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Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

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Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#151

Post by Senderman »

sideproject wrote: post #148
neom wrote: post #8

From 2001-2007 I worked on helping build the community at dA. Had such an interesting and unique childhood and teenage years due to deviantART (and IRC). I owe everyone from that time a huge thank you for helping me become who I am today. It lost all it's magic (for me) when Scott and Eric Kolb left. Angelo is an absolutely amazing guy and I really really admire him but it was pretty sad to watch the community die. F…

Would you care to elaborate what was so amazing about the dA community? I ask sincerely as someone who was never a part of the community. I've visited the site in passing a few times, so I know of it. But would love to hear the specifics as to what makes (or made) dA such a great place for you (and others of course!)

DA has always had a culture of being a safe place online to post something you've made without fear of ridicule. I joined in 2001 as a person-who-liked-drawing but had no scanner, so I tried out writing, since that was a category on there that other people were doing, and I got terrific feedback from a handful of strangers, who quickly became friends. Now I consider myself a writer. Programmer/writer, but writer nonetheless, and I don't think that would have happened without DA. I eventually became a programmer there for a while too, so maybe I wouldn't have become either of those. ;)

Anyway, as far as I could see, that welcome-to-the-community experience was happening to everyone who joined, if they were participating at least. It's bigger now, so it's hard to bump into the right people when you're new, but that same DNA is still there. Read the comments on any popular piece - it's usually positive and constructive. And often extensive.

I don't know if I'm replying well; I feel like this ultimately just sounds like "you had to be there" - but when it comes down to it, I believe the amazingly positive culture is the answer to "what was amazing?"

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#152

Post by sengork »

DA is one of the web's icons and it complemented the rise of CGI extremely well.

For me the site was at times educational helping explore software tools others used to create their works of art. Screenshots on the other hand were extremely useful in desktop customisation and seeing what was possible to do across OS platforms.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#153

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

egeozcan wrote: post #52
minimaxir wrote: post #4

Yesterday, coincidentally, there was a surprisingly silly and heated discussion in a large Facebook group about whether a person who specializes in Wix can be considered a "web developer." ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/hackathonhackers/permalink/1... ) Hacker News is biased toward DIYing websites from scratch, but WYSIWYG builders like WIx are very important for those who aren't tech-savvy. DeviantArt, in a world…

You are a definitely "person who develops for web" but not necessarily a Web Developer within the context of any community which assigned a specific meaning to that title. The definition may, of course, change over time and it already differs across communities. On the top of my head, I know many freelancers who wouldn't consider you a web developer without good Photoshop skills and many JavaScript- oriented develope…

Someone who can use Wix could possibly be called a “Web Designer”, but “Web Developer” seems a stretch within a conventional understanding.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#154

Post by Someone »

delinka wrote: post #86
buro9 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://about.deviantart.com/policy/submission/ 3. License To Use Artist Materials. As and when Artist Materials are uploaded to the DeviantArt Site(s), Artist grants to DeviantArt a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to do the following things during the Term: a) to prepare and encode Artist Materials or any part of them for digital or analog transmission, manipulation and exhibition in any format and by…

Notice it says nothing of re-licensing to others. These terms seem to facilitate DeviantArt's (and presumably its owner(s)) ability to show your work to the world on their site. But does not facilitate their sub-licensing your work to others. If I were an artist and loved my DeviantArt account, I'd make sure to hold them to task if my work showed up on a Wix customer's site.

If I understand wix.com's product correctly, those customer sites run on wix.com's servers. So, one could argue that it would be wix.com that shows the images. It would not be clear-cut that this infringes on that license.

I do hope that wix.com will do the right thing, though, and limit this to images that their creators permitted to be reused and/or add a feature where wix customers can negotiate with deviantart users over pricing.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#155

Post by spynxic »

neom wrote: post #8

From 2001-2007 I worked on helping build the community at dA. Had such an interesting and unique childhood and teenage years due to deviantART (and IRC). I owe everyone from that time a huge thank you for helping me become who I am today. It lost all it's magic (for me) when Scott and Eric Kolb left. Angelo is an absolutely amazing guy and I really really admire him but it was pretty sad to watch the community die. F…

To everyone reminiscing in this thread:

Better make a repository of your works, quickly! Who is to say it will be the same site in a few months, or weeks.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#156

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

bookbinder wrote: post #115

I thought DeviantArt would be worth more than $36M.

The valuation makes sense to me. Their userbase is hard to monetise (I'd wager a large chunk of kids aged 10 to 18 with limited purchasing power - and the adults there are definitely in the AdBlock crowd). Things like premium site subscriptions and print services will only take you so far - and now that we're post-"mainstream Internet" its growth is limited to the rate people are being born and given its anti-establishment streak I don't think the site will last long in China.

