I’m pretty sure I caught on to a scam before I gave them thousands of dollars. There’s an an outfit called artstorefront dot com that appealed to artists (I’m a painter) who don’t like handing the business side of their work, as few artists will–the self-promotion, the coping with galleries, the dealing with potential customers. I saw an ad they were running on Facebook, decided to click, and I was briefly intrigued. So I signed up for an hourlong Zoom presentation, and learned that they had several artists making a healthy 5 figures, for which artstorefront wanted only a low four figure one-time fee, a small monthly fee, and a tiny commission, which seemed reasonable UNTIL
I realized that the business plan didn’t make any sense tor the artist but it did make a lot of sense for the company . By taking only a tiny commission (5-10%, depending on how much you paid in in the low four figure one-time fee) they were expressing very little confidence that you’d be able to sell much art. I have very little business sense, so I’m quite proud that I was able to figure this out: If they took a larger commission (it’s not at all out of line for a legit gallery to take 50% of the selling price of a piece of art) but a much lower initial fee and monthly fee, they’d make a lot of money if you sold your work, a good deal more than the few thousand dollars they were asking for the initial fee and monthly fee.
Illustration: in model #1, theirs, I’d pay say $3000 upfront to join, plus $60 per month, and they’d get a 5% commission on each work sold. They were assuring me that some artists earned close to $100,000 annually, so off that figure they’d make about 9 grand the first year, and about 6 grand every year after. `(3000 + 720 + 5000, and then 0 + 720 + 5000).
If they did it the other way, model #2, mine, off even a small fraction of total sales, let’s say $20,000, they’d make much more: in the first year, they’d charge a much smaller initial fee, say $1000, and a much smaller monthly fee, say an annual total of $100, but a much larger commission, like half, which would be $10,000, making 11,100 the first year, and 10,100 every year afterwards.
So why structure it their way? Easy answer is that no one earns anything like $100,000, but as long as they get their $3000 initial fee they’re happy.
This isn’t really a pure scam–they seem to actually provide the services they claim (teaching you how to improve your media presence, handling sales and shipping, showing you how to build a client base) the difference being that most people’s art doesn’t sell, so they don’t need to do the things they claim they do. It’s a scam because naive artists will say “No need to spend hours on the distasteful part of being a artist? Cool. I’ll invest a few grand in that.” Their victims, in other words, are willing victims, so it’s probably legal, and a rare artist might even actually make money. I wonder how many of the people making testimonials for them on the amounts they’ve earned are real.
Another tip-off for me btw was the non-existent bar for signing up–they didn’t screen to see if you knew what you were doing. They did ask to be directed to a website or to be sent an attachment showing your artwork, but here’s the thing: I got an almost instantaneous response praising my artwork (in the most generic terms) to the heavens, If I were interested in helping them, I’d advise them to lay off the rapturous praise which only raised my hackles. At this point, I’m mildly pissed that I allowed them to waste an hour of my time figuring out`that it was a scam, though I’m rather proud that I did figure it out.
