A couple of months ago, I bought this drawing from New York artist William Powhida. It’s called “A Guide to the Market Oligopoly System”, and it’s lots of fun, as well as being very astute.
It’s dominated by a big pyramid, with “the yearning masses” at the bottom — “submerged artists”, “deep in debt”, with enthusiasm rather than money. There’s a little dot over on the left, saying “you are probably here”. Powhida explains the economic condition that most artists find themselves in: There are always more people who like to earn their income as an artist than there is demand for them: there is a structural excess supply of labor. So, why do they persist? It’s a labor of love, or willful ignorance of the odds.
At these levels, art-making is simply not an economic activity, and as such it might be the purest art of all. There’s something quite noble about a labor of love, and indeed most artists, galleries, and museums at much higher levels of the pyramid are happy to continue to pretend that the art they’re showing is still a labor of love, even as it sells for millions of dollars. Art is getting bigger and glossier because that’s where the money is, but few artists (Takashi Murakami, perhaps?) will unabashedly admit that they make art for the money.
For the most part, then, as you rise up the pyramid, you encounter a steady increase in hypocrisy and artspeak, with the latter largely designed to obfuscate the former.
At the same time, however, it’s easy to sneer at the labor-of-love types: the art world has internalized the idea that labors of love are only worthwhile so long as they fetch a goodly number of dollars, or at the very least have a veneer of art-school sophistication — a veneer which becomes even more important if your art is popular or decorative or minimally functional. (Elsewhere, Powhida notes that “fashion isn’t considered art. Sorry!”)
The next level of the pyramid is what Powhida calls “the broad primary market”, which includes “tons of commercial galleries everywhere” as well as non-profits, pop-ups, co-ops, and the like. This is the point at which art starts being traded for money — the artists in question typically make a three-figure sum selling smallish works, with larger pieces at more respectable galleries going for a few thousand.
At this point, both artists and collectors start thinking in terms of what any given piece might be “worth.” Everybody in the system — artist, collector, gallery — has a natural desire to want to believe that an artwork is “worth” more than the collector paid for it, and that the trajectory of the artist’s future career will mean that in years to come, the collector will be able to sell it at a profit.
This is where the collector hypocrisy comes in: collectors love to say that they buy art just because they love it, and that they will never sell it. For them, just as for the artist, it’s important to keep up the pretense that what they’re doing is a labor of love; when collectors are caught flipping artworks to auction houses and making a profit on the deal, they’re sneered at, especially if they don’t immediately reinvest the proceeds in even more art. But the fact is that beyond a relatively modest initial level, no collectors will buy anything unless they think that it has real monetary value now, or will have it in the future.
This is why galleries are so important: they’re the mechanism through which an artist’s career can be tracked and reduced to a handy dollar figure. Everybody knows that there’s much more art than science to setting the dollar amount, and that’s why they always keep an eye on the auction houses, which are considered more objective. There’s an interesting tension here: galleries and artists love to see new records being set at auction, even as they hate the collectors who take their work to an auction house in the first place.
The auction houses are actually two full notches higher up on the pyramid, above the blue-chip galleries in London, LA, and New York and the major art fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze. At these levels, art becomes more explicitly a commodity: virtually everything bought here has some kind of immediate resale value, and you’ll probably be able to borrow cash money against it if you put it up as collateral. Galleries will nearly always buy back the work they sold you, if not at the price they sold it to you for, and much of the work will happily be accepted by the big auction houses.
The barriers to entry, at this level, are high: in the primary market, individual artworks start in the five-figure range and go right up into seven figures or even eight for massive works by megastars. Meanwhile, the same dealers operate a highly-exclusive secondary market where works can occasionally break the $100 million mark.
