Online art community Deviantart bought by Wix.com for (reported) $36mill

February 25, 2017 4:22 AM

Wix.com - primarily a WYSIWYG Web hosting company - buy DeviantArt Established in 2001, the art community / noticeboard DeviantArt (aka DA) has long been the place to see some of the best hobbyist, and professional fandom and original digital art.

In 2006 DA gave all users the option - and more importantly easy tools - to submit their works under Creative Commons licences, as well as also enabling users to sell prints / merch and monetise their artworks.

With over 35 million registered users and more than 256 million uploaded images DA is an established digital art brand - whether it is also a cohesive art community remains to be seen.

But what does Wix.com - a company known primarily for letting people set up free WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get] personal websites have to gain from the sale? Answer: All the digital assets on DA which it can now offer to it's wix.com customers.

Wix.com was founded in 2006. A Cloud based platform that primarily allows anyone to set up their own free website. It has approx 3.5 million users and had a valuation of $127 million when it's shares were offered to the public via NASDAQ in 2013. Wix as a company currently has a market valuation of around $2.86 billion.

Wix said that it will continue to operate DeviantArt as a standalone site, but it will also use it to boost its own business in a couple of ways.

First, DeviantArt users will get access to Wix’s web design tools to build out more dynamic online presences. These tools do not only cover design, but commerce and other features for running businesses online. - Tech crunch

Reportedly, as part of the deal, Wix has not only purchased all DeviantArt assets, but will retain all staff as well.

Neither company seems to have made any official fanfare about the sale.

posted by Faintdreams (27 comments total)

$36 Mil kinda feels like chump change in this day and age. I reckon if the site was a good 15 years younger and still with the new startup smell in it, the values would have been a lot higher.
posted by lmfsilva at 4:48 AM on February 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

Oh good. DA is good at what they do and nurtures a community with high standards. Maybe they can turn Wix into something greater than a steaming pile of shite.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:50 AM on February 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

> Maybe they can turn Wix into something greater than a steaming pile of shite.

Maybe if it were DeviantArt that bought Wix, but it's more realistic to instead expect the values of the purchaser to be enforced on the property. RIP.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 5:26 AM on February 25, 2017 [4 favorites]

lmfsilva: "$36 Mil kinda feels like chump change in this day and age. I reckon if the site was a good 15 years younger and still with the new startup smell in it, the values would have been a lot higher."

Yeah, that's not quite a fire sale price but it's pretty minimal for such a well known property.
posted by octothorpe at 5:37 AM on February 25, 2017

I can't imagine how WIX intends to convert umpteen terabytes of furry pr0n [/s] into a value-add for small businesses looking to build their cupcake website. In fact, I can easily see a slow but steady weeding-out of anything deemed too adult on DA, just to make things more palatable to WIX's customers. There's no point of buying an art repository if 3/4 of the product isn't appropriate for your customer base.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:16 AM on February 25, 2017 [8 favorites]

Surely we can do this thread without making jokes at the expense of well-intentioned members of the DA community.
posted by schmod at 6:33 AM on February 25, 2017 [8 favorites]

They're leveraging the creator-space!
posted by blue_beetle at 6:49 AM on February 25, 2017

Kind of surprised DA is still a thing, I left it for tumblr a long time ago--except now sometimes people are like "tumblr is still a thing?" I don't know if there's a more current "thing" for artists since most popular social media like insta, snapchat, etc are centered around photography.

This article actually reminded me I had a 13-year old DA account full of crappy drawings I made as a teenager, so I wiped everything and deactivated it, lest it comes to bite me in the ass some day.
posted by picklenickle at 7:21 AM on February 25, 2017

I would be surprised if their intention is to make the artwork available to small businesses building their websites. That would be a nightmare from a technological and legal perspective even without having to deal with tons of porn. It's more likely they want to use aspects of the platform to appeal to artists/creatives who want a professional website.

