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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.

DeviantArt Study Results · 2005-01-26 22:33

I didn’t want to go to far with my work I was doing off to the side all involving crawling the DeviantArt site looking for weaknesses, so I’ve decided to stop where I’m at and make the information I’ve collected useful and public. None of the following information was gathered illegally, it’s all public information, easily accessible via the DeviantArt website. Enjoy!

The information gathered allowed me to do a few things I’ve actually wanted to do for a while with the DeviantArt site, first of which being a list of the most popular artists (no matter how long you stay on DeviantArt, there’s always artists in this list you never run upon surprisingly), so without further hesitation, I present the top 30 watched DA artists:

  1. pu-sama (I’m a big Hellsing fan as well)
  2. enayla
  3. bleedman
  4. kurot
  5. suzi9mm (also DA staff)
  6. bri-chan
  7. celesse
  8. messa
  9. sebychu
  10. larafairie
  11. arcipello
  12. Wen-M
  13. kittynn
  14. jennadelle
  15. noah-kh
  16. nyanko-chan
  17. ferus
  18. MincedNiku
  19. Artgerm
  20. ursulav
  21. maui
  22. SeaFairy
  23. nanami-yuki
  24. lithiumpicnic
  25. giovannag
  26. Michelle84
  27. ssilence
  28. ukitakumuki
  29. bara-chan
  30. bionic7

I’ve noticed running through the results (a good portion of these artists have made my personal DevWatch list now as well) that the results seems to be bias not just on good art, but also tend to favor users who submit a lot more art, and not necessarily good art. So keep that in mind.

I was curious to find who else has administrator rights to DeviantArt that isn’t listed as staff on the About page. In the process of doing so, I also found a status symbol not mentioned in the FAQ, ”#” – supposedly meaning “Art Group Member”. Not sure why DA needs a special status symbol for it, but whatever. Well, let’s continue with the admin results:

All users minus subscribed (*), free (~), banned (!), and senior member (`):

”#” – Art Group Member

”$” – Core Administrator

”%” – deviantART Prints Staff

Somehow my database missed a few of the prints staff here. Here’s the ones it missed that are listed:

”+” – General Staff

”:” – Premium Content Staff

”@” – Shoutbox/dAmn Moderators

”^” – Gallery Directors

As for inennui, I found out she/he left DA due to a fight this last week, ironic, no? The account was set back to a “Senior Member”. See this for further info: inennui’s Journal

All of the above information was taken from a database of 333,000+ DA users that has information about user status including subscription, admin status, banned users, etc. It also follows popularity trends through the count of users with any given user in their DevWatch. Since I didn’t have full access to DA’s databases, mine is incomplete. The method of information gathering though ensured I didn’t miss any active users. There may still be as many as another 200,000+ users not included in the stats, but they should all be people who signed up for an account, but never used it (those people most likely did not pay for a subscription, so I won’t include them in those stats).

The incomplete database I’ve collected shows about 16,988 users who are paying for a subscription to DA. At yearly rates, a subscription costs $30/yr, at every 3 months, it’s $32/yr, at monthly rates, it’s $60/yr. With the price break being so big at every 3 months, I’m going to guess the average user pays $35/yr for a DA subscription. With 16,988 users paying $35/yr, DA makes about $600,000 per year on subscriptions alone. This does not include DA merchandise, prints, or donations (none of which I can find out about, but am guessing it’s at least another $500,000 per year).

That database is freely available here in SQL format with structure, compressed using gzip compression here. (3.30MB) (right-click, save as…)

I found a lot more information about prints giving myself 10 minutes to look around the deviantPrints site:

There are somewhere around 63,600 prints total on DA. DA has a base price that every print costs (supposedly the actual cost of the print), the price at which any artist chooses to sell their work at, DA takes 50% of the profits (total price minus base price divided in half between DA and the artist). According to DA’s pricelist (listing base prices and default standard prices), DA makes on average $5 to $15 profit (as well as the artist) per print for your usual sized prints. I’m sure that there’s a lot of prints that never get sold, but I also know there’s a lot of prints that sell more than 20 copies a piece. Considering DA has an approval system in place before any prints are posted, I’m sure at least 50% of prints accepted are purchased, also meaning at least 25% of prints have sold 2 copies, and so on…

If I’m doing the math even remotely correct, DA has made at least $500,000 from prints since the prints system was added. Want to know what’s more sick than that? I didn’t even include the cost of buying a DA print account (which costs $25, which I’m not sure if it’s annually or not). Let’s say on average, everyone with a print account has 10 prints for sale, which I think is about right. That would make about 6,360 artists with print accounts meaning another $159,000. See the DA Prints Pricelist.

Ok, now on to the DA advertising costs. As an advertiser, you can spend as much as $50 per week on advertising. Currently, advertising shows about 3 major advertisers paying for ads along with DA showing ads for it’s own prints as well as some Google AdWords bringing some cash flow back to DA. I’m going to guess that DA brings in at least $200 per week on advertising, which comes to a measly $10,000 per year, barely a 1/10th of the cost of bandwidth for the year. So advertising brings in close to nothing compared to other DA services. There is still one really good reason for keeping advertising up though: It’s most likely the main reason more than 50% of users have subscribed to DA; just to get rid of the ads. So DA only keeps ads up to push people to subscribe since they make more money off your subscription than they do the advertising. If DA thinks they need those banners there to push people to subscribe, they point out the fact that even they realize their subcriptions aren’t worth the money. If they wanted to make an honest income, they would take down the banners, and work on the site to make DA subscriptions worth the money it costs, and get people to subscribe because they want those cool features and not because they just want to get rid of those stupid banners that take ages to load, and account for probably 10% of the outgoing bandwidth that DA is in dire need of according to them (their excuse for slow page loading times even though it’s not).

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