As its position on the pyramid suggests, the auction market is even more exclusive. It’s actually smaller, even as a secondary market, than the behind-the-scenes dealings of gallerists, and it’s also much more brutal in its assessments of an artist’s career trajectory. Auction houses are happy to sell relatively cheap works by up-and-coming artists, but they are much warier of more expensive works by artists seen as being on the decline. There’s still a market, for instance, for 80s superstars like Julian Schnabel or Eric Fischl, but you’re very unlikely to find their work at auction: they’ve been kicked out of the auction world, back down to the primary dealers.
It’s worth noting that this mechanism creates a very strong survivorship bias in the official art-market returns, quoted by Powhida at being 0.55% per year. Those returns are calculated by looking at pieces which have come up for auction more than once, but the fact is that in the big auction houses will often simply refuse to accept pieces which are no longer in favor, with the result that those works end up being sold in the opaque secondary market of galleries, and never get incorporated into official statistics. Auction sales are emphatically not a representative sample of secondary-market art sales more generally. What’s more, most art collections are built up in the primary market rather than the secondary market, and art indices give no indication of the rate of return on primary-market purchases, again because those numbers are so opaque.
Most people who buy art will, to a first approximation, “lose” all their money: like most other consumer products, it won’t or can’t be resold after being bought. Many of those people kid themselves that their work is “worth” roughly what it would cost them to replace it; they’re only disillusioned when they actually try to sell the thing and find no willing buyers. And even the clear-eyed often think of their art as a lottery ticket: it might be worthless today, but maybe, in the future, if the artist becomes hugely successful, it could be worth a fortune.
Art only really becomes an asset class at the very top of the pyramid: the auction houses, the museums, and the stars (a/k/a Damien Murakoons). Artists are constantly if slowly being inducted into this world, and museums are constantly receiving donations of art and buying it themselves, thereby taking it off the market. As a result, the total size of the market remains roughly constant, even the art which makes up the asset class is constantly changing. Right now, you’ll find Richard Prince and Francis Bacon in high demand; in ten years’ time it’ll be someone else.
One of the things I like the most about Powhida’s piece is the various different ways that he characterizes what you might think of as the y-axis: the thing that changes as you go higher up the pyramid. One sequence looks at the artists, who go from “submerged” to “emerging” to “established” to “stars.” Another looks at the artists’ net worth, which goes from “deep in debt” to “loaded.” Then of course there’s the price of art: “hundred$” to “thousand$” to “million$.” There’s a line characterizing the art from the collector’s point of view, from “speculation” to “investment.” There’s an upside-down pyramid, showing the art world in terms of effect rather than mass. And then there’s this:
You can argue the toss on some of these, but the main thrust is clear: the value of a work of art is to a very large degree a function of the city where it’s being sold. New York’s at the top of the heap (or, to be precise, Manhattan); Berlin punches well above its weight; Paris, the erstwhile center of the art world, is conspicuous by its absence.
Art schools, too, are ranked: Yale’s at the top, followed by Columbia, RISD, the Art Institute of Chicago, MICA, Cal Arts, UCLA, Bard, and Pratt. No foreign art schools are on the list, which is a shame, but Powhida is a very American artist.
In any case, I love this particular piece — I’m geeky enough to think that there should be much more art with footnotes — and I’m glad to own it. Naturally, I’ll never sell it. But I can still dream of a day when Powhida is famous and it’s worth a fortune.
SEO in the niche of web hosting and domain name registration
In this article we`ll try to generalize our practices in promotion of companies that provide web hosting and domain registration services.
We will talk about such questions:
- Analysis of hosting / domain name registration market and finding potentially advantageous promotion directions;
- Features of keywords selection in the conditions of SEO-pressure
- Definition of promotion strategy
- Methods of getting links
- Features of different queries groups conversion depending on geography
- Typical problems that interfere sites conversion and ways of their solution
Market analysis and competitive researches. Finding potentially advantageous promotion directions
First of all, it is necessary to note that a large traffic in the niche of web hosting is deceptive. If you look at Google AdWords Keyword Tool data you will find out the following picture:
In fact, there are about 400-500 visits from the 8th– 9th place for a query “hosting” per month. It`s necessary to consider this and other points while planning hosting project promotion, because information about a large amount of queries in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool is “stuffed” with endless positions checks. As the market of hosting projects and domain name registrars is extremely competitive, you have a great chance to invest money, work and time in promotion of such queries that are stuffed and do not bring traffic and sales, and after all you can incur losses and even remain disappointed in the search promotion at all. The same can be said about domain name registration.
