March 4, 2011 at 12:11Where to go to artists and what awaits them in the Internet space
One of the comments that I saw on the Habrahabr.ru website sounded like this: “Well, why in RuNet there are no normal sites for creativity - with a large audience, good design and excellent content? Everywhere there is either design or freelance ... But for musicians and artists there is nothing normal at all ... ”
Let me tell you a little about what we do and how we help creative people realize their talents, well, at least declare them. And I would also like to share my observations during the work of the Russian-language version of the site.
We are a kind of “house of talents” and, moreover, an international house, because the team sincerely believes that creativity knows no boundaries and all that. Small difficulties and problems in the form of a language barrier sometimes still arise among fellow artists on their thorny path to fame, despite the fact that they communicate in the language of art. Therefore, our platform today operates in six languages (English, Russian, Turkish, Spanish, French, German), and we plan to add two more in the near future. We work in several areas, namely, music, cinema, photo, design, fashion and fine art.
Interactive communication on the site takes place through contests or, as we call them, Creative Invites. We announce a contest, participants register on the site, post their portfolio (if there is something to post), then they also upload their application. The application is a work (sketch, photo, music track, video, etc.) and a small description of it. After the end of the contest, voting begins, in which everyone is interested and for this it is not necessary to register on the site, because You can vote through your Facebook account. When the voting ends, the contest organizer usually first looks at 10-20 works that received the largest number of votes. If for some reason these works do not pass, although this happens very rarely, the organizer selects from the general list of applications. Sometimes we immediately indicate that the organizer plans to review all the work, regardless of the vote. For example, in the case of a competition from the Ann Klein brand for the redesign of an existing logo. Thus we identify the winners.
I also want to note that we are trying to organize contests not with cash prizes, but to concentrate more on an interesting and useful experience for our artists. For example, a recently launched contest from the legendary Queen group. Yes, there is a slight contradiction with the statement above. Yes, the prize is money, in the amount of one and a half thousand bucks, but the experience itself is amazing - creating a design for a T-shirt for the 40th anniversary of Queen's musical career. If I were a designer, I would at least try. But in addition to this, a design T-shirt will be sold in the group’s online store, funds will be sent to fight AIDS. Unique experience and noble aspiration.
But one of the cool contests that recently ended was the comic book grandfather Stan Lee - creator of such characters as Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men and others. The prize is a trip to Comic-Con 2011 in San Diego (USA), meeting with Stan Lee and a trip to Todd McFarlane’s studio. It will be a unique experience for the winner (I will say so, because the winner has not yet been announced). After all, you never know what such opportunities can turn into. This is an important element of our concept - opportunities and positive experience.
Here are a few heroes from 2 thousand applications that we received. On the site you can see such a riot of fantasy that it is difficult to come off.
In the beginning, of course, a skepticism arises. By launching the Russian version of the site, we analyzed if there is something similar in RuNet. Of course, there is a remotely similar one. As the author of the comment correctly noted, there are a lot of sites with contests for designers, there are several for photographers - such as photosight.ru and a couple more consonant in name, there are also for DJs, such as promodj. I don’t want to say anything bad about them; we successfully cooperate with some of them. But they are usually local (oriented to Russia), publish competitions from Russian companies, or translate publications from foreign sites without directly cooperating with them. Freelance, I would not refer to this category, because nevertheless, they are a job search and tendering site, and they are doing it quite successfully.
Our difference from the aforementioned platforms and the like lies in the fact that we do not restrict participants geographically, and the spectrum of competitions is wider. The site, of course, exists relatively recently. In the present version - a little over a year, and during this time about 100 Creative Invites were implemented. We usually receive from 300 to 2 thousand applications for one competition. The subjects of the competition are from design to dance with names such as Stan Lee, Lady Gaga, Queen, Anne Klein, Adidas and the British Olympic team, Paul Taylor and others.
