New York, 1 March 2012, Art Media Agency (AMA).

Skate’s Art Market Research, an independent online company providing information to art investors, published 26 February 2012, a study on the activity of auctions and sales of works.

Like a panel of figure skating judges, the study scored the websites according to their technical performance—annual activity according to Alexa’s system of measurement, as well as their artistic performance—according to an undisclosed algorithm, which includes services such as authenticity guarantee, choice, variety, and quality of the offered works.  It is important to note that the websites Sothebys.com and Christies.com were excluded from the rankings due to their high scale stature.

The five principal leaders of this market are Ebay, with a score of 9.875/10, Artnet.com (8.125, recognised for its seriousness, despite its gaps in e-commerce material), Liveauctioneers.com (7.350, recognised for its quality of mobile applications and its certification procedure), Heritage Auction (7.175, thanks to its strategy completely focused on the web, but which should be more geared towards direct sales in addition to auctions), and lastly Artfact.com (6.875, outrun despite its good initial strategy).

It is worth noting that in terms of technical performance, the rankings are dominated by five american companies, the sixth place being held by the French Artprice.com; another French company, Tajan.com, was ranked 23rd.  The first Indian company, Saffronart.com, is 20th, and the first Chinese company, China Guardian (cguardian.com), 21st.

Additionally, the new company The Curator’s Eye, founded in September 2011, is congratulated in the press release for its 18th place ranking, a few days after its official entrance in the market.  The website surpassed more seasoned competitors such as Artbasel.com and Paddle8.com.