Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Saatchi online gallery a success ... maybe

Forgot to link yesterday to this free story in The Wall Street Journal about what appears to be success at Saatchi Online, the online art gallery run by Charles Saatchi. The story says that in two polls the gallery has conducted with some of the artists who have uploaded work for sale to the site, collectively the art they've sold has rung up $30,000 a week and $88,280 respectively. That's not bad, although one wonders how those numbers would pan out if everyone who received the poll had replied. Who wants to admit their work isn't selling? Another problem with the story: Saatchi is quoted as saying that the site "regularly" receives 50 million hits a day (that includes page views and other new images). Meanwhile, Media Metrix says the site g0t 894,000 unique users in August. Doing some crude math, if you divide 894,000 by about 30 to get a rough number of daily visitors (29,800), and then take 50 million and divide it by 29,800, that would mean that, on average, each unique visitor is looking at more than 1675 pieces of art when they go to the site. Fifty million hits a day? I doubt it.

1 comment:

Media Monkey said...

Hits are always a smelly way of measuring traffic.

A hit means a request for data. Some pages can have dozens of random gifs dotted around the place which will each generate a hit as it loads.

By loading this page and looking at it once, I've generated 20 hits.

Still not enough to explain it and Mr Saatchi is not known for his humility but is known for exaggeration!