Also, I'm kind of surprised at the association of DA with porn. Granted, I haven't visited regularly in a long while, but I have an account there I used to follow a lot of fantasy / sci-fi illustrators. I knew some of them personally, and knew that they drew porn, but they never uploaded it there. Guess things change.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:31 AM on February 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

Ach, I use Deviant Art to host my series of "Artisanal Memes" cartoons. Is this likely to be a good, bad, or indifferent thing for people using DA to host drawing portfolios and one off projects mainly because DA offers such a convenient and painless channel for building and maintaining those kinds of galleries?
posted by saulgoodman at 7:41 AM on February 25, 2017

As someone who works on cars, I've always wondered how a filter company ended up in web design.
posted by dirigibleman at 8:40 AM on February 25, 2017 [5 favorites]

I haven't looked at the site nor my account for ages. I think I lost interest mostly when Brony art became huge, not that there is anything wrong with My Little Pony nor Brony art, but it's not my fandom of choice so it was somewhere I just went less and less.

Fandom art spaces do seem more splintered now than ever, especially since space such as Tumblr, instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, dedicated forums, Dreamjournal (and yes still) Livejournal - there is a niche space for all kinds of artists which I guess means people will gravitate to where ever is the least judgemental space that allows them to scratch their own personal artistic itch.

As for Porn / Controversial material I always avoided it by just having my mature filter left at 'On'. I always appreciated the fact that 'On' was the default and if someone really wanted to showcase their Nazi themed Shinbari, they normally had the good sense to place it under a 'Mature Content' tag so unless I went searching for it, I never saw it.

Not kink shaming there, just using the topic as a visual example.

I am not sure how wix.com makes money if it's base product is free, and also what they have actually gained from their DA acquisition. If they try to monetize all the user base art without strict consent, then plenty of non-professional artists will just delete their content, close their accounts and leave. Professionals might get litigious over rights and usage of their content.

I hope that DA isn't slowly dismantled or sanitized though. There does seem a palpable sense of community there and I think, it would be hard to replicate wholesale somewhere else.
posted by Faintdreams at 8:42 AM on February 25, 2017

Thorzdad: "There's no point of buying an art repository if 3/4 of the product isn't appropriate for your customer base."

25% of a quarter trillion images is still a lot of potentially useful images
posted by Mitheral at 9:01 AM on February 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

How many of those billions of images are licensed as creative commons or otherwise not commercially available though?
posted by dilaudid at 9:19 AM on February 25, 2017

DeviantArt is a fascinating little community full of some very creative artists. I hope it survives. I 'm thinking of LiveJournal which has so slowly and sadly withered away.
posted by Nelson at 9:27 AM on February 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

This is bad, right? DeviantArt is probably the best and well known platform for sharing and organizing art (Tumblr is absolutely terrible; Pixiv is great, but Japanese). Despite all the, "lol, that's still a thing?", a lot of people use the site and I can't think of a replacement platform everyone could move to if Wix got all Yahoo with DA.

It feels more and more like everything interesting and inspiring about the internet was a complete accident that only happened because traditional powers didn't take it seriously, but now that they do, they're working hard to "correct" the "mistakes."
posted by byanyothername at 9:44 AM on February 25, 2017 [13 favorites]

I am not sure how wix.com makes money if it's base product is free...

Don't you have to have your shiny new DIY website hosted by WIX? Or, that there's some nifty bells and whistles that only work if hosted by WIX?
posted by Thorzdad at 10:19 AM on February 25, 2017

Suddenly Allo realizes that its time has once again arrived.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:25 AM on February 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

Ello, you mean. And, yes, they do seem to be going after DA's niche.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:33 AM on February 25, 2017

Whoops, my bad. And yeah, before I deleted my account the thrust of the weekly emails was that it was a place for cool designers to share their cool creations.

The thing is, I kind of thought the point of DA was its very lack of cool. Maybe that just means the site had a bad designer, but whenever I've ended up browsing DA it's been to see the work of some hobbyist or amateur - a hobbyist who perhaps is using DA as their portfolio when applying to other jobs, but nonetheless.

