Here is the question that has been bothering me for a while:

When the artist joins the online gallery or forums or mailing list part of the intention is to promote his/her art work - this is clear. The "foggy" subjects is what are the odds?

Lets say the "mega-artsite" like iTeo or Guild for example has lots of visitors and supposedly buyers, but also a lot of artists. I have a friend who has a few pages at the iTeo and in four month he had no visitors (he does not do anything to bring people there himself, though). I also placed one of my frescoes on some mega-site about 3 years ago and had two visitors and only because there were curious enough to search the site for frescoes and I was the only artist (out of 30,000) that had a fresco.

On the other hand there are personal artists galleries with links pages and all sorts of 100/50/150 Top Art Sites lists.
Modern Fresco Gallery link on a few of them and, for example "Olga's Gallery" - great museum quality site on Classic painters (mostly 19th cent and earlier) sends to www.truefresco.com about 50 people per week, or a link on a friends page gets a few people each day.

OK, to the option one (mega sites) buyers go "supposedly"
To the option two - artists, students and just curious people.

Now the question:
1. Does this traffic/exposure to non-buyers on the small site benefits artist more then a chance to "run into a buyer" on the mega-site?
2. Will the joining and exhibiting on the new/forming site, another words investing your time and effort, give the artist more useful exposure then going to where the bigger "crowd" is?

I know that in the "Brick and Mortar" gallery (I owned two at the same time, once) it is better to have one buyer than a hundred "just looking", but what are the odds on of finding a collector in the crowd of (hypothetically) 30000 of website "lookers" or to be found by a collector in the crowd of (hypothetically) 30000 artists?

Ilia Anossov
http://www.truefresco.com/anossov