The article(s) you are reading here are part of the DeviantArt Study collection, an examination of DeviantArt's policies, actions, and behaviour back in 2005.
DA, the Corp - Follow Up · 2005-01-08 15:10
A lot of people thought my words were a little harsh in my last journal post. So I thought, why don’t I do some numbers, and let you decide rather than giving you my opinions. I’m not any DA admin or anything, so I have limited access to what info I can gather, but here’s what I did find:
I did some math on large lists of DA users (meaning I pulled usernames from friend lists of the more popular DA users, btw, thanks DA for using a character indication of subscribed status), and found that on average 1 out of every 7 people on DA have a subscribed account. I know there’s been a lot of freebies given out and that number also includes some admins not filed under free users. So lets take that number down to about every 1 in 10 DA users pay the subscriber fees.
Out of the numbers I counted alone (I have no idea how many users DA has, but I could guess over 1 million), that being about 17,200 users, 2425 of them not free accounts, but we’ll bring that number down to 2,000 since like I said, some are admins and freeloaders. At 2,000 accounts paying $30 per year, that’s $60,000 per year. Say we look back at our base of 1 million users, approximately 100,000 of which are paying $30/year, hell, I’ll go with $20 since I think some are still back on when DA charged less than $30/year. That’s about $2,000,000 per year. Now, DA has a little under 50 distributed servers acting as the “collective rectum” (see footer of this page) that cost as much as $100,000 per year for all the equipement including switches including maintenance and upgrades I estimate. Then maybe $100,000 per year spent on rented NOC space at the most along with $90,000/yr for the OC-3 line (being that’s the biggest line I can imagine DA needing). There’s still another $1,700,000 per year to spend on employees. That’s enough to pay (with fairly damn good salaries might I add) about 40 full-time employees. To be honest, I think DA could get away with 10 full-time techs, and even though I’m not one to pay people to keep up a “DA Image” in the community (the politics side I mentioned before), another 10 people to manage the community. If DA was really about the users and artists, it would be the users and artists that are free to use the entire DA system. To me, that means that the only difference between subscribers and non-subscribers is the ads, possibly thumbnailing, but DA has gone too far with restricting non-subscribers to force people to pay for a shitty service.
I could go into further detail about how most of the “community leaders” are artists making bank on prints (a whole other source of income from DA aside from subscriptions that’s probably making close to the same amount of income, except with a more physical product), but I think I’ve made my point unless one of the DA founders wants to enlighten all of us with some stats and info.
You can find all my numbers I base my approximations on here and here.
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