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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics • And finally: a customer friendly interface, allowing users to orientate fast, to browse easily and to find the information they are looking for within seconds. It is a question of further research and collective thinking to find out to what extent cultural portals could generate profit, and what are the factors influencing this process: field of art, scope, main mission, users’ participation, content generation and development, funding strategy of the portal, etc. A money-making and smiling cultural online tool: is it possible? How can we make our cultural websites more attractive for users? There are hundreds of websites of European cultural networks, research centres, directories, cultural observatories, online databases, artistic platforms, online libraries and cultural organizations. 1 On a vast majority of them, users are not given the possibility to pay online for a professional service or for a cultural product. It is of course important to emphasize that most of these websites operate in the non-profit field, serving the users for no payment, with the aim to secure wide access and fulfil a public aim. Therefore, their financial structure is set up to rely on government support, foundation grants or another funding agency. They do not exist to primarily increase their revenues based on users’ interactions and payment. But does it mean all the existing possibilities should be entirely denied by website managers and developers, especially in a world of ongoing financial constraints and fundraising problems we face in the arts and cultural field? Can the non-profit by nature cultural websites and portals support part of their budgets by making money, implementing wise marketing ideas and promotional tools and making users more satisfied, more committed and happier? Here is a selected list of possibilities we could consider, among the many: 176 • advertising through banners and direct marketing; • membership fees and subscription models; • rebates on cultural products (shows, concerts, exhibitions, conferences, etc.) for regular customers; • awards, contests, competitions for creative ideas and projects; 1 LabforCulture is one of the major pan-European online initiatives, aiming to develop innovative approaches, tools and technologies to strengthen, stimulate and facilitate cultural collaborations across geographic, cultural and imaginative borders. It works with and for artists, arts and culture organizations and networks, cultural professionals and audiences in all of the countries of the wider Europe and between Europe and the rest of the world. The main mission is (1) to ensure that all those working on cultural collaborations have access to up-to-the-minute information and (2) to encourage the cultural sector to become more experimental with online technologies. LabforCulture is an autonomous project initiated in 2004 and hosted by the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) in Amsterdam.
• selling artistic products online (books, journals, paintings, tickets for concerts, theatre shows, exhibitions); • selling information and “know-how”; • selling services (consulting, education, information, educational tools); • paid participation in collective intelligence tools. An attractive website is the one containing “fun” elements, an “easy-to-digest” content and “make user feel important” concept. Somehow, my analysis and browsing convinces me that we miss these three variables when designing our online platforms in the non-profit arts and cultural world. The formula of attracting and increasing the online viewers and users online today seems very simple: research and understand what people like the most, irrespective of their nationality and cultural differences, and deliver it. There are words that work like magic and attract audiences instantly: YouTube proves that words like “dance”, “girls”, “funny” and “music” are used around 50 million times a day! We European cultural professionals (researchers, academia, managers, curators, decision-makers at all levels) tend to believe that fun and entertainment aspects are not a serious attitude. For many of us, culture and entertainment are two different and unconnected areas. The same applies to culture and media. We are somehow afraid to implement fun and jokes in our online tools, to give a very personalized approach, to criticize with a sense of humour and even sarcasm, to mix the serious reviews, newsletters, discussion forums and blogs with joy and fun for everyone. One of the exceptions is the Budapest Observatory Memo (www.budobs.org) which, not without reason, attracts many fans and supporters around Europe, who read it with pleasure and a smile. Adult users are like kids: they love not to take everything too seriously. In their busy daily schedules, they would be happy to have bits of entertainment and fun. But of course, we can’t even imagine publications by the Council of Europe or the European Commission, entitled: “Tips on how to make a cultural administrator laugh?”, “100 best jokes about artists”, “Recipes for surviving when applying for EC money”, “66 selected amusing adventures of artists crossing borders” etc. Looking ahead The online power of users and money: can culture gain? No doubt the digital production and distribution of content will become increasingly important and, to succeed in such environment, businesses in media, arts and entertainment should test new tools, take risks, be innovative all the time and try to anticipate users’ needs. How then can conventional cultural organizations and their non-profit websites survive in the digital world? 177
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Managing culture in virtual realms:
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Foreword Digital culture is a new c
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INTRODUCTION
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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynam
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PART ONE DIGITAL CULTURE - THE NEW
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Introduction Media users: from read
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Media users: from readership to co-
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designers will take a back seat in
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Transformations of cultural product
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digital resources, needs to be defi
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