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Rent Seeking Behavior and YCH Auctions
11 years ago
Sometimes you just need a microscope
Anyone who watches FA will have noticed a flood of YCH auctions from artists with 5k+ watchers over the past year and a half. The auctions and the payouts generally associated with them can often be taken to 'the absurd.' There are now several incidents of single character no background per-rendered poses and a highly questionable amount of actual work put into them going for $500 usd or more. It is an interesting phenomena to watch.
We'll break it down into economic reasons from the artists perspective first. For an artist, especially a popular artist with 5k+ followings, there is zero incentive for them to do standard commissions with the YCH auction model. Why bother with commissioner requests when you can make 4-5 times your standard rate doing a pose you've already done the basic outline for. From an artists standpoint this is an idyllic situation as it removes almost all input from the buyer outside of usually species and gender.
Someone I watch once had a stream titled "Pay me to draw what I want to draw" - This is entirely the mentality behind it. With those auctions it guarantees the artist is drawing something they wanted to draw in the first place while getting paid (on average) far more than they would charge for commissioned work. This is made significantly worse with an auction mentality where you often have 2-3 individuals driving the prices over what a classically trained graphics artist would charge. From time to time this bidding contest goes so far as to put it outside of the means of the bidders (There are several journal rants of these instances scattered across FA). I have my suspicions that some artists may go through less than legitimate means to artificially inflate their prices on these types of auctions to guarantee payouts. In that situation a non-paying ban can be slapped on the alt account and they can still collect on the second bid.
There is a secondary (and thankfully much smaller) group that operates through services like paetron (a quick description - think of paetron as a 'voluntary' subscription service) - This is full on rent-seeking behavior as people pay a monthly amount to the artist and the artist is not required to give anything in return. There is the slim argument that they are helping to subsidize a favored artists expenses and can feel good about it but from a value for work done for their supporters, this is truly scraping the bottom of the barrel as this model doesn't even require them to produce anything to earn revenue.
Now from the buyers perspective neither of these models are beneficial. They provide by far the least value for, generally, the highest price. Outside of internet bragging rights there really isn't an incentive to buy into these. There is the counter argument of "I like the pose" but this falls on its face immediately when standard commission work already allows you to dictate the pose of your choice instead of the artists choice of pose. There is also the concept of caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, both caveat emptor and the pose argument shouldn't be a thing if commissioners take the time to do a little bit of research on the artist and check their past history. There are artists that have shown up on sites like Artists Beware because of their past performance and it is tempting to sidle artists who slink into the land of "pre-pose auctions" and their counterparts in the pateron camp right next to those who take the money and run. It's not that different.
There are a few artists who can command a triple digit price tag. They are generally the full photo realism folks, professional graphic artists, who do insane amounts of work on a piece by piece basis - See http://rlv.zcache.de/wusten_prinzes....._8byvr_324.jpg - Work done by Kannos on Inkbunny (apologies for having to use a link where their artwork was outright stolen to sell mouse pads but I could not find the original). These people pour themselves into their commissioners work. I have zero qualms with these folks as they provide a breathtaking amount of depth.
We'll break it down into economic reasons from the artists perspective first. For an artist, especially a popular artist with 5k+ followings, there is zero incentive for them to do standard commissions with the YCH auction model. Why bother with commissioner requests when you can make 4-5 times your standard rate doing a pose you've already done the basic outline for. From an artists standpoint this is an idyllic situation as it removes almost all input from the buyer outside of usually species and gender.
Someone I watch once had a stream titled "Pay me to draw what I want to draw" - This is entirely the mentality behind it. With those auctions it guarantees the artist is drawing something they wanted to draw in the first place while getting paid (on average) far more than they would charge for commissioned work. This is made significantly worse with an auction mentality where you often have 2-3 individuals driving the prices over what a classically trained graphics artist would charge. From time to time this bidding contest goes so far as to put it outside of the means of the bidders (There are several journal rants of these instances scattered across FA). I have my suspicions that some artists may go through less than legitimate means to artificially inflate their prices on these types of auctions to guarantee payouts. In that situation a non-paying ban can be slapped on the alt account and they can still collect on the second bid.
There is a secondary (and thankfully much smaller) group that operates through services like paetron (a quick description - think of paetron as a 'voluntary' subscription service) - This is full on rent-seeking behavior as people pay a monthly amount to the artist and the artist is not required to give anything in return. There is the slim argument that they are helping to subsidize a favored artists expenses and can feel good about it but from a value for work done for their supporters, this is truly scraping the bottom of the barrel as this model doesn't even require them to produce anything to earn revenue.
Now from the buyers perspective neither of these models are beneficial. They provide by far the least value for, generally, the highest price. Outside of internet bragging rights there really isn't an incentive to buy into these. There is the counter argument of "I like the pose" but this falls on its face immediately when standard commission work already allows you to dictate the pose of your choice instead of the artists choice of pose. There is also the concept of caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, both caveat emptor and the pose argument shouldn't be a thing if commissioners take the time to do a little bit of research on the artist and check their past history. There are artists that have shown up on sites like Artists Beware because of their past performance and it is tempting to sidle artists who slink into the land of "pre-pose auctions" and their counterparts in the pateron camp right next to those who take the money and run. It's not that different.
There are a few artists who can command a triple digit price tag. They are generally the full photo realism folks, professional graphic artists, who do insane amounts of work on a piece by piece basis - See http://rlv.zcache.de/wusten_prinzes....._8byvr_324.jpg - Work done by Kannos on Inkbunny (apologies for having to use a link where their artwork was outright stolen to sell mouse pads but I could not find the original). These people pour themselves into their commissioners work. I have zero qualms with these folks as they provide a breathtaking amount of depth.
I find it doubly offensive, when an artist begins the starting bid at the full price they want to receive. In my eyes, that is simply saying "I'm covered, but lets see how much I can make out of you folks". I do take enjoyment in watching those ones go empty though.