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Art commissioning as a business model (sort of)
9 years ago
Before I get to the point! Business-processes and economics are not my specialty, so please forgive my dilettantish positions.
The main question is how the demand is formed here on FA. I'll be ranting about artwork commissioning, but I guess some general patterns are easily applicable to anything one can order here.
So, first of all, how is the customer's choice formed?
Some basic factors are obvious: one's personal tastes, expectations about a desired piece of art, its quality and, of course, one's paying capacity. To put it simple, one wants to get an art that fulfills all the requirements (aestetic tastes, fetishes etc.) in the best quality possible and for the lowest price possible. And when there's an artist that offers, say, a good-looking YCH for a fair price, it's a "Shut up and take my money".
I wish it was that simple, seriously.
So what are the obstacles?
First, it's a balance of quality and pricing. Normally an artist would set up prices for a certain commission based on how much time (and effort) it would take to make it. In my place, for example, working 40 hours a week would cost approximately $4.8 USD per hour to make relatively fair living for a single grown-up person, most surely without an option of making savings. Respectively, if one works for, say, 70 hours a week (an insane pace, if you ask me), the labour price can be lowered to $2.7 per hour. Doesn't sound expensive, I guess, but (BUT!) that requires a constant supply of orders. And here is the deal: orders are not something constant. So, to make sure that they get enough money for living, artists (those who want to work for themselves, of course) have to raise prices for all the same art quality. That often leads to overpricing and, consecutively, losing the clientelle. That, I think, constitutes the economic(?) side of the quality/price problem. Not taking into account, of course, the problem of unreasonable price-setting.
That leads to, from my point, a key problem of the demand-forming process here at imageboards: lack of information. If one wants to order a commission, how do they find an appropriate artist? By combing dozens of pages with commission info sheets, YCHes and stuff alike. Such method culd not possibly embrace the entire range of artists avaliable and open for comissions. Which means that both potential customer and artist with best offers are likely not to find each other.
Now, I am aware that there are sites where the technical possibility of finding commissions by filtering the quality/price of their offers is put to live. But the question still standing: is that enough?
What do you think? Is the problem of forming a customer demand solved by making technical means to fnd one artist-of-dream? Or maybe there are some other issues?
The main question is how the demand is formed here on FA. I'll be ranting about artwork commissioning, but I guess some general patterns are easily applicable to anything one can order here.
So, first of all, how is the customer's choice formed?
Some basic factors are obvious: one's personal tastes, expectations about a desired piece of art, its quality and, of course, one's paying capacity. To put it simple, one wants to get an art that fulfills all the requirements (aestetic tastes, fetishes etc.) in the best quality possible and for the lowest price possible. And when there's an artist that offers, say, a good-looking YCH for a fair price, it's a "Shut up and take my money".
I wish it was that simple, seriously.
So what are the obstacles?
First, it's a balance of quality and pricing. Normally an artist would set up prices for a certain commission based on how much time (and effort) it would take to make it. In my place, for example, working 40 hours a week would cost approximately $4.8 USD per hour to make relatively fair living for a single grown-up person, most surely without an option of making savings. Respectively, if one works for, say, 70 hours a week (an insane pace, if you ask me), the labour price can be lowered to $2.7 per hour. Doesn't sound expensive, I guess, but (BUT!) that requires a constant supply of orders. And here is the deal: orders are not something constant. So, to make sure that they get enough money for living, artists (those who want to work for themselves, of course) have to raise prices for all the same art quality. That often leads to overpricing and, consecutively, losing the clientelle. That, I think, constitutes the economic(?) side of the quality/price problem. Not taking into account, of course, the problem of unreasonable price-setting.
That leads to, from my point, a key problem of the demand-forming process here at imageboards: lack of information. If one wants to order a commission, how do they find an appropriate artist? By combing dozens of pages with commission info sheets, YCHes and stuff alike. Such method culd not possibly embrace the entire range of artists avaliable and open for comissions. Which means that both potential customer and artist with best offers are likely not to find each other.
Now, I am aware that there are sites where the technical possibility of finding commissions by filtering the quality/price of their offers is put to live. But the question still standing: is that enough?
What do you think? Is the problem of forming a customer demand solved by making technical means to fnd one artist-of-dream? Or maybe there are some other issues?
