Ibaku

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, the Corporation · 2005-01-07 23:39

During his exhaustive search for a years subscription to DeviantArt through an art trade, my good friend mochi pointed out to me that yearly subscriptions to DA are now $30 for one year! I start thinking to myself, didn’t they used to be something like $12? I know of cheaper email services that put more work into keeping their servers running than DA puts into at least making sure your page requests are served (even if it does take 15 seconds). DA has been constantly getting on my nerves for the past 2 years. They just keep getting worse.

I wouldn’t even touch this subject unless I had experience in the field and knew about how much work is required to keep this kind of a site online, but I do in fact have that experience. I know from talking with the developers working on DA that it’s run from PHP and MySQL, and from using the site, I have a very good idea what their database schemas look like, and I know how they have their distributed services setup. That all happens to be my area of expertise when it comes to computers, networking, and programming. So don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about here. I have yet in the past 2 years seen a solution to the buggy friend management system, which shouldn’t of taken more than two months to implement, test, and throw on the production servers.

The second DA started charging for subscriptions with added features, they became a company with paid employees. I’m not arguing their steps when they made that move, it was a required move for the fact that there are servers and bandwidth that need paid for. I’m just saying that for having full time paid programmers, they’re doing one shitty job at keeping up maintenance, scaling their servers, and making choices on features, website design, and the way they handle image thumbnailing. They aren’t doing the job their paid for. Having a DA subscription means absolutely shit when the site doesn’t even work properly.

There was a time I actually considered making a DA type site of my own that was coded correctly from the ground up the first time. That was maybe 6-7 months ago. I even registered a domain name for it, but also mostly since it had a whole different purpose that what DA is for in the first place. The point I’m going to make right now is that DA needs to shape up before I ever sign up for a subscription, and they really never deserved the subscriptions they have right now. I may at some point (as soon as I’m finished with some other website ideas I have that come before this) start work on that site again considering it’s already paid for and already hosted. It’s pretty pathetic that 10-20 people get paid to run this site, and it only needs maybe 5. That doesn’t include community leaders, etc, which I’ve also found happen to be the artists on this site that are making lots of money off of prints on this site, but don’t even get me started on the politics of DA.

I guess I should also mention that yes, Spot, we have met in person. Also, sorry Pinguino, I know DA is somewhat of a home for you, hope to see you at next Defcon. I’ve managed to keep the Scavenger Hunt competition running strong, it’s now an official event as of Defcon 12.

Update: As if it wasn’t enough, DA had to prove me right the same day I originally posted this.

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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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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:

pu-sama (I’m a big Hellsing fan as well)
enayla
bleedman
kurot
suzi9mm (also DA staff)
bri-chan
celesse
messa
sebychu
larafairie
arcipello
Wen-M
kittynn
jennadelle
noah-kh
nyanko-chan
ferus
MincedNiku
Artgerm
ursulav
maui
SeaFairy
nanami-yuki
lithiumpicnic
giovannag
Michelle84
ssilence
ukitakumuki
bara-chan
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

$fluffy
$spot
$spyed
$lllo0o0olll
$chris
$dj-designs
$kevin
$realitysquared
$dygel
$skittleboi
$micahgoulart
$liquisoft
$phae
$Heidi
$jark
$jsenn
$pachunka
$MikeyLove
$fella1 (interesting account to say the least)
$jeanpat (not listed)
$mccann
$melodymaker (not listed, note subscription expiration)
$JasonLee (not listed, also note subscription)

”%” – 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

:deepbluenothing (not listed anywhere, not sure what his job is, possibly Daily Deviation)

”@” – 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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Ulterior Motives · 2005-04-12 22:51

I’ve once again been brought back to this subject with a few more thoughts to be taken into consideration. There seems to still be a lot of people that think I’m crazy with this DA evaluation, and come back with the age old response: “But DA supports the artists. They bring the community together.” Lets examine this response, because I’ve gotten quite the opposite feel from DA.

A really good artist I know has an account with DA, and I have a quote from him today:

“How some of the people on DA get all the pagehits they do will forever remain a mystery. Some people are fan-whores, drawing art that corresponds to whatever cartoon/anime is most popular at the time (note: popular does not equal well done). Some people are death-whores, some are inflationists (which boggles my mind to levels previously unthought of), some are simply REALLY BAD ARTISTS. How some of these people gain such REDICULOUSLY HIGH PAGEHITS/WATCHES/FAVS will continue to befuddle my mind for as long as I remain here. There are some artists on here who simply kick ass, yet get no recognition whatsoever, while some other folk can spend ten minutes spitting up a peice of explitive deleted that makes it into the top deviations.” – Mochi

I’ve seen artists mark every last one of their submissions as changed without changing anything just so everyone in their Devwatch list get’s a message and link to every last one of their submissions so they can pump up their pageviews to insane numbers without doing anything. I wouldn’t care about this or bring it up if the admins were working on a fix for it, but this isn’t some old bug with DA, “artists” are pulling off this little hack right now. It’s still a bug in the DA system. DA has never gotten around to fixing it, and probably won’t ever fix it.

My rankings I did in my last journal entry aren’t ranked by pageviews, their all ranked by how many users are watching their deviations/journals/scraps/etc. It’s probably the only and best way to rank artists on DeviantArt, and what’s sad about that is that it’s not fair either since new, better artists haven’t had the time to build up watchers. DeviantArt could put a ranking system like 1 to 5 stars per deviation (for example) and every user could rate a deviation once, then those numbers would be a better way of ranking artists. It would rely strictly on good art versus popularity. Then again, what would I know, I’ve only been building websites for 5 years.

DeviantArt supports the artists you say? I don’t think so. They feed on popularity. While it’s possible for a good artist to make their way up the ranks, it takes both time and knowledge of DA’s system. You have to understand how you need to post your work to know how to get the page views and to get people to buy your prints. It would be fine as well if DA had a rating system for artwork so people could browse art based on ratings as well as categories, but DA is a 100% popularity contest. There is no ranking system.

Conclusion

The fact that I could easily collect all of the above information (including more that I didn’t post) already points to the fact that DeviantArt runs a fairly loose company more based on the politics of the company than keeping up solid, secure, efficient servers. My numbers keep blaring in my face going “how in the hell does all this money not cover bandwidth, equipement, paid programmers as well as paid database administrators ensuring everything is optimized to handle the load (which it isn’t, and still to this day is constantly being shut down for ‘maintenance mode’)”. How is it that there’s 90-100 admins, but the site is constantly having problems? I’ve seen sites that get 50 times more traffic, and only have maybe 15-20 guys working on it (Slashdot probably makes for a good example). Well, take everything I’ve said with a grain of salt. Thanks for at least reading all the way to the end. Feel free to add your opinion to the thread.

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