Of course, it can’t do without technical problems. As it turned out recently, for example, the site does not support the Opera browser, which, for example, is not used at all in the USA, and 35% of Russian Internet users work with this browser. It was, of course, news to American colleagues, yes, and to me too. All over the world this browser has lost its relevance, and in Russia it is still very popular. But we are working on it, although there are enough dissatisfied participants. But such technical difficulties always arise when a large mass of people begins to use the site. At the testing stage, it is difficult to foresee everything, so they missed Opera browser.
Returning to our users, the number of unique visitors with us has grown rapidly with the addition of the Russian and Turkish versions of the site, which indicates an increased interest and lack of such resources in these countries.
I was also struck by the rapid increase in the number of visits from Armenia. In a recent competition from the music group Maroon 5, one of the winners was the representative of Armenia. And the percentage of visits today is around 3% of all traffic, which is good for monthly growth. Below is the work of the winner from Yerevan.
Another discovery for me was how actively the population of Turkey uses the Internet. Traffic from this country on the site is in the region of 15% and this is a month's growth. The country ranks third in the number of Facebook users. Our employee said that even her grandmother has a Facebook account, which made my mouth open a little. And I will not say that in each competition we have at least one representative of Turkey among the finalists, which is impressive.
Design and photo contests remain very popular. Either because this category of people is more actin and ready to share their ideas, or because contests, for example, for DJs are too narrow and niche. For example, in the design competition for Queen, which I mentioned above, we did not manage to announce the competition, as we had already posted about 100 works.
The first contests and the platform itself in its current form were launched in July 2009. We started working with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra; model Naomi Campbell; director and nominee for an Oscar, Fernando Maralis, etc.
In addition to contests on the site, you can still upload your portfolios and receive comments, exchange projects or order projects, which is already happening between the site participants and without our control.
Our platform can be called anything you like - a social network with a creative focus, an online platform for contests or, as we were recently called in the media, a marketing agency. The essence of this does not change - an interesting experience and the implementation of creative ideas.
Thanks in advance for the comments and if the habrahabr community likes the publication, I will be happy to talk about other observations, contests and their results.
We are always looking for talents and will be glad to see you in our community, to hear your wishes and comments.
Naida Volkova (Talenthouse.com)
Let me tell you a little about what we do and how we help creative people realize their talents, well, at least declare them. And I would also like to share my observations during the work of the Russian-language version of the site.
We are a kind of “house of talents” and, moreover, an international house, because the team sincerely believes that creativity knows no boundaries and all that. Small difficulties and problems in the form of a language barrier sometimes still arise among fellow artists on their thorny path to fame, despite the fact that they communicate in the language of art. Therefore, our platform today operates in six languages (English, Russian, Turkish, Spanish, French, German), and we plan to add two more in the near future. We work in several areas, namely, music, cinema, photo, design, fashion and fine art.
Interactive communication on the site takes place through contests or, as we call them, Creative Invites. We announce a contest, participants register on the site, post their portfolio (if there is something to post), then they also upload their application. The application is a work (sketch, photo, music track, video, etc.) and a small description of it. After the end of the contest, voting begins, in which everyone is interested and for this it is not necessary to register on the site, because You can vote through your Facebook account. When the voting ends, the contest organizer usually first looks at 10-20 works that received the largest number of votes. If for some reason these works do not pass, although this happens very rarely, the organizer selects from the general list of applications. Sometimes we immediately indicate that the organizer plans to review all the work, regardless of the vote. For example, in the case of a competition from the Ann Klein brand for the redesign of an existing logo. Thus we identify the winners.
I also want to note that we are trying to organize contests not with cash prizes, but to concentrate more on an interesting and useful experience for our artists. For example, a recently launched contest from the legendary Queen group. Yes, there is a slight contradiction with the statement above. Yes, the prize is money, in the amount of one and a half thousand bucks, but the experience itself is amazing - creating a design for a T-shirt for the 40th anniversary of Queen's musical career. If I were a designer, I would at least try. But in addition to this, a design T-shirt will be sold in the group’s online store, funds will be sent to fight AIDS. Unique experience and noble aspiration.
