Museums are institutions that collect, conserve, interpret, and exhibit artifacts of cultural, historical, artistic, or scientific importance. It would be difficult to put a price on their significance, but these organizations do play a key role in terms of economic impact. In 2023, the market size of the museum industry in the United States was estimated at roughly 16.7 billion U.S. dollars, experiencing a 2.6 percent annual increase. That year, employment in the U.S. museum industry reached just over 74 thousand, with total wages in the U.S. museum market amounting to almost four billion U.S. dollars.
The United States is home to one of the largest museum and research complexes in the world, the Smithsonian Institution, which is also the U.S. charity-based organization with the highest revenue. In 2023, the number of visits to Smithsonian museums and institutions in the U.S. totaled nearly 18 million, rising over 2022 but remaining below the figures recorded before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. When it comes to social media presence, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (known as the Met) in New York were the museums with the highest social media followers worldwide as of March 2023. The Met was also one of the U.S. institutions ranking on the list of the most visited museums worldwide in 2022, together with the National Museum of Natural History and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
According to data from Statista’s Consumer Insights Global survey on event ticket bookings in the United States, seven percent of U.S. respondents reported booking tickets for museums and art exhibitions as of September 2023. When breaking down museum ticket bookings in the U.S. by age, consumers aged 30 to 49 recorded the highest figure as of that month. Meanwhile, a 2023 survey focusing on the ethnicity of museum visitors in the U.S. showed that four in ten individuals who identified as Asians or Asian Americans visited a museum in the previous year.
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