YouTube effect - ArtReview:Digital goes video
In case you’re not an E-Flux subscriber, this morning’s announcement was “ArtReview:Digital goes video,” another step in the London-based magazine’s campaign to distinguish itself from other printed art mags by embracing all things digital.
Having previously set up the possibility for a fully digital subscription, the magazine now announces that “each new ArtReview:Digital will come with videos, including gallery and studio visits, interviews with artists and multimedia art projects specially made for the magazine.”
Clearly in the YouTube era, and following the wildfire viral spread in the artworld of the Sotheby’s preview video starring Tobias Meyer, it’s a logical step. What comes next? Maybe an artworld-only social networking side, in the spirit of MySpace and Small World. Although when it comes to artists per se, the Saatchi Gallery has first-mover advantage on that front. (In an interesting media-insider sidenote, the man spearheading Art Review’s drive toward digital is editorial director John Weich. On the Saatchi side, former Art Review editrix-in-chief Rebecca Wilson has played an active role in developing and promoting the website after being sacked by Weich last spring.)
Given the fact that most art-magazine economics trend scarily into the red, I’m curious to see whether the added cost of producing digital content will be borne by the publishers or whether it will instead become part of the extra work journalists are expected to do as part of producing their print pieces.
After writing this, I actually went and looked for one of my articles on the “ArtReview:Digital” site. Kids, its bad.
What’s wrong? Well, there’s the slow load times and the over-complicated interface and the fact that the site does not seem to recognize previously registered users. But the killer is that you can either see pages at 75 percent of their real size (i.e. not legible, due in part to Art Review’s latest in a long succession of squint-inducing fonts) or at 150 percent, meaning you can’t read a page without scrolling madly around like someone playing a real-time-strategy video game. If you were to actually try reading the magazine somewhat thoroughly, it would take you hours of click-wait-scroll-scroll-scroll-click-wait-etc action. And it’s totally unskimmable.
Then again, maybe it’s not about reading the text. After all, the registration interface demands to know where you fit into the artworld, offering the following options: auctioneer, collector, curator, dealer, gallery professional (which I guess means gallerina/arthandler), museum, school, student. So, what category’s missing? Critics. At ArtReview.
Seriously, though, this site is totally the right bold move by the magazine. But it totally needs to be rejiggered. It feels like a very expensive solution that was not beta-tested under normal conditions - although I’m sure that with fat-pipe broadband and a 25-inch-monitor, it’s aces.
There is so much to say about the economics of art magazines. There are basically four options, as I see it: A./ have a sugardaddy, B./ become a lifestyle magazine to get luxury-goods advertisers, C./ rely on your own industry to use you as an advertising tool, D./ function as a nonprofit running on grants and/or with such low overhead that you can do it with volunteer labor.
It’s easy to see that each one of these approaches has its own compromises: A./ a usually eccentric and erratic person (or organization) holding the purse strings, and the inevitable psychodrama that results; B./ having to water down the content to get those young lifestyle readers in; C./ being in bed with your own industry doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for editorial independence; D./ begging for foundation money is tedious, and using low-cost or free labor is not a good way to generate good content, plus it’s no fun to be poor.
OK, will the internet solve the problem? The internet does add the intriguing element of mixing editorial with e-commerce. But this sounds like an even worse case of conflict of interest than (C), and you’d have to generate a lot of business to sustain a publishing operation — no one has done it yet. Where do we go from here? Am I missing something?
You know, Andras, that breakdown sounds familiar. Ian and I once did a long night of analyzing the whole art-magazine sector in a Swiss chalet and decided the only viable money-maker was your option B, “Become a lifestyle magazine to get luxury-goods advertisers.” Mixed in with breathless advice on what to buy at fairs and auctions, it could work really well in this newbie-swollen market.
But it sounds like a really boring job and shaky in its business premise (the market has to keep swelling long enough to amortize the startup costs of a magazine, i.e. 5-7 years). So we decided someone else could give that a try. Which sort of explains how we ended up here.
BTW, I had an interesting talk with curator/critic Barnaby Drabble tonight. He’s a HUGE fan of the new Art Review:Digital. Why? Because he has a fast broadband line and it’s free. When asked about the clunky interface, he told me that he just prints out the few articles he thinks are worth reading. So much for going digital. But genius for Art Review - now their readers are paying the printing costs.
Option B is what Culture & Travel attempted — is it still attempting? — to do. There were some other false starts in recent years. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of Culture & Travel. People do travel for culture. The first time I heard it I thought it was a really smart idea. But then when I saw the magazine I felt it was neither travel nor culture. I wouldn’t read it for travel ideas and I wouldn’t read it as an art magazine. The articles were too flat and superficial to be enjoyed as an art magazine. The whole thing had a self-conscious air about it.
András is right about content being watered down to appeal to a bigger market. It is a fundamental problem of all media that to get the number of eyeballs needed to attract advertisers, you need to make the message palatable and understandable to a broader readership. There is an alternative, though. The cpm ad-rates of the Financial Times are higher than for any other newspaper in the UK because the FT reader is considered more valuable to a specific subset of advertisers than the readers of general newspapers. So if you, as a magazine publisher, are able to target and hold a “high-value” readership and convince advertisers that it is so, you can charge a premium per reader and generate more ad revenue for a given circulation than broader readership magazines.
But there is a second problem for physical Art magazines. The economics of trying to publish and distribute a physical product to the disparate, geographically scattered interest groups that make up the Art world today mitigates against likely long term financial success. Even in the current market bubble, there are just too few people who really care, scattered across too wide a geographic area.
And then along comes the Internet.
Clearly publishing online looks very attractive. It is cheaper than publishing a physical product (no printing costs, almost no distribution costs) and “search” now means that anyone who really wants to, can find you. Unfortunately this is also true for anyone else who wishes to publish. And the result is the multitude of sites across the various spectra of amateur to professional, populist to high, broad to deep, inane to erudite, out there.
It doesn’t mean you cannot make a crust in this world. But it does make the competition more numerous and more varied than before.
And we haven’t even talked about how different the function of an online magazine is from its paper cousins…