COVID-19 has pushed museums to improve their online offerings, including virtual tours, as they explore potential business models based on digital content
Daniel Grant / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
When COVID-19 lockdowns hit in early 2020, cultural venues scrambled for substitutes for foot traffic: coverage of the period described a surge in online community building and live streaming becoming an ad hoc support system for music and nightlife. This article marks the moment museums moved past improvisation toward treating virtual tours and other digital content as potential business models rather than stopgaps.
The arc that follows validates the experiment: within two years, European institutions including the British Museum were embracing NFTs as a fundraising tool, while UK stage theater companies built AR and VR broadcasts of productions for home viewers — evidence that pandemic-era digital offerings hardened into revenue lines.
First-order effects
- Museums with closed galleries gain a direct incentive to staff and fund digital teams — photography, tour software, and content production shift from marketing side-projects to core operations competing for budget.
- Visitors locked out of physical buildings get new paid-or-freemium access points, forcing each institution to decide what stays free outreach and what becomes product.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent performing arts face the same playbook: theater companies' move into AR/VR broadcasts shows the museum model spreading across cultural sectors, putting pressure on any venue still treating digital as a loss leader.
- Platforms that host this content gain negotiating leverage over cultural institutions, mirroring how live-streaming platforms became intermediaries for musicians during lockdowns.
Third-order effects
- If the business-model search keeps yielding results, museums' relationship with their collections changes structurally — digital assets become monetizable property in their own right, a path already visible in institutions collecting and displaying NFTs even through market downturns.
- A two-tier cultural economy could emerge where large institutions with digitization resources sell global reach while smaller ones remain dependent on physical attendance, widening funding gaps across the sector.
The trend: Cultural institutions are converting pandemic-era emergency digitization into durable digital revenue models, from virtual tours to NFT-based fundraising.