2013

Between September 2013 and January 2014, Retronaut was Guest Curator at Europeana. Retronaut surfaced Europeana’s #1 shared image, Europeana’s #1 search term and a 17,000% rise in traffic.

Mashable

(2014-2017)

“I can easily say that my partnership with Wolfgang and Retronaut was one of the most rewarding episodes of my many years in the news business. The potential for retronaut to enrich a site by using visual stories is truly endless.”

- Jim Roberts

Executive Editor, Mashable; Assistant Managing Director, New York Times; Editor-in-Chief, Cheddar

In 2014, Retronaut was licensed to the US-based site Mashable for three years. Retronaut’s brand, curation methodology and content was exclusive to Mashable for the length of the deal. Retronaut published approximately 450 capsules on Mashable.

During its first week on Mashable, Retronaut published the capsule Russia before the Revolution in Color. The following day, on October 1st, that capsule was responsible for almost a quarter of Mashable’s entire traffic. Across the three year period, Retronaut’s capsules were the most viewed content on the entire Mashable site, with almost three times the average visit time of the next most viewed.

For the year 2015 to 2016, Retronaut was the most viewed content creator on Mashable. As an example, Retronaut created five of the top ten most viewed posts across the entire Mashable site, and 25 of the top 50 posts - including the number one post. Across the top ten, Retronaut’s posts were responsible for 16.2m views. For Retronaut’s five posts in the top ten, the average visit time was 155 seconds. The nearest non-Retronaut posts in the top ten was 88 seconds.

For the year 2016 to 2017, Retronaut was again the most viewed content creator on Mashable, with a total of 48.2m views across a total of 509 posts. The next closest creator achieved 46.1m views - but published 1,765 posts. The average number of views across Retronaut’s 509 posts was 94.8k. Of the top ten content creators, the next closest average was 26.2k.

Mashable extended the licensing deal for a further year in September 2017, but the deal was then axed when Mashable was sold to publisher Ziff Davis the following month.

(2015)

In 2015, Retronaut collaborated with print and card makers Urban Cottage Industries on a series of exclusive Retronaut cards.

Meural

(2016-2017)

From summer 2016 to winter 2017, NYC-based art company Meural licensed Retronaut's digital capsules for its Meural Canvas - a digital connected canvas built to showcase artwork and photography. The canvas uses TrueArt technology—a proprietary blend of hardware, firmware, and software—to renders images lifelike and textured.

(2016)

In October 2016, Buzzfeed published a post of a set of pictures of immigrants to Ellis Island taken from the Retronaut / Dynamichrome book The Paper Time Machine (US: History As They Saw It; German: Zeitreise; French Quand Le Passé Reprend Vie En Couleurs).

The post achieved 2.8million views in the first four days, and became the most shared and viral of all pictorial posts on Buzzfeed.

2.8m views. To get that amount in just 4 days is incredibly impressive, it truly went viral around the world. I’ve published over 400 articles for BuzzFeed and the Ellis Island one is the most viral, with the most readers. Second post to that is at 1.6m. We don’t really have average figures for articles, but anything over a million is considered to be extremely successful, most don’t do that. I’ve only done that three times now.

- Matthew Tucker

Picture Editor, Buzzfeed

The piece went on to be published in multiple global media outlets.

(2016)

The Paper Time Machine pictures of Ellis Island Immigrants are featured in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service film USCIS and the Legacy of Ellis Island. 

(2018-2020)

From October 2018 to March 2020, Retronaut licensed its brand and curated capsules exclusively for Considerable - a media site which looked to redefine what it means to grow older.