Christie's Live: Online Bidding Is Not Very Lively

Christie's has just issued two important press releases: The first boasts about the first-year performance of its online bidding service, Christie's Live; the second celebrates the auction house's "Historic Worldwide Sales" for the first half of this year.

I'll discuss the second release next week. For now, you can get Bloomberg's take on it, here.

The release about the "phenonmenal success" of Christie's Live has so many holes that you could drive four trucks through it. So I did: I sent the press office the following four questions, eliciting the same answer for all of them:

We have not disclosed that figure.

Without these answers, it is very hard to assess whether online bidding for high-quality art is the wave of the future or (as it appears) just a drop in the bucket. Here's what I asked:

1) How many lots were purchased through Christie's Live during its first year? [A reasonable and basic question, or so I thought. All they would say is that there have been "28,600 online bids"---not necessarily successful ones.]
2) How many unique individuals (not counting repeats by the same registrant) have bid (not just registered) on Christie's Live during its first year? [We do know that only 52% of the "Live" registrants actually used the service to make a bid, but we don't know how many people that represents.]
3) You say 15% of Live clients are new to Christies. How many clients is that? And how many of those new clients have actually bid (as opposed to just registered)?
4) Do you have any figures on the median and/or mean price of works that were actually purchased through Christie's Live (or any other way of quantifying the price level of bids that it attracts)?

The Wall Street Journal's Kelly Crow yesterday crunched Christie's numbers to observe:

The technology hasn't done much yet to boost the auction house's bottom line. Since launching the online venture last July, the auction house says, it has sold $25.1 million of fine and decorative art to online bidders, or about 0.5% of the $4.6 billion in art it sold last year.

Actually, a fairer comparison would be to the $1.68-billion sold total at the 377 sales for which online bidding was actually allowed during the past year. (The $1.68-billion figure was the answer to the one statistical question I asked that DID elicit a useful response.) The big-ticket Impressionist/modern and contemporary evening sales were not on Christie's Live, but may be brought online this fall, according to Christie's PR head, Toby Usnik. But even using this smaller, more relevant sold total, it appears that going online did little to help the bottom line.