Is CARA the new social media for artists? Instagram versus Cara

hey welcome back and if you're new here my name is Christina Kent and I'm a full-time fine artist based in San Francisco and today I want to talk about something that has been sort of taking over my social media and that is the app Cara or Cara I'm not really sure how to pronounce it so if you've been on Instagram recently you've probably seen a lot of artists posting about this new app Cara and for me like just over the past few days I saw one artist post about it one day and then all of a sudden it felt like everyone was posting about it the next day and the day after one by one all the these artists that I knew were starting to move to this app Cara and meanwhile a lot of artists are super frustrated with how things are going on Instagram how Instagram has been treating artists and so in this video I want to talk about this new app Cara and if this app could be an answer to all of our Instagram woses so first why are artists getting frustrated with Instagram um and I think Nicolas urbe who's a really amazing artist and Camilo coreno they were recently talking about some of their frustrations with Instagram I've seen a lot of other artists posting recently about their frustrations and I also made a video about whether or not I thought that Instagram was worth it for artists given all of the changes that are happening on the platform many artists on Instagram are finding that it is so hard to get exposure on the app anymore when back in the day they could send a post and it could go viral and or even just get seen by their followers today artists are making posts and not even a fraction of their their followers are seeing it and this is for larger accounts for smaller accounts it's hard to even get seen at all as I talked about in my other video I think Instagram is trying to get users to pay or creators to start to pay more for exposure rather than giving us exposure on the app in exchange for all of the great content that we're creating and so this is a big move that that I see Instagram doing but even if you pay for exposure like I've tried doing some Instagram ads and it feels like I have to pay a lot of money for just a small amount of clicks by people that I don't even know if they're real the other issue with Instagram is I feel like it's been dominated by like funny videos and memes to me it's becoming a lot more like Tik Tok and even like of the artists I follow I don't actually see their art I see more of like the content that they're creating like videos of them in the studio which which is fun also but like I kind of just want to see the art sometimes and then more recently there's been some news about how Instagram is using all the photos on the app to train its Ai and how at least for people in the US I think it might be different for people in the EU um but for people in the US and most of the world you actually can't opt out of this training and even I've heard people in the EU it's very hard to opt out it's possible but they make it really difficult so as a Creator on Instagram I kind of just feel like I feel like disrespected I feel um that they're just trying to make a lot of money off of me when I'm already creating a bunch of content for them for free like without any compensation and and then just um adding to the fact that they're scraping all of the images that I put up and using them for their AI I mean that that's just is like an additional slap in the face so what can an artist do well there's a new app now called Cara that could be the answer to some of our problems and I think this app has been around for a while like it I saw some of their posts on the app that have been around for a year or more um but it wasn't until recently that I heard about it and saw a lot of a lot of artists that I know flocking to the app I think the big Exodus is partially driven by the news about meta using all of our images for their AI training which a lot of artists dislike and then also I think some really large accounts on Instagram like Nicolas arbe are talking about it and moving over and that that kind of spread the word to all these other artists recently the app has actually hit 300,000 users and I think they were not expecting this Mass flood because the app has been crashing things have not been working well and I think that they're just struggling to keep the servers running I think this huge influx of new users to Cara has reflected just how frustrated the art community is by all of these changes that are happening on Instagram and I think part of the mass Exodus has also been artists flocking away from Deviant Art which from my understanding has been overrun with AI images and that's one of the big selling points of Cara that they emphasize is that they don't allow any AI on their platform so Cara has gotten all these new users and it could be a critical mass to build a strong art community on the app but is Cara the answer to artists who are frustrated with Instagram so from what I understand about Cara it's pretty new it's a pretty pretty small team I heard it's founded by an artist and they claim to be by artists for artists the app is kind of like a combination of Instagram and Twitter so there's like a portfolio section that looks like the Instagram Gallery where you can have all of your works but then there's also a section for posts that's a bit more like Twitter where you can post your work you can repost other people's work um you can share different things and so it feels like a little combination of those two apps and going along with their anti- a stance they've partnered with a tool called glaze that apparently helps you put a filter on your artwork so that it can't be scraped to be used by these AI algorithms I tried using that filter but um things are kind of running slow on the app right now so I wasn't able to actually use that myself and one of the other big differences between Cara and Instagram or Twitter is that you can't post videos and you can't post AI art so is this the solution to all the problems that I mentioned earlier with Instagram here are some of the good things that I'm noticing first it seems like the app really is devoted to Art and artist so when I look through my feed I'm mostly just seeing paintings and because we don't have video content I feel like the focus really is on just the art I also like how it has both this portfolio feature where I can show exclusively my own work and it has the reposting feature where I can share art work by artists that I really like because I think that also helps build a greater sense of community as far as the no AI art thing goes that has affected me less I think because I mostly follow traditional artists on Instagram I don't get exposed to that much AI art but I think think for digital artists this is a really big deal they also have an automated tool to detect if images appear to be AI generated but honestly the tool seems a little overzealous because it did flag one of my original paintings as Ai and I haven't been able to resolve this yet so those are the good things that I'm happy about on the app but I do have some questions my first question is is this app really going to be just for artists or will the broader art community Join one of the things that I love about Instagram is that I can connect with galleries art