Confessions of an online art guide
Shorter days spell an end to the year and provide a good reason to review NARB’s progress over 2009. We officially launched in March at Rotterdam Museum Night and spent the months after making deals with cultural data providers like the Dutch Uitburo.nl to improve coverage and working on the website and an iPhone app of which we released the third version recently. We also made it possible to add exhibitions for people in other countries. At the same time we’ve stood on many a stage to present our ideas and talked with museums, galleries and heritage people about partnerships. We also designed & created NARB installations for museums, the latest one the 2009 Design Prize at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. So where are we today?
After appraising web analytics and museum interventions it seems the current version of the ‘NARB platform’ works best as a tool for augmenting exhibitions at museums and galleries, for instance being used for competitions or as a bridge to other social networks. Meanwhile membership while it did grow has not yet reached the sort of numbers that we had hoped for. We have many theories on why exactly this is but we haven’t nailed down a single thing that would be solved by an easy fix.
So while the truth behind our slow uptake is probably a combination of these, we believe that…
- Art is a niche, which equals small viewership. Maybe obviously, but worth remembering perhaps.
- Urban city guides already provide editorialized art events. (companies like Unlike.net are doing great work here)
- Our user experience is not compelling enough. We have a lot of functionality, but it’s still missing what you might call flow.
- People, both visitors and venues, are already invested in other social platforms like Facebook and it’s platforms like these where (almost) everybody can be found online these days.
With museums and galleries more likely to move social networking activities across to Facebook to announce exhibitions, and the most vocal in-crowd folks using Twitter to talk about art, we might have to face the fact that getting the ‘culture crowd’ to invest in a new social network (or platform) like NARB might take more investment than we can bring to the party. At the same time, our dedicated social tools for exhibitions have succeeded in attracting some solid use, especially when combined with a competition formula. As long as it’s a easy to understand and has a clear goal with richer incentives these more physical interactions seem to entice people to use them.
What’s our take-away from all this?
For starters, something has to change. While visitors numbers are OK, considering the art niche, it’s not enough to build a sustaining business model as the participation in our platform is generally too low volume. This combined with the cold hard fact that getting the actual data to be able to show which exhibitions or events are taking place where, let alone which are the most worthwhile, is too time consuming since right now it can’t be done without at least some manual labor involved.
What do we want to change?
We already have a few ideas about how to transform the current website into something that will be more viable in the future and be easier to support both from our point of view and from the point of view of the venues listed on our site. From a business perspective we think NARB should concentrate on activities that can return on investment. Right now that’s installation work, consulting and creating tools for cultural institutions that will allow these institutions to get online sooner, better and easier. In some ways we built a site for a future that just isn’t there yet. So were taking a step back and seeing which things need to be in place first before the full NARB vision can actually come to fruition. The most glaring thing in need of improvement is the state of cultural data. While agencies such as the dutch Uitburo do what they can to scrape together data about events from a myriad of sources it’s far from an ideal situation and in most cases the data is not complete, nor correct or in other ways flawed. That’s no fault of the Uitburo, they do what they can with the resources they have, but it’s a result of a system that is basically broken. For each exhibition taking place in NL, there are 100 people hired across the country, typing in dates for events into their own little database, sending out press releases and generally duplicating each others work. While the obvious source for exhibition data, or event data of any kind, should be the venue that’s hosting the event in the first place. Or at least thats what we think.
This is obviously not a problem that’s easily fixed, if it’s possible to fix it at all, but there are already solutions out there and we’ll try and figure out how we can make those tools easier to find, easier to use and when they don’t exist yet we might create tools ourselves that would allow venues to easily publish their event date online for use in NARB and other event guides, magazines et al.
In the meantime we’ll try and adapt our site to work better by focusing more on the venues themselves instead of events taking place. This is data which is widely available right now and for most countries and cities worldwide. At the same time we’ll try and widen our reach a bit to encompass more than just contemporary art by opening up to cultural venues in general. We’re not going to go into clubs, bars and music halls but we might add the history museum or that cool design shop / gallery downtown.
Thing is, these are all just ideas right now. We’re working with museums and other cultural events right now to make some of this happen but as far as the site, and the iPhone app, is concerned all possibilities are still up in the air. In the coming months we’ll be talking to a wide range of people and asking their and your help in figuring out what NARB should look like in the future to become the worthwhile addition to the cultural arena that we hope it will be at some point.
Practically speaking you might notice some small changes to the site now and then. Some of the functionality you have come to take for granted might disappear, for lack of it being used. Some other things might take their place. Do not despair, it’s all part of the plan. So here’s our perspective, we’d love to hear
yours!
Yours sincerely, Tijs & James
