Personal artwork commissioning market: products and attempts
Before it appears
Artwork commissioning is an urgent need both in commercial sceneries and for personal proposes. Games need painters to create characters, publishers need pictures for their book cover, and ordinary people also hope to present their faces in a different way, or to visualize their imaginary characters. The former usually go through introductions between painters and formal contracts, while the latter seems more ambiguous.
Before there was any platform for personal artwork commissioning, painters posted their price lists on different social media with specific hashtags. Consumers added painters as SNS friends after seeing the price lists, paid them before or after they finished their creation. Accidents always happened, because nothing ensured the painters would finish the painting or the consumers would pay. Also, painters distributed on different platforms, so consumers needed to go through Weibo, Tieba, Qzone, Xianyu and even more apps to find a painter they would like to collaborate with.
Mihuashi: from commercial to long-tail
Mihuashi, a platform launched in 2014, focuses on connecting painters and consumers. For the first several years, it was a commercial platform with a user scale of about 30,000, mostly enterprise users; however, at about 2018, a bunch of personal users discovered and moved to the platform, because it offers secure transactions and high-quality painters(since most painters on the platform were commercial artists at that time ).
Mihuashi realized the long tail market behind personal users' behaviors. In response, they added the "display window" function in the APP. Earlier, all the commissions were offered by users in the "commission" function, where users could present their requirements and invite artists to quote the price. In the display window function, painters show their price list and sell acceptance slots like merchandise. This converts a buyer's market into a seller's market, which is more in line with the needs of individual buyers, because usually they don't know what exactly they want until getting an example.
In recent years, Mihuashi is the uncontroversial biggest artwork commissioning platform in China, relying on its first-mover advantage and care for individual users.
Bilibili workshop: blue ocean and fan economy
In 2022, a point in time that Mihuashi already has a large and stable user base, Bilibili released workshop, a sub-function relied on the famous video APP. When first released, workshop was highly similar with Mihuashi, where the only difference was the audit standards of painters, which means cheap but low-quality painters could undertake commissions from users.
Later, Bilibili workshop started to develop a series of different functions. It first extended its business scope to all virtual products, including paintings, articles, pay for knowledge contents and high-resolution photos, and offered a user-friendly system which allows every content creator to manage their items. Compared with Mihuashi, this further fitted different users' needs: some of them only need a picture as avatar, don't care about if it's unique or not; some wish for different vectors, not only paintings. Later, even physical goods are also available through Bilibili workshop, and a correlated logistic enquiry system was launched. By "being different" with Mihuashi, Bilibili workshop developed a group of loyal users.
Another strategy of Bilibili workshop is to bind items with content creators deeply. Actually, there's no direct entry to workshop, all entries to particular item are embedded in video uploaders' homepage and video pages. By this way, the workshop have deeply integrated with the fan economy, creators now can easily sell fan merchandise with this function.
Artwork commissioning is an urgent need both in commercial sceneries and for personal proposes. Games need painters to create characters, publishers need pictures for their book cover, and ordinary people also hope to present their faces in a different way, or to visualize their imaginary characters. The former usually go through introductions between painters and formal contracts, while the latter seems more ambiguous.
Before there was any platform for personal artwork commissioning, painters posted their price lists on different social media with specific hashtags. Consumers added painters as SNS friends after seeing the price lists, paid them before or after they finished their creation. Accidents always happened, because nothing ensured the painters would finish the painting or the consumers would pay. Also, painters distributed on different platforms, so consumers needed to go through Weibo, Tieba, Qzone, Xianyu and even more apps to find a painter they would like to collaborate with.
Mihuashi: from commercial to long-tail
Mihuashi, a platform launched in 2014, focuses on connecting painters and consumers. For the first several years, it was a commercial platform with a user scale of about 30,000, mostly enterprise users; however, at about 2018, a bunch of personal users discovered and moved to the platform, because it offers secure transactions and high-quality painters(since most painters on the platform were commercial artists at that time ).
Mihuashi realized the long tail market behind personal users' behaviors. In response, they added the "display window" function in the APP. Earlier, all the commissions were offered by users in the "commission" function, where users could present their requirements and invite artists to quote the price. In the display window function, painters show their price list and sell acceptance slots like merchandise. This converts a buyer's market into a seller's market, which is more in line with the needs of individual buyers, because usually they don't know what exactly they want until getting an example.
In recent years, Mihuashi is the uncontroversial biggest artwork commissioning platform in China, relying on its first-mover advantage and care for individual users.
Bilibili workshop: blue ocean and fan economy
In 2022, a point in time that Mihuashi already has a large and stable user base, Bilibili released workshop, a sub-function relied on the famous video APP. When first released, workshop was highly similar with Mihuashi, where the only difference was the audit standards of painters, which means cheap but low-quality painters could undertake commissions from users.
Later, Bilibili workshop started to develop a series of different functions. It first extended its business scope to all virtual products, including paintings, articles, pay for knowledge contents and high-resolution photos, and offered a user-friendly system which allows every content creator to manage their items. Compared with Mihuashi, this further fitted different users' needs: some of them only need a picture as avatar, don't care about if it's unique or not; some wish for different vectors, not only paintings. Later, even physical goods are also available through Bilibili workshop, and a correlated logistic enquiry system was launched. By "being different" with Mihuashi, Bilibili workshop developed a group of loyal users.
Another strategy of Bilibili workshop is to bind items with content creators deeply. Actually, there's no direct entry to workshop, all entries to particular item are embedded in video uploaders' homepage and video pages. By this way, the workshop have deeply integrated with the fan economy, creators now can easily sell fan merchandise with this function.
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