Unseen (website)
Unseen is an online marketplace for [...] art. It does not produce nor commission any of the artworks featured on its site. Rather, it provides an eCommerce infrastructure enabling the hosting and sale of the erotica artworks authored by individual artists, which Unseen calls “grassroots erotica.”
The content ranges widely, spanning all major artistic media, varying in subject matter from naïve snapshots to political cartoons and contemporary shunga, and ranging in quality from amateur cyberporn to works of considerable artistic competency.
Concept
Unseen’s principal idea is to deliver a self-regulating Web-based marketplace for all types of [...] art produced by individual artists. Unseen aims to capture a portion of the Internet-based Adult market by leveraging a completely new content production and delivery model. On the supply side, Unseen counts on the untold millions of individual authors ranging from established artists to amateurs, to home video enthusiasts. On the demand side, Unseen’s audience is equally diverse and includes a casual cyberporn aficionado and a serious art collector alike.
Another point of departure from typical Adult Web sites is Unseen’s stated policy of inclusiveness with respect to [...] orientation and subject matter. While most Adult sites on the Internet occupy a very narrow niche, Unseen offers a home to all types of visual expressions of human sexuality.
History
The Unseen site was launched on March 1, 2008 by Liquid Amber, a Berkeley, California based Internet development firm. By September 1 the site grew (through the word-of-mouth and occasional Craigslist ads) to 400 registered users and 14,000 daily image views.
Web Site Features
The Unseen web site implements a range of features designed to support a rich user experience for both content authors and content consumers. The home page features two sets of gallery thumbnails: “the most viewed” and “recommended.” The most viewed galleries are presented in the order of popularity as recorded and calculated automatically by the Unseen application. Recommended are the newly uploaded galleries designated by the Unseen editorial staff as meeting a certain standard of quality and artistic competence. In the future, Unseen plans to deploy sophisticated social networking capabilities which will (among other things) automate the editorial recommendations.
Unseen features completely open metadata. In other words, any registered user can adjust any metadata pertaining to any other user’s work (not just his own), such as “hardness rating” or the [...] orientation of the content. This is a radical departure from the generally-accepted way the modern Web 2.0 sites, such as Flickr, treat user metadata by allowing only the owner of the content (or, in some cases a group of people designated by the owner) edit the metadata. Unseen’s stated reason for this departure is to broaden the base of metadata authorship . Server-side algorithms weigh each metadata adjustment based on a variety of factors (owner vs. non-owner, the number of adjustments to date) in order to guarantee fairness and convergence.
In keeping with Unseen’s open metadata model, it features open and adaptive tagging. Not only can any registered user add tags to any content, but each tag has a weight with respect to each gallery. Over time, each gallery acquires a set of tags that reflect not only its author's but the entire Unseen community’s perception of the content. Each time a user performs a search on a particular set of tags and interacts with the search results, the server-side algorithms readjust the weights of the tags with respect to the galleries on the hit list.
Monetization
Unseen offers two way for the artists to monetize their work:
- Direct sales of original works of art, not unlike a traditional art hosting site.
- Sales of reproduction prints of the artwork, not unlike a traditional photo sharing site. Reproduction prints are offered as postcards, note cards and 3 sizes of gallery quality inkjet prints.
- Unseen has hinted at the possibility of introducing premium content galleries in 2010.
See also
- [...]
- erotica
- [...] art
- [...] photography
- [...] photography
- life drawing
- figure drawing
- figure painting
- gesture drawing
- [...] modeling
- depictions of nudity
- [...]-positive feminism
- paid content
- user-generated content
- online community