Of course, this attitude towards DA may also reflect that I first learned about it in high school, when everyone is an amateur.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:46 AM on February 25, 2017

Hmmm... there's no official blog post on the site, but I did a search for "wix" and this official-looking "journal" was the first result: With a Kindred Spirit. Including this update:

UPDATE: There's been some confusion around wording used in TechCrunch's reporting of the DeviantArt and Wix story.

Their article includes: "...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."

Please know that the DeviantArt Submission Policy, Terms of Service and Copyright Policy all remain the same. Deviants continue to own their own works. In the future, there's a possibility Wix might provide opportunities for you to license your work -- only if you want to -- to more people around the world. And, there will be opportunities for Wix users to join DeviantArt and make the community stronger.

Of course, if dA is anything like what I remember it being ~10 years ago, half the site is already in full-on freakout mode over management selling off the rights to all their art.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:18 PM on February 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Surely we can do this thread without making jokes at the expense of well-intentioned members of the DA community.

Believe me when I say that, when I wonder if I'll still have access to Rule 34 art of my favorite fandoms, I'm not joking.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:11 PM on February 25, 2017

Please know that the DeviantArt Submission Policy, Terms of Service and Copyright Policy all remain the same.

So, I can't speak for fan *art* per se, but I can say that stupid decisions, even those that are rapidly reversed, can absolutely destroy an internet community. The Great Purge of fanfiction.net in the aughts wiped out a ton of early fanfiction (the Buffy / Angel fandom was *destroyed*, and I suspect X-Files and some of the other 1990s TV shows suffered similarly). I have stuff on my computer that exists nowhere else, and I will never bring myself to delete it.

(For those of you who don't remember, "MA" -- "NC-17" -- rated fanfiction wasn't erotic so much as it was written by adults. People tacked on an "MA" rating to indicate that their stories weren't songfics and had been written by someone with a basic grasp of grammar. And then fanfiction.net, in a fit of respectability, decided to purge all of that from its archives.)
posted by steady-state strawberry at 5:06 PM on February 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

... All of which is to say, if I were a DA artist, I'd be panicking, because even a reversed decision could destroy everything I've done for the past ten years.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 5:07 PM on February 25, 2017

The comments in the link Rhaomi provided are going back and forth about whether or not this is a good thing. Some people have noted with alarm this clause in the new agreement:

3.1. Your Intellectual Property
As between Wix and you, you shall own all intellectual property pertaining to your User Content, including to any designs, images, animations, videos, audio files, fonts, logos, illustrations, compositions, artworks, interfaces, text, literary works and any other materials created by you. You hereby grant Wix a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable and sublicensable right and license to use your User Content (in whole or in part) worldwide in order to provide you with the Wix Services, and as further specified in Section ‎2.2(5) above.

posted by bryon at 9:03 PM on February 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

can absolutely destroy an internet community

And it's true even if no content is lost - because once people lose confidence in the service hosting their work, a lot of them will go elsewhere. The community will splinter, old files will be lost in deleted or neglected accounts. I'm still sad about what happened to fandom on LJ.

I also have a lot of stuff saved on my hard drive that, as far as I know, isn't anywhere else. It's a weird thought. The fate of most creative work is obscurity, whether it's online or not, but the ephemeral nature of digital files seems to accelerate it.

You hereby grant Wix a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable and sublicensable right and license to use your User Content (in whole or in part) worldwide in order to provide you with the Wix Services, and as further specified in Section ‎2.2(5) above.

Isn't this a pretty standard clause in hosting content? Because they do need the right to use your work in order to host you. Or have they added something non-standard?
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:42 AM on February 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

The fate of most creative work is obscurity, whether it's online or not, but the ephemeral nature of digital files seems to accelerate it.

Yeah. I'd always (sort of) toyed with being one of the scholars who reconstructs texts from Egyptian garbage dumps and that library they found in Herculeum. I'd never imagined I'd be part of that here.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 4:26 PM on February 26, 2017