How on Earth did a com­pa­ny like Neon­Mob sell 4.8 mil­lion pieces of dig­i­tal art since launch­ing in 2012? They must have found a gim­mick that works because so far they’ve raised a total of $2million dol­lars in seed fund­ing from investors. Oh and get this, the guy who invent­ed the hash­tag back in 2007, Chris Messi­na is leav­ing Google after more than three and a half years to join this com­pa­ny. So what is it about Neon Mob that made Messi­na become this San Fran­cis­co Company’s head of com­mu­ni­ty and growth?

Dig­i­tal Art is a grow­ing indus­try and the fact is that there are so many images avail­able on the web that try­ing to make mon­ey on it is very dif­fi­cult, so Neon­Mob (jobs st Neon­Mob) is look­ing to make it so that an image avail­able online is unique and wor­thy of being col­lect­ed. How is this done? You have to cre­ate the idea of scarci­ty, that that image is lim­it­ed in acces­si­bil­i­ty. The com­pa­ny offers a myr­i­ad of tools and fea­tures that the artist can apply to their works to help them build col­lec­tions. Then if a cus­tomer wants to buy the col­lec­tion they can. The artist deter­mines the price and how many will be made avail­able, thus intro­duc­ing the notion of scarcity.

Mike Duca, founder of Neon­Mob states that “Dig­i­tal scarci­ty is kind of rad­i­cal and goes against the way most peo­ple think about how the inter­net and data works.” Neon­Mob has cre­at­ed an authen­ti­ca­tion soft­ware that cre­ates a sequence of num­bers that pro­vide the user with a unique code for own­er­ship of the art­work, so prints can be ver­i­fied on and off the Neon­Mob plat­form. “Since Neon­Mob inher­ent­ly pro­motes the notion of dig­i­tal scarci­ty, we have to show peo­ple why it’s no dif­fer­ent than Andy Warhol choos­ing to cre­ate 50 prints of each Campbell’s Soup poster instead of 1 or 1,000. Peo­ple aren’t used to relat­ing to data, or art, in this way.”

Now the groovy ele­ment for the artist is that Neon­Mob offers up to 70 per­cent of every sale that occurs on their site. Smart move on their part because they keep inven­to­ry costs way down since the works are dig­i­tal and the artists actu­al­ly make some mon­ey. Duca says “we’re try­ing to show peo­ple that col­lect­ing online can be just as sat­is­fy­ing, as and or more sat­is­fy­ing than offline col­lect­ing.” Still con­vinc­ing peo­ple of this idea of scarci­ty is not going to be sim­ple since we have grown so accus­tomed to just copy­ing and past­ing what­ev­er we like into a fold­er some­where on our computers.

If you love art and the new premise of cre­at­ing a scarci­ty online dig­i­tal art cul­ture, find out if they are look­ing for more tal­ent­ed folk to join.