consultants curators and my collectors and as a fine artist that's really important so far I haven't seen anyone from these groups moving on to Cara and that gives me a little bit of pause I'm wondering if it might be more of like an artist networking app kind of like the artist version of LinkedIn and maybe that's okay because it is really important to connect with other artists and build community but I still really want the collectors and the Galleries and the curators to be on there too and right now I'm not sure if there's enough of an incentive for them to join because right now all the artists that I on Cara seem to still be posting to Instagram and so galleries collectors curators they can just continue to follow them there I'm not ready to stop posting on Instagram because I still want to connect with that group another big question is how is the app going to sustain itself with the new influx of users I saw they posted something like their server costs have gone up to like $133,000 a month and right now I don't think that they have any sort of Revenue model so the question is how are they going to make money will it be ads is it going to be a subscription if they're going to base the revenue off of ads then I feel like they're going to start moving in the direction of Instagram going for video content for clickable things for things that um that just grab our attention and keep us on the app longer and I think that that's that's going to destroy the beautiful thing that it has going on right now another option is for the app to support itself with subscriptions but of course then that runs the risk of users not wanting to pay the fee and so not being on the app and for an app that is basically like a social network you really want to have a huge Network for it to be valuable right now they're asking for people to donate money um because they're trying to run these servers and I think for these like large social media apps a lot of them they don't they're not able to make much money until later on so for this small app that seems to be kind of bootstrapping things I don't know if I I just don't know how sustainable that is I mean already they're spending a lot of money on their servers and they're asking for donations to help support them and so so it seems they definitely need to find a way to start making money if they want to keep going and when it comes to subscriptions I don't know if I would be willing to pay like I want to know if the app is actually valuable maybe I mean maybe you could say hey it's worth it artists are so fed up with Instagram um we should give this app a chance at least to see where it could go and the nice part about subscriptions too is that um I don't have to worry about them selling my data or or using my work in a way that I don't agree with like I feel like when we're paying a subscription we're the customers rather than the product and I do like that model better but I still need to feel like it's worth the value of that subscription and maybe it's worth paying like $5 a month to give it a chance but I also wonder if galleries art Consultants my collectors would feel the same way another thing I'm wondering about is if they could follow sort of a LinkedIn model so from my understanding LinkedIn makes its money from companies who want to hire people paying for extra features and things so I can have my LinkedIn profile as as like a potential worker but I don't have to pay anything and it's the companies it's the recruiters who pay for these other services that support the app now I don't know how much potential this idea has for the Fine Art world I don't know if galleries are willing to pay for things like this but I'm wondering if maybe companies like um Animation Studios or yeah companies that hire like concept artists digital artists would be paying for this the app does have a feature that reminds me of LinkedIn where you can uh you can show on your profile if you are open to work if you're contract based if you're open to full-time work or part-time work so that did make me think a little bit about the LinkedIn model so those are my two main questions for the app can we bring the broader art community so not just artists but also art lovers onto this app and also will the app be sustainable in the long run which brings me back to my question is Cara the answer for us artists who are frustrated with Instagram and I think to be honest like the whole Instagram experience has just left me really burned out with a lot of these apps over the years I realized I can't depend depend on one app to support my art business or even to help me connect with the broader art community because maybe the app starts out great like what I thought Instagram was and then it turns into something else and I just don't have any control over that so while I'm hopeful about Cara it's I'm not going to put all of my faith into it for me I'm focusing on inperson interactions so that that's having exhibitions going to Art openings going to open studios and trying to meet other artists art collectors curators in person because these inperson interactions these relationships that we build can't be taken away by a change in an algorithm or an app and I'm also still building my email list because I think email is not going away anytime soon um it doesn't seem to have these like major changes that a lot of apps can have over time it's kind of a pretty reliable system that that everyone uses and so that's what I basically want to keep using to connect with people who I don't get to see in person it takes a longer time to build these relationships and to grow a career this way but I think it's a lot more sustainable in the long run so while I'm cautiously optimistic about Cara or Cara or whatever it is I'm not going to be putting all my hopes on this one app I will say I do feel encouraged to see so many artists sort of uniting around the same cause and connecting over this frustration about the way that we've been treated on these apps I feel like we artists have a lot of power when we unite as a cohesive community and that's awesome so yeah I'm just thinking of Cara as another tool in my toolbox of things but but it's not the main thing I'm depending on and a lot of this stuff about inperson interactions I recognize it's really easy for me to say I live in a big city so I I mean if you're in a smaller town I feel for you I don't have good advice for you right now and um and I would love to hear like if you do live in a small town and you're finding other alternatives to um being beholden to these apps I would love to hear about your experience in the comments anyway that's my thought on the recent happenings on social media for artists I'd love to hear your thoughts about the benefits of Cara or questions that you have about it or potential problems or concerns um please post them in the comments below and as always a huge shout out to my supporters on patreon thank you guys so much for supporting this Channel and making these videos happen if you like my art if you like my videos and you want to help me make more check out my patreon at the link thanks again for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Christina Kent Art

Views: 65,561

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Id: yogJ0C1YFhM

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2024