NewHive


NewHive is both a social network and a creation engine for Web 2.0 content. It is a web platform that encourages users to develop their own creative content that has been coined by NewHive as, expressions. Many members of the NewHive community are productive artists with established practices, creating, “A critical framework around post-internet art practices by engaging with the art world and contemporary society".

Features

The NewHive site uses Python, MongoDB, and JavaScript in a user-friendly interface. The site is hosted by Amazon's cloud services. Though simple but powerful on-line tools that can be learned quickly, NewHive allows text, links, photos, videos, drawings, music, GIFs, and more to be composed into website collages. It also allows embedding of material from YouTube, Spotify, and so on. GIFs can be combined into single scrolling pages, which NewHive calls GIF walls. When you save a page on the site, you can add tags or allow others to remix it to help it reach a broader audience or you can leave it private.
NewHive has been involved with new practices in contemporary art since its launch, fostering trends and allowing for the creation of thousands of art works. In addition to working with curators and promoting works created by users, it regularly commissions multimedia mixtapes, singles, zines, ebooks, curated exhibitions, and solo projects by emerging and established artists engaged with the Internet. NewHive also works in partnership with organizations like Asylum Arts, the Goethe-Institut and the Museum of the Moving Image.

Revenue model

NewHive is presently backed by private investors and is free to use, and ads will never be placed on expressions but NewHive hopes to eventually sell new tools to the creators who use them as one of their means to raise revenue. CEO Zach Verdin said, “In addition to a marketplace that will allow third-party developers to create applications, extensions and widgets; the New Hive will provide services…such as customized URLs and personally branded hives...

History

The concept behind NewHive was developed in 2008 by cofounders Zach Verdin, Cara Bucciferro, Abram Clark, and Andrew Sorkin and was on-line in private beta in November 2011. Seed funding of $100,000 was obtained from private donors including SV Angel in 2012 allowing the platform to be launched in beta followed by a public launch on February 18, 2014.
Visual artists, like Molly Soda and Labanna Babalon, were among the first people to appear on NewHive.