Nota bene: these figures (+1200%) reflect a trend and would have to be confirmed over a much longer period to have forecast value. Nevertheless, according to thierry Ehrmann Artprice CEO and founder "Artprice's ambition to revolutionize the art market via the provision of free and paid market barometers (dashboards) has definitely produced a tsunami on the art market".
This tsunami was triggered in an exceptionally short time-frame by a global campaign on five continents and in 12 major languages, primarily in collaboration with the NASDAQ OMX (Thomson Reuters IR, PR).
Its impact - which has been far greater than that of any other Artprice initiative in terms of data volumes - confirms that the disruptive economy can very quickly shatter old circuits. By their asymmetrical information these old circuits have allowed a well-organized market structure to develop around the purchase and sale of art with enormous margins that have no economic justification in the 21st century.
Artprice is regarded as the primary "disrupter" of the Art Market (see Trading and IPO's analysis of August 20, 2014):
http://www.actusnews.com/communique.php?ID=ACTUS-0-36953 (http://www.actusnews.com/communique.php?ID=ACTUS-0-36953)
Until now, Artprice has given access to extremely sophisticated data developed by its econometrics and statistics department via its high-end subscriptions. Artprice, world leader in Art Market information, is the only group capable of mining and exploiting a huge volume of market data and producing highly reliable information based on the method of repeat sales. This method consists in meticulously and rigorously tracing the ownership history of artworks in order to calculate their value through the years.
Today, the commercial success of mobile Internet (3.1 billion connections worldwide) fits perfectly with Artprice since its clientele is by nature nomadic and wealthy and needs immediate access to art market information (galleries, auction operators, valuers, etc.). In fact the mobile Internet is expected to account for 80% of Artprice consultations in the very near future. By August 2014, it already accounted for 72% (iOS + Android).
On top of that, we have 2.7 billion fixed online connections that often overlap with the mobile connections.
A year ago Artprice decided to accelerate its disruption of the art market (in which it has become an unavoidable player) by asking its econometric department to develop a series of extremely simple applications specially designed for mobile Internet usability. These applications allow Artprice to respond to 70 million art consumers, amateurs, collectors and art market professionals, and not just to the aforementioned elite that used to control the market.
Now, within seconds, a buyer or seller using a smartphone, phablet, tablet or pc can access graphic displays of an artist's price index, the number of works sold per year, his/her annual auction turnover, his unsold rate, the geographic distribution of his sales per country, per price segment or per artistic medium, not to mention an array of more advanced options.
So, in just three mouse-clicks, the non-initiate can compare the price curves of two artists and check the performance of an artist versus the Artprice Global Index (Artprice's general Art Market Index that become an authoritative reference in the business over the last 18 years).
At the same time, he can also compare the artist's valuation to the major stock market indexes like the S&P 500, the DAX, the CAC40, the FTSE, the NIKKEI and the S&P Asia 50.
For example http://www.artprice.com/artist/3416/francois-boucher/index (http://www.artprice.com/artist/3416/francois-boucher/index)
Indeed over the past 18 years the art market has seen exponential financialization. Most of the world's major private banks and wealth management institutions are clients of Artprice.
To create a shock wave and literally reshape the Art Market (in the sense of the "disruptive economy" described by Clayton Christensen) we needed to condense the market's macro- and micro-economic data so that non-initiates could get access to easily understandable and pertinent information about artists and thus be in a position to negotiate on equal terms with seasoned professionals.
In addition, to generate a truly disruptive and viral economy, a major proportion of these indices are free online, and these indices are today essential features of an artist's online profile in freemium mode (the freemium model provides the basic data in free mode and the value-added data in pay mode) generating an irreversible shockwave to the traditional relationship between art buyers and art sellers. This principle will generate an impressive number of new Artprice members because to get access to this freemium mode information they will need to register with Artprice.
On the basis of these latest "user" figures, up 1200%, Artprice is raising its "new members" forecasts for the period 2014/2015.
Now, using their smartphones, tablets and PCs, buyers can rapidly obtain summarized and pertinent figures that sellers cannot ignore without risking being destabilized in negotiations. To avoid this, sellers will have to join Artprice to restore a symmetrical information relationship with their customers.
For centuries asymmetrical information enabled a highly structured market to buy and sell art with margins that no longer have any economic justification in the 21st century.
Since January 2014, Artprice has accelerated the injection of 80% of its data in online free mode and now provides freeware access to 630 million data covering the period 1700 to the present day (in the form of owner application licenses distributed free of charge but with certain user restrictions) via its agreements with Google (since 2003) and Baidu (China). The same approach has been activated in 2014 with Bing (Microsoft) which has a market share of 18.4% in the USA. So. as of Tuesday, September 2, 2014, the dashboards and indexes will immediately be directed to all these search engines.
At September 9, 2014, Google, in just one week, had fully indexed the new data on artists in 6 languages (french, Chinese, English, German, Italian and Spanish)
http://www.artprice.com (http://www.artprice.com) (c)1987-2014 thierry Ehrmann
About Artprice:
Artprice is the global leader in art price and art index databanks. It has over 30 million indices and auction results covering more than 550,000 artists around the world. Artprice Images(R) gives unlimited access to the largest Art Market resource in the world: a library of 108 million images or prints of artworks from the year 1700 to the present day, along with comments by Artprice's art historians.
Artprice permanently enriches its databanks with information from 4,500 auctioneers and it publishes a constant flow of art market trends for the world's principal news agencies and approximately 6,300 international press publications. For its 3,200,000 members (members log in), Artprice gives access to ads posted by members. This space represents the world's leading Standardised Marketplace® for buying and selling art. These sales take place under two systems: either fixed price sales or auction-sales (regulated by paragraphs 2 and 3 of Article L 321.3 of the French Code of Commerce).
Artprice is listed on the Euronext Paris SRD L.O. (Euroclear: 7478 - Bloomberg: PRC - Reuters: ARTF)
Press Releases:
http://serveur.serveur.com/press_release/pressreleaseen.htm (http://serveur.serveur.com/press_release/pressreleaseen.htm)
Discover the Alchemy and the universe of Artprice http://web.artprice.com/video (http://web.artprice.com/video), which headquarters are the famous Museum of Contemporary Art, the Abode of Chaos
http://goo.gl/mwsqp (http://goo.gl/mwsqp)
https://vimeo.com/87859684 (https://vimeo.com/87859684)
http://twitter.com/artpricedotcom (http://twitter.com/artpricedotcom)
https://www.facebook.com/artpricedotcom (https://www.facebook.com/artpricedotcom)
Contact : Josette Mey : e-mail : ir@artprice.com (mailto:ir@artprice.com)
The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.
Source: ARTPRICE COM via Globenewswire