But one of the cool contests that recently ended was the comic book grandfather Stan Lee - creator of such characters as Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men and others. The prize is a trip to Comic-Con 2011 in San Diego (USA), meeting with Stan Lee and a trip to Todd McFarlane’s studio. It will be a unique experience for the winner (I will say so, because the winner has not yet been announced). After all, you never know what such opportunities can turn into. This is an important element of our concept - opportunities and positive experience.
Here are a few heroes from 2 thousand applications that we received. On the site you can see such a riot of fantasy that it is difficult to come off.
In the beginning, of course, a skepticism arises. By launching the Russian version of the site, we analyzed if there is something similar in RuNet. Of course, there is a remotely similar one. As the author of the comment correctly noted, there are a lot of sites with contests for designers, there are several for photographers - such as photosight.ru and a couple more consonant in name, there are also for DJs, such as promodj. I don’t want to say anything bad about them; we successfully cooperate with some of them. But they are usually local (oriented to Russia), publish competitions from Russian companies, or translate publications from foreign sites without directly cooperating with them. Freelance, I would not refer to this category, because nevertheless, they are a job search and tendering site, and they are doing it quite successfully.
Our difference from the aforementioned platforms and the like lies in the fact that we do not restrict participants geographically, and the spectrum of competitions is wider. The site, of course, exists relatively recently. In the present version - a little over a year, and during this time about 100 Creative Invites were implemented. We usually receive from 300 to 2 thousand applications for one competition. The subjects of the competition are from design to dance with names such as Stan Lee, Lady Gaga, Queen, Anne Klein, Adidas and the British Olympic team, Paul Taylor and others.
Of course, it can’t do without technical problems. As it turned out recently, for example, the site does not support the Opera browser, which, for example, is not used at all in the USA, and 35% of Russian Internet users work with this browser. It was, of course, news to American colleagues, yes, and to me too. All over the world this browser has lost its relevance, and in Russia it is still very popular. But we are working on it, although there are enough dissatisfied participants. But such technical difficulties always arise when a large mass of people begins to use the site. At the testing stage, it is difficult to foresee everything, so they missed Opera browser.
Returning to our users, the number of unique visitors with us has grown rapidly with the addition of the Russian and Turkish versions of the site, which indicates an increased interest and lack of such resources in these countries.
I was also struck by the rapid increase in the number of visits from Armenia. In a recent competition from the music group Maroon 5, one of the winners was the representative of Armenia. And the percentage of visits today is around 3% of all traffic, which is good for monthly growth. Below is the work of the winner from Yerevan.
Another discovery for me was how actively the population of Turkey uses the Internet. Traffic from this country on the site is in the region of 15% and this is a month's growth. The country ranks third in the number of Facebook users. Our employee said that even her grandmother has a Facebook account, which made my mouth open a little. And I will not say that in each competition we have at least one representative of Turkey among the finalists, which is impressive.
Design and photo contests remain very popular. Either because this category of people is more actin and ready to share their ideas, or because contests, for example, for DJs are too narrow and niche. For example, in the design competition for Queen, which I mentioned above, we did not manage to announce the competition, as we had already posted about 100 works.
The first contests and the platform itself in its current form were launched in July 2009. We started working with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra; model Naomi Campbell; director and nominee for an Oscar, Fernando Maralis, etc.
In addition to contests on the site, you can still upload your portfolios and receive comments, exchange projects or order projects, which is already happening between the site participants and without our control.
Our platform can be called anything you like - a social network with a creative focus, an online platform for contests or, as we were recently called in the media, a marketing agency. The essence of this does not change - an interesting experience and the implementation of creative ideas.
Thanks in advance for the comments and if the habrahabr community likes the publication, I will be happy to talk about other observations, contests and their results.
We are always looking for talents and will be glad to see you in our community, to hear your wishes and comments.
Naida Volkova (Talenthouse.com)