Two of the art world’s most recognisable digital platforms are now under the same roof. Artnet and Artsy completed their merger last week, with both companies passing into the ownership of Beowolff Capital, a private equity firm founded by Andrew Wolff, a former Goldman Sachs trader.
“Artsy and Artnet have now merged under private equity ownership: Can two struggling platforms build something profitable?”
In the process, Artnet has been taken private. Jeffrey Yin, who previously led Artsy, will serve as chief executive of the combined entity. The question remains whether combining two businesses that have struggled to achieve sustainable profitability will produce something better or whether a larger version will simply have the same problems.
The restructuring that follows was, by any honest assessment, predictable. Economies of scale were always going to be implemented, and they have been. Word on the street is that at least seven Artnet News staff have lost their jobs, Artnet’s Berlin office has been closed, and the full extent of the redundancies across both organisations has not been formally disclosed. What is clear, the editorial operation has been significantly diminished, with some of the better journalists among those shown the door. Wolff has told Monopol magazine that he intends to maintain the group’s status as a leading voice in art reporting. The gap between that stated ambition and the current reality of the editorial team’s departure is, to put it charitably, a train wreck.
The strategic logic of the merger is difficult to understand, and its execution remains uncertain. Artnet holds a substantial database of secondary-market prices, comprising some 18 million auction results. The downside is that they were generated by Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and every other provincial auction house worldwide, and data remains in the public domain. The major auction houses have spent years litigating against Artnet and, for various reasons, have not been able to maintain a stranglehold on the copyright to the data. However, why pay for content when consumers know this little trick? If you need to price up a Warhol, go straight to the horse’s mouth or just Google Warhol… Prices or images. It’s all out there!
Artsy provides primary market intelligence through its extensive gallery network and an established audience of buyers at various stages of their collecting lives. The vision, as Wolff has articulated it, is a seamless platform that takes a user from discovering an artist through to understanding prices, reading about exhibitions, and ultimately purchasing a work, all within a single ecosystem. The problem with this is that most people want to see the work in the flesh and would rather buy it directly from a gallery or an Art Fair. The Bloomberg-for-the-arts comparison is entirely fanciful. Artsy prides itself on attracting an AB1 consumer, but has ended up saturated with too many galleries that are not Art Basel quality.
The financial picture also requires scrutiny. Artnet reported a loss of just over $1 million in its first-quarter 2025 income statement, filed shortly before the company was taken private. Artsy, despite raising more than $130 million since its founding in 2009, has never publicly confirmed a profit. Wolff’s current strategy centres on cost reduction, but cutting editorial staff creates a credibility problem of its own. Advertising revenue in most online media businesses is not a profitable ROI unless you have content to pin it to. Less coverage means fewer cases for luxury advertisers, who are themselves cutting back. The broader luxury market lost an estimated 50 million consumers between 2024 and 2025, a contraction felt across the sector and showing little sign of abating.
There is also the issue of technological changes that can scrape auction results from publicly available sources, and the continued development of artificial intelligence tools threatens to make comprehensive price data increasingly accessible without payment.
The Bloomberg terminal model, which costs somewhere between $27,000 and $30,000 annually, is a tempting comparison but a demanding standard. The art market for those new to its particular rhythms remains comparatively small, significantly elitist and resistant to the kind of infinite scalability that private equity investors tend to find most appealing.
Wolff has outlined a five-point plan for the business and indicated that both brands will be maintained separately for the foreseeable future, with a possible merger if the companies fail. Whether that represents strategic flexibility or deferred decision-making is a matter of interpretation. What is not in question is that the departure of experienced editorial staff represents a real and immediate loss to art market journalism at a moment when serious, independent coverage of the market is more necessary than ever.
Wolff is not without resources or ambition. But potential and ambition have been present at both companies throughout their histories, and neither has been sufficient in the past. The art world will be watching the next phase with a mixture of scepticism and expectations. Artlyst, for one, is happy not to have fat-cat VCs breathing down our necks after learning the hard way that there are no free lunches!.