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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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having moved in Deviant Art circles (some time ago, admittedly) I'd say one reason for the low price might be that, somewhat like Reddit, the core values of the community make it challenging to monetize.

Is it? dA is full of artists selling their art and users buying it. It's full of Patreons, donation buttons, etc. See Twitch for what successful monetization of this sort of audience looks like.

A lot of that commerce happens in violation of copyright, and sometimes in violation of other laws too; it can fly under the radar when it's person-to-person but would be harder for the company to monetize.

Is Twitch profitable? Have they had to face a serious copyright infringement lawsuit from a game maker yet?

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

#73

One thing I discovered about Wix the other day. They are active on their public GitHub repos and they are have very high quality React Native packages!

My only experiences with Wix websites have been completely negative. Slow load times, non-functional interfaces, menus and the like and terrible designs (as in, presentation layout and formatting of graphics and other objects) have been the norm for me. It's cheap, and folks are getting what they pay for.

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

#74
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…

> Chris Bolt the dude who built a lot of the tech there is INCREDIBLY

Incredibly what? =)

I haven't touched my DA account in years, but more because I've stopped drawing than any issue with the site or community. I was exposed to the work of a lot of amazingly talented people through DA, that I probably would not otherwise have seen.

http://rorypyro.deviantart.com/

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

#75
post #70

One potentially alarming sentence in this article is "Wix will open up DeviantArt’s repository of art and creative community to the Wix platform, giving Wix’s users access to that work to use in their own site building." Exactly what do they mean by that? Will it be opt-in? Will it only cover art that's already under Creative Commons? Will be it all Creative Commons? Does a Wix site count as commercial use? I can't i…

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…

Royalty-free? Looks like a bad deal.

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

#76
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The first I heard of Wix was a few months ago when a local news site deployed their new design. The page would be completely blank for 10-15 seconds while it made hundreds of requests for useless little React turdlets. As far as I can tell, they "fixed" it by moving away from Wix. If that's normal for a Wix site, then I would say no, nobody involved on either side of the transaction is a web developer except in the m…

I thought you were exaggerating, but holy cow... maybe those who disagree can find me a site from http://www.wix.com/explore/websites for which that doesn't hold true, because I gave up after a few which were all incredibly abysmal. Yeah, those sites are "stunning" alright. Aesthetically very bland and samey, but technically utterly stunning. I wouldn't even know how to make something that slow without using a combination of bmp images and sleeping here and there for a few seconds.

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

#77
post #51

I think the most interesting detail here is that Wix is doing well enough that it has $36M to spend.

wix and squarespace and godaddy are the new "wordpress site". I ran into a "Squarespace developer" here in Manhattan few weeks back.

Why? It seems like Wordpress still offers the perfect balance between usability and flexibility. At least that was my conclusion after doing research for an association that was looking to host their own website. Wix options seemed to be very static while Wordpress has a plugin for everything. And it's free while you had to pay for "social media plugins" in Wix.

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

#78
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…

Royalty-free? Looks like a bad deal.

It's a classic point in most, if not all, social websites or where the content is generated by the user.

And it's usually there to protect the website for altering storing and advertising with user generated content.

It always has had the potential to be used for bad, we will see if this time actually happens.

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

#79
post #17

I remember spending many hours browsing dA back way back when. There are so many art/design/etc communities now that I'm sure it's getting more difficult to retain users.

What are some other art communities? I've been looking for a decent alternative for a while

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

#80
post #70

One potentially alarming sentence in this article is "Wix will open up DeviantArt’s repository of art and creative community to the Wix platform, giving Wix’s users access to that work to use in their own site building." Exactly what do they mean by that? Will it be opt-in? Will it only cover art that's already under Creative Commons? Will be it all Creative Commons? Does a Wix site count as commercial use? I can't i…

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…

I'm no lawyer, but it looks like that language grants the DeviantArt corporation rights to use submissions, which they need in order to provide basic search as well as marketing.

It would be a different thing to grant Wix users the right to take someone's work over to their own sites, I speculate that would require an extension or transfer of copy rights in addition to the quoted policy.

I'd wait and see, I'd expect that Wix won't just lay claim to all submissions without asking for permission or remunerating artists who's works are sold.

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