So if the site is making $10m/yr profit, 3 years' revuenue and no expectations of growth means $36m is a fair price.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#157

Post by neom »

Senderman wrote: post #151
sideproject wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to elaborate what was so amazing about the dA community? I ask sincerely as someone who was never a part of the community. I've visited the site in passing a few times, so I know of it. But would love to hear the specifics as to what makes (or made) dA such a great place for you (and others of course!)

DA has always had a culture of being a safe place online to post something you've made without fear of ridicule. I joined in 2001 as a person-who-liked-drawing but had no scanner, so I tried out writing, since that was a category on there that other people were doing, and I got terrific feedback from a handful of strangers, who quickly became friends. Now I consider myself a writer. Programmer/writer, but writer none…

I think this is exactly it. Kindness was something built-in from day one, it was core to everyone who was responsible for steering a community. We talked about loving each other and loving the community very often and publicly and loudly. It also came from the top. Scott Jarkoff (co-founder) and especially Eric Kolb (dir of community) are really great people, they encouraged and in fact mandated a general idea of no assholes. Everyone on the community team had a lot of lee way to ban, and we banned liberally and often for anything that was even remotely off tone or out of culture. The cool thing about banning from the admin side is it was build in a "time out" manner, when you banned someone you would generally set a period of time the ban was for, and it was pretty difficult to ban someone for life. Rehabilitation was something we actively promoted. We worked pro-actively to resolve conflicts out in the open. We also made a pretty deliberate effort to instill a culture of positive critique and criticism. If someone posted something that was harsh or to the point, you could generally expect an experienced community member to reply with a suggestion to start with a compliment or something similar. Sometimes someone would even re-write a whole crit for a new member to show how it's done. We tried to humanize the site as much as possible too, profiles became very important, we encouraged people to be very personal in their journals. It was for sure lots of little things, such as around 2005 (I think but don't quote me) the community staff started talking among themselves about having a photo as their profile, not an avatar. The IRC community was also quite large and vibrant, and again the tone was always positive. Pedanticism was STRONGLY discouraged. Every time I was coached by Eric or Scott, it was always super: "you are awesome here is how you can improve btw we love you, be more awesome, you are awesome." - This is what Scott wrote on my linked randomly one day, you can get a sense of the type of dude he is: http://john.je/jIP5 -- As a note, this is the exact same way that the DigitalOcean community was built. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714513

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#158

Post by TheGrassyKnoll »

bhouston wrote: post #34

Seems like a low valuation as they raised $10M in 2013 from Autodesk: https://techcrunch.com/2013/09/26/deviantart-autodesk-fundin... https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1402519/000140251913... I can not figure out what the valuation was of DA when it got the Autodesk investment. I also notice that ArtStation.com seems to be rising on DeviantArt.com but still a way to go: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/deviantart.…

> "...deal will increase its revenue outlook by around $8 million,..."

  So $36 million/$8 million = 4.5 times sales
>"...40 million registered members..."

  So less than a buck per registered user

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#159

Post by elastic_church »

sideproject wrote: post #148
neom wrote: post #8

From 2001-2007 I worked on helping build the community at dA. Had such an interesting and unique childhood and teenage years due to deviantART (and IRC). I owe everyone from that time a huge thank you for helping me become who I am today. It lost all it's magic (for me) when Scott and Eric Kolb left. Angelo is an absolutely amazing guy and I really really admire him but it was pretty sad to watch the community die. F…

Would you care to elaborate what was so amazing about the dA community? I ask sincerely as someone who was never a part of the community. I've visited the site in passing a few times, so I know of it. But would love to hear the specifics as to what makes (or made) dA such a great place for you (and others of course!)

personal hug box, with areas to challenge your creativity and request the harshest of criticism if you so desired.

putting yourself out there in this way was also part of the networking aspect, as it was hard to get any attention to your artwork.

as we've seen to this day across a plethora of networks, nobody has come up with a real solution to discoverability in the face of volume, and I fear machines are just going to learn to do it the same way as humans.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#160

Post by blhack »

sxates wrote: post #145
neom wrote: post #8

From 2001-2007 I worked on helping build the community at dA. Had such an interesting and unique childhood and teenage years due to deviantART (and IRC). I owe everyone from that time a huge thank you for helping me become who I am today. It lost all it's magic (for me) when Scott and Eric Kolb left. Angelo is an absolutely amazing guy and I really really admire him but it was pretty sad to watch the community die. F…

I remember chatting with Scott on ICQ when he was building the site at the very beginning. He sent me a link to test uploading something, which I did - a screenshot of my desktop. It's one of if not the oldest remaining submissions, and was the first 'daily deviation' (for lack of other content, I'm sure!). Lots of great people around communities like this back in the day, but then so many of us seemed to grow out of…

Oh c'mon, you have to link to a piece of internet history like that!
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