Online Art Sales Reached $423.9 Million in 2025 as First-Time Buyers Kept Coming
Online-only fine art sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips, Bonhams, and Artnet Auctions reached $423.9 million in 2025, an 8 percent increase from 2024. The figure underscores how firmly digital bidding has settled into the auction business, even as the broader market expanded at a faster pace.
The online segment’s growth lagged the market overall by 5.3 percentage points, but its scale remained substantial. A total of 29,623 lots sold online in 2025, roughly unchanged from the previous year. What shifted was pricing: the average work sold online climbed 8.6 percent, to $14,309.
The long view is even more striking. Online-only sales were 270 percent higher than in 2019, before the pandemic accelerated the migration of auctions to digital platforms. What began as a practical adjustment has become a durable channel for both established buyers and newcomers.
Christie’s offered one of the clearest signs of that change, reporting that 63 percent of its new buyers in 2025 made their first purchase online. For auction houses, the message is hard to miss: online sales are no longer a secondary convenience, but a meaningful entry point for a younger and more digitally fluent collector base.
As the market continues to rebalance between live rooms and screens, the online category now looks less like an experiment than a structural part of contemporary art commerce.
