deviantART

About

deviantART is an online artist community that focuses on curation of user submitted artworks and collaboration among its users. The website’s content pool is sectioned into a number of categories including digital art, photography, traditional art, film and animation, cartoons, manga, flash animation and literature. Aside from showcasing artworks, the site also hosts a discussion forum where users can discuss their artworks and a category section dedicated to educational resources and tutorials for artistic techniques.

History

Launched on August 7th, 2000, DeviantART was founded by Scott Jarkoff, Matthew Stephens, Angelo Sotira and others as part of the Dmusic Network, a larger network of music-related websites and blogs. In the beginning, DeviantART was designed as a place to upload and share custom designed skins for applications, similar to other projects like Winamp Facelift, Customize, Deskmod, Screenphuck and Skinz. The site was well-received upon its launch and quickly gained a strong and loyal user-base as well as a team of voluntary moderators.

In less than a year after its foundation, DeviantART was officially incorporated in April 2001. Later that same month, DeviantART user switched[7[ submitted a mascot artwork of a robot cat named “Fella,” which went onto win the site’s contest and became adopted as the official mascot of DeviantART.

As the community continued to grow, one of the co-founders Matt Stephens proposed a plan to expand the scope of the site from application skins to a general art community. In November 2006, DeviantART enabled a new option for users to submit their works under Creative Commons license, which gave the artists the right to specify how their contributions can be used and shared by others. In September 2007, a film category section was added to the site where users could upload their own videos and add annotations for comments or critiques during playback. Many individuals who were involved in the early development and promotion of the site continue to work for the site, including the co-founder Angelo Sotira who serves as the chief executive officer of deviantArt, Inc.

Features

• Both unregistered visitors and members can browse millions of user-submitted artworks through thousands of category sections by medium, genre or style. Once signed in, a user can easily “favorite” bookmark any artwork by clicking and dragging it into the user’s collection page. Users can upload an unlimited amount of artwork at no cost.

• Users can also create and customize the profile page to introduce oneself to the community at large. The user profile section also offers journal entries and custom widgets, as well as pageview statistics on submitted artworks.

• Users can also earn revenue through selling prints of their artworks, receiving 20% of the profits in transaction. With a premium account, users can be rewarded 50% of the profits.

Traffic

According to one of the co-founders Angelo Sotira, the site had over 14.5 million members, 100 million total submissions and generates roughly 140,000 submissions, 1.4 million favorites and 1.5 million comments per day, as of August, 2010.^[1] The site holds a Compete^[3] rank of 344, a Quantcast^[2] United States score of 97, and is the no. 121 in the entire world on the Alexa^[4] scale as of July 2011.

Highlights

Art fads are popular amongst deviantART users, and often consist of a picture within set constraints, such as a character they’ve made in a specific style, age or pose like Nyu’s Art Meme, Sparkledogs, and the DeviantArt Age Meme. In addition, Emoticon-based fads, such as Pyong or Lick Icons, can be commonly be found on the site as well. The site is also notable for popularizing template-based survey memes; there is even a group on deviantART dedicated to these called “Meme Station”.^[5]

Search Interest

External References