that there are no dead ends in this business. And then try things and very slowly rule things out if you have to.
Most of us are more than inclined to believe it is all dead ends. You can not sell with that sort of block.

We all have dues to pay.

Dave

No matter how many purses Walmart sells, there is still a market for Coach bags.

No matter how many shoes Target sells, there is a market for Louboutin. NOTE: These are sold out at $995 http://us.christianlouboutin.com/us_en/shop/women/toerless-muse-1.html

No matter how many Kias sell, there still seems to be a market for Mercedes.

I am not saying Floyd is wrong, he is not. What I am saying is that you have to choose what market you want to pursue. That said, if you go after the high end market you had better be offering them something better or unique and you had better market towards that segment.

Totally agree JC, that is exactly my point. Everyone has to decide where they and their product fits into the market place and where they want to go and what they want to achieve. And that has to be supported with a good plan of action.

A good plan of action is not just price high and sell high. Or price low and sell low.

But remember one thing.

If you lose money on every sale, you can not make that up with volume. lol

David, at one time I was listed on the Wal-Mart hit list. I have no love affair with Wal-Mart due in no small part on how the exploit the welfare laws and their predatory pricing by their pharmacy.

--betting JC had to look up how to spell "Louboutin." ;)

I own a pair of ancient Louboutin boots. They are obviously from his "practice stage." Unfortunately, I don't ever expect to be able to afford to upgrade, unless I come out of my "practice stage" the same way he did.

Yes, yes he did.....

I can however spell Tony Lama, Lucchese, Roper and Stetson...... All fashion statements in their own right in my world.