Dutch museums see attendance increase; smaller locations in the red

Almost 26 million people visited a museum in the Netherlands last year, an increase of 2.7 million compared to 2013. But despite the increasing visitors, a number of smaller museums still ended up in the red, according to the report Museum Figures 2014 commissioned by the Museum Association.

Sector wide museums managed to increase their revenues by 29 percent, despite the economic crisis. But smaller museums are still struggling, mostly due to strongly declining subsidies because of municipal budget cuts, according to the association. While the smaller museums did manage to increase their own income and reduce their costs, this is not sufficient to cover the subsidy decline, which affects 70 percent of the museums in the Netherlands.

Between 2011 and 2014 the number of museum visits increased by 31 percent - an average annual increase of 9.3 percent. The number of foreign visitors increased by 37  percent. The number of kids under the age of 18 visiting museums, many as part of a field trip, increased by 12 percent to a total of 5.1 million young visitors last year.