In fact, there are about 500-600 visits from the 5th – 6th place for a query “domain” per month.
That`s why, in our opinion, it`s better to begin promotion of hosting project or domain name registrar with finding active competitors in the search marketing niche and define their strategies. For this purpose we can recommend a wonderful tool – SemRush.
So, we need to find competitor sites in our niche, which are actively engaged in the Internet marketing. We just type highly competitive query corresponding to the topic in SemRush and find sites that are ranked well for it:
Now we need to make cleaning, i.e., remove irrelevant sites from the list. In this case, obviously, Wikipedia must be removed from the list. After checking a few queries important for you in the same way, we will receive a “crossed” list of sites. Sites from this list have good rankings for many queries in this subject, so they should be examined primarily.
Lets take a site hostgator.com as an example:
The example shows that, firstly, the number of search queries for which the site “hostgator” is shown has an explicit trend to growth. It reflects the efforts made by the owners of this project to increase its visibility in search engines.
After selection of queries that bring maximum traffic to the project according to SemRush, we get an approximate keywords list which can be used to start promotion.
Making the list of necessary keywords, let’s see whether it is a good idea for us to «meddle into a fight» for these keywords. You should consider such factor, as SEO-pressure, for this purpose.
Features of keywords selection in the conditions of SEO-pressure
You can use different tools to estimate a competition for the selected query. A plug-in for FireFox called SeoQuake is one of convenient free instruments.
Let’s type a relevant query interesting for us, e.g., business hosting:
You can see that some strong sites are present in SERP, and some of them have got from several hundreds thousand to millions of backlinks and even more. The competition in SERPs is about to be really strong, so I would like to repeat: you should select a semantic core very carefully. Moreover, there are sometimes artifacts in SERPs, and learning them is possible only from experience. Let’s take the query “ecommerce hosting”. This query is high frequency in subtopic «hosting for ecommerce sites», it has about 12 thousand searches per month in exact match worldwide:
We can see that the trends of search don’t show any sudden jumps or drops.
The target audience for these queries is in the U.S. and UK – the most creditworthy regions in general. However, traffic for such query from the American Google Top5 – Top6 is about 1-3 persons a day, with natural drops on weekends; it gives us about 40 people a month. A conversion rate for these queries is extremely low. Of course, promotion for this queries is acceptable only with the purposes of improving positioning and brand awareness, but as for sales it isn`t effective.
Let`s take a query “reseller web hosting” which has next data from Google KeyWord Tool worldwide, for comparison:
The query brings twice more traffic from the 4th-5th places having twice smaller amount of searches in exact match according to Google KeyWord Tool! Conversion rate of this query is also quite high. At that, Google Insights give the following data:
At the same time the great part of traffic and transactions comes from the U.S. and UK users despite of the fact that the site holds comparable positions also in Google.co.in.
All of these patterns are also true for domain name registrars.
It’s impossible to know this information without experience in promoting a site for such queries or without trying PPC advertising in exact match. There are a lot of keywords like these, so you should constantly monitor all queries in the aggregate estimating of the effectiveness of each one.
You can also “pull out” perspective keywords making the analysis of the backlinks text anchor to sites of competitors who are actively engaged in search marketing. You can use special tools, for example, CS Yazzle or SEO SpyGlass by LinkAssistant, either manually using Yahoo! Site Explorer.
To estimate a real traffic on a query you may also try PPC in exact match.
