Dear Dimi,

Found this about revenue and marketing of the Rijksmuseum: 

TL;Dr: 2012 income 180.000, cost 100.000, small piece of museum revenue, abandoned for marketing and policy reasons, was worth it
(Sorry for the gaps, copied from PDF on mobile):

"Different sizes for different prices
In 2010, when nothing was available under open conditions, there was actually less revenue
than in 2011, when the first set was made available. It is even more interesting to see
that in 2012, there is an even more substantial increase in sales. This shows that
releasing the medium quality images to the public in 2011 still allowed them to have a viable business model, and in fact increased the amount of image sales.13

Sustainability of image bank
€181,000 was the total revenue from images of the Rijksmuseum in 2012. 14This is
quite high, but represents only 0.2% of the total revenue of the Rijksmuseum during
that period. From the annual report, it is not clear how many employee hours were
spent on the sale of images, but in the interview with the collection managers, it was
mentioned that the total employee costs were about €100,000 per year. During the
interview, it was also mentioned that not every request would bring an equal amount
of profit. Requests from a person or entity for access to a larger set or a particular
collection were fairly easy to handle

In October 2013 the Rijksmuseum decided to no longer charge for public domain
images that were already digitised and started releasing their highest quality images
for free. They preferred instead to focus their efforts on generating project funding
from art foundations in order to digitise an entire collection. Such administrative
costs are much lower, as a transaction is only made once and is a lot easier to handle
than multiple private individuals. The fact that the Rijksmuseum is so well known for  their open access policy has made getting project funding easier, it was in some cases  a requirement to get the funding, according to the interviewees. For the Rijksmuseum
the revenue from image sale was relatively small and they decided to abandon it all
together as a way to create more goodwill, get more people familiar with their collection and attract them to come to the museum.

http://pro.europeana.eu/publication/democratising-the-rijksmuseum

Study US / Tanner 2004:

"Even those services that claimed to recoup full costs generally did not account fully for salary costs or overhead expenses.” (Selbst jene (Bild-)Dienste, die behaupteten, die vollen Kosten wieder hereinzuholen, berücksichtigten generell Lohnkosten oder Gemeinkosten nicht in vollem Umfang.) Simon Tanner, „Reproduction Charging Models & Rights Policy for Digital Images in American Art Museums: A Mellon Foundation Study“ (King’s Digital Consultancy Services, 2004), https://www.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/pubs/USMuseum_SimonTanner.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20161111191846/http://www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/us-art.html. S. 35; darauf bezieht sich auch eine 2013 veröffentlichte Studie: Kelly, Council on Library and Information Resources, und Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Images of Works of Art in Museum Collections. 
“none can demonstrate a profit once the cost of administration and operation are included in the calculations” (niemand kann einen Gewinn aufweisen, sobald die Kosten für die Verwaltung und die Betriebskosten in die Berechnungen einbezogen werden) Sanderhoff, „This Belongs to You: On Openness and Sharing at Statens Museum for Kunst“. S. 70 

This great Ted talk is about the very same topic, but without the numbers you are searching for
“... getting the public, both scholars and the general public, to pay for digital images ... this is sort of an open secret, but in the vast majority of cases, this is not a business model that works.” (... die Öffentlichkeit, Wissenschaftler und die breite Öffentlichkeit, dazu zu bekommen, für digitale Bilder zu zahlen ... das ist eine Art offenes Geheimnis, jedoch in der überwiegenden Mehrzahl der Fälle ist dies kein Geschäftsmodell, das funktioniert.) „The wide open future of the art museum: Q&A with William Noel“,

https://blog.ted.com/the-wide-open-future-of-the-art-museum-qa-with-william-noel/


As cited by Thomas Tunsch
https://thtbln.blogspot.de/2015/07/wem-gehort-das-kulturelle-erbe.html

All the best
Bernd

john cummings <mrjohncummings@gmail.com> schrieb am Fr., 19. Okt. 2018, 07:34:
Hi all

I looked at this a few years ago for the UK and most of the national museums refused to give the information in an Freedom of Information request or didn't calculate it


One exception is the Natural History Museum who published it in their annual accounts (they refused the FOI but made the info public) which shows a loss of £155,000 over 5 years (this would be larger but they included filming location profits in the calculation).

Thanks

On Wed, 17 Oct 2018, 20:33 Timothy Vollmer, <tvol@creativecommons.org> wrote:
Here's a few links shared with me from some GLAM folks that might be of interest...

Reaping the Benefits of Digitisation: Pilot study exploring revenue generation from digitised collections through technological innovation

Museum Policies and Art Images: Conflicting Objectives and Copyright Overreaching

Copyright, Museums and Licensing of Art Images

cheers, 
tvol




On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 10:10 AM Stephen LaPorte <slaporte@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Dimi,

This is a fantastic question. I think it's been investigated from different angles, but there is certainly room to improve and update the research.


"Revenue matters less than many institutions think it does. Cost recovery and even, in some cases, net income from commercial licensing activities are important considerations for museums. Although a past study has shown that virtually no museum rights and reproductions operation is a profit center (Tanner and Deegan 2002), and although museums generally acknowledge that their obligation and desire to provide information about the collection in as open a manner as possible trumps revenue concerns, revenue remains a topic of interest to many museums today."


"Recent developments in business models concerning the production and distribution of content on the Internet, coupled with a continued examination by museums of their missions and mandates, has led to an awareness that the making available of museum images is merely a means to a commercial end, and not the end in itself. Indeed, in a recent press release, the Victoria and Albert Museum announced that it would no longer charge fees for academic and scholarly reproduction and distribution of its images, claiming that while it earned approximately $250,000 a year from scholarly licensing programs, the overhead costs associated with licensing fees rendered their profits much less.140 What is not reported, but what is suspected, is that the Victoria and Albert Museum determined that it was smart business to allow its copyright-protected images to be made available for free, thereby increasing their circulation and delivering significant promotional opportunities back to the museum. 

This sort of decision-making in academic and educational institutions has been documented since 2001, when MIT undertook a similar inventory of its IP, allowing certain types of its academic content to be made available on the Internet without charge. While contributing to the public good and furthering the educational mission and mandate of a collecting institution is primordial, it is argued here that providing unfettered access to museum images is actually good business."

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 6:17 AM Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov <dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,

I need to brainstorm with this group on museum incomes.

As you might know we are having some issues [1] with copyright and related rights being claimed on digitisations of public domain works. We are working on fixing this [2] over the legislative path in the EU. The recently adopted mandate of the European Parliament [3], as bad as it was, at least introduced a paragraph (Article 5.1a. & Article 5.1b.) that would solve many of these issues.

As this is a new article introduced by the European Parliament, the Member States attachés in the Council are currently discussing it. One of the worries they seem to be having is not to endager museum incomes. We have shared the opinion that museum shop sales are mostly dependend on location, rather than on exclusivity.

It would, of course, be good to have some analysis/research/data on museum income and exclusivity of works. Therefore I wanted to ask the list:
  • Do you know of such research?
  • Do you know of someone who would be interested in doing such research? (We might have a grant available.)
Thanks!
Dimi



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