I Like Ur Art: Saatchi Creates an Online Hangout for Artists

by innes | December 18, 2006 at 11:13 am

388 views | 0 Recommendations | 2 comments

Julie Ann Travis , 23, a graduate student at the California College of
the Arts in San Francisco, is curious to see what her peers are up to
and to share some of her latest work. So recently she posted a
self-portrait in which her head is buried in a pile of dirt at Stuart
(saatchi-gallery.co.uk/stuart), the latest addition to a recently
redesigned Web site for the Saatchi Gallery in London.

The brainchild of the London-based advertising magnate and collector Charles Saatchi,
this social networking outlet â a kind of MySpace knockoff for artists
â is causing something of a sensation, boosting traffic at the
galleryâs Web site overall to more than three million hits a day.

In May Mr. Saatchi, famed for spotting young unknowns and turning them
into art-world superstars, created a section on his Web site for
artists of all ages to post their work at no charge. It is called Your
Gallery, and now boasts contributions by about 20,700 artists,
including 2,000 pieces of video art.

Hate to break it to you, but I don't think everything is honest in Saatchiville. Saatchi’s site, www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk, including STUART looks fishy to me. There traffic ranking is very deceptive. Go to www.alexa.com and you will see that the largest group on the site based on country is India making up 16.5%. Most art sites and websites in general have the United States, United Kingdom and Germany as their three top countries for traffic. Saatchi has India, Thailand and Indonesia which all happen to have a market for pay-per-click services.

So my guess is that the marketing brains behind Saatchi’s art site has paid some of those companies to visit the site in order to fudge their numbers. Need more proof about Saatchi’s little white lie? The United States and United Kingdom each make up less than 0.6% of the membership. Germany makes up 1.1%. Russia only makes up 1.2%. So that means most of the hubs of the international art world are hardly represented on the site. Anyone else think that is strange? When compared to other popular art sites?

People have said it before and I will say it again, the only reason people put work on Saatchi’s site is because his name is on it. His site looks like it came from the mid 1990s. You tell me how a poorly designed site with an outdated look has become one of the top 300 websites in the world. Don’t bother. I know the answer. Millions of hands paid to visit and Saatchi’s huge bank account to pay them.

When are people going to learn that the Saatchi site has manipulated their traffic? The traffic is deceptive. If you visit sites that monitor traffic (Alexa.com for example) and look up info about Saatchi you will see that a huge percent of the site traffic comes from India. India is notorious for having pay-per-click services that websites hire to boost their traffic. So it looks like some of those services may have been used to increase traffic ranking.

Most sites with legitimate traffic gain the most flow from the US, UK, or Germany. Last time I checked those countries were not near the top three countries on Saatchi's ranking. It looks fishy and I'm surprised people have not examined some of the claims that have been made further.

If they have hired pay-per-click services there could be other deception going on. For example, during major competitions they could tell the company which artist to have employees vote for. So the whole system of popular voting could be a scam in that they can dictate who wins in the end by directing their hired ‘clickers’ to specific artists.

If you don’t believe this may be an issue look up info on pay per click and the attitude that Techcrunch and others have on the issue.

I also don’t believe they have sold millions of art on the site. If people had sold on the site you would think they would write about it on their blog and personal website but searches of ‘sold on Saatchi’, ‘sold painting on Saatchi’ and variants of that reveal nothing. I’m not buying the lies.

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