The following method can be used to estimate keywords efficiency. The initial necessary data is:
- Position for a keyword;
- Traffic on it;
- Estimated number of searches from Google Keyword Tool in the exact and phrase match for the world and top regions;
- Quantity of page views;
- Time spent on a site;
- Bounce rate;
- Conversion rate.
Microsoft Excel counts a parity of all these factors with the help of formulas and allows realizing efficiency/inefficiency of each keyword visually.
Perspective traffic, quantity of searches per month (data of Google AdwordsKeywordTool) and conversion data for each query are marked with green color. Indicators exceeded the average indicators for the site to the worse are marked with red (bounce rate, number of pages reviews).The percent of conversion which vastly differs to better from the average indicator for the site is marked with yellow color in the last column (Conversion rate).
Using this technique allows tracking the most convertible requests and receiving greater outcome from a client’s site.
Selection of promotion strategy
Based on our experience in promotion of projects in the niche of hosting and domain names registration we can say that the most high-frequency, convertible and competitive queries are in these topics exactly.
Shared vs VPS vs Dedicated
If to compare an earning power of dedicated servers sale (VPS) and earning power of shared hosting sale you will come to the conclusion that in general virtual (Shared) hosting sale is more profitable: one dedicated server sale brings around 200$ of income, at the same time sale of the same server “cutted” on virtual (Shared) hosting allows to earn much more (~100×5$), even with the consideration of the increasing load on a support.
However, traffic in Shared hosting subtopic is much less than in dedicated server subtopic. People interested in such things, according to our observations, come by queries like “cheap hosting”, “cheap web hosting”, and the quantity of such searches is very small because Godaddy and Hostgator take away the lion’s share of these customers, mainly due to type-in traffic.
In this case, it seems to be a good decision to perform promotion in the VPS and Dedicated sector.
Many companies, apparently, have come to the same conclusion: promotion for queries of “shared” group is much easier, than for queries related to dedicated servers.
Specialized kinds of hosting
As we have noted above, low-frequency traffic brings rather small part in general traffic and conversion; therefore, in our opinion, it`s better to begin promotion for high-frequency keywords with addition low – and mid-frequency keywords, which give a great bulk of sales and target traffic on a site. However, if your hosting site sells “exotic ” types of hosting, such as hosting with support of Zen Cart or Django, then such low-frequency, long-tail keywords can justify themself at the initial stages of promotion.
A cost of their promotion to the Top-10 is small, and similar “exotic hosting” is usually searched by people who understand the subject well and thus type long queries in search bars.
Eventually, when the site starts to rank well for competitive queries, it makes sense to “collect” low-frequency “long tail” of queries in subjects, not to miss this small piece of the market.
Also I would like to notice that promotion for keywords like “hosting” and “web hosting” is extremely difficult process due to high competition (though these keywords begin to “sell” beginning from top-20!)
Methods of getting links
The basis of search optimization are at the moment:
- keyword research;
- texts and meta tags optimization according to the keywords;
- adding backlinks with correct “anchors” (with right reference texts).
As we have already noted, hosting sites have a large number of backlinks. How do they receive so many backlinks? This is obvious, that reviews and comments at forums will never help to collect tens thousands of links. Four main methods used in this theme should be picked out. Some of them are typical for other niches and some of them have unusual “boom” exactly in hosting and domain subjects.
- Link exchange (the proper way)
- Links buying (the smart way)
- Getting links through its own affiliate program.
Conversion of search traffic
Let’s look at the comparative analysis of search traffic conversion in various regions (sample of more than 90.000 sales for “domain names” and more than 2000 sales for the “hosting” market):
car insurance quotes
markiibhoy
lukeratray
jeff123456tw
zfjczoycdzpsmxpr
yandards
froginat0r
frynsesmadrer
greddy350z
lokelvient
grmejia
asutral
emmielynn
jackieyeh
coleenawilson
jackwisps
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