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I worked at deviantArt from 2009 to 2013. It was my dream job. At the time deviantArt made money a few ways. In no particular order, because I don't know which

I worked at deviantArt from 2009 to 2013. It was my dream job. At the time deviantArt made money a few ways. In no particular order, because I don't know which were profitable or which represented a larger portion of revenue: - Subscriptions (users could pay for a few extra features and to disable ads on the site) - DeviantArt branded merch. - Prints and products with users' art printed on them - Sponsored Contests. These promoted movies or other media properties, or software of interest to artists. Often the prizes included Wacom tablets and Adobe Photoshop licenses. During my time there a significant problem we were dealing with was due to deviantArt's stance on adult content. Anything was allowed as long as it wasn't outright pornography. In practice that meant that nudes were allowed but sexual acts were not. This had consequences for deviantArt's revenue. It meant that we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks and were forced to deal with seedier outfits that often (e.g. constantly) included malware in the display ads, exposing users to all sorts of nasty stuff. One of my projects was to detect and/or prevent the malware ads which proved challenging and at least given the amount of resources devoted to it, it was not very fruitful. It really is sad for me to see what deviantArt has devolved into. Once the original founders sold out a few years ago I really didn't hold out much hope for the site's future.

neom 2y ago
imo once the suicide girls and the suzi9mm stuff started to be "the thing" - and we allowed a bunch of people from that crew into GD, things started to change really quickly. Honestly, I hated it so much, it made me really upset. I have no issue with that style of art, but it really took over the narrative for a while, and that was silly, and I'm still surprised some 20+ years later it was allowed to happen.
- lmm 2y ago
  Who or what do you think it "was allowed" by? Nothing kills an edgy contemporary art platform faster than censorship, plus they would've got bogged down endlessly in fights about you let someone away with x so why are you blocking y. The place is called DeviantArt FFS.
  - neom 2y ago
    I'm happy to say it: Daniel and Richard. But especially Daniel.
  - nox101 2y ago
    > Nothing kills an edgy contemporary art platform faster than censorship I don't know the solution but isn't 4chan an example of what happens with no censorship? That would also kill an edgy contemporary art platform as the "4 teh lulz" crowd drowns out the "for the art" crowd. As another semi-related example. Imgur used to be interesting "images" but now 25-75% are posts of text (like a screenshot of a tweet for example, or of a blog post, etc...). That might be good for Imgur's bottom line, I don't know, but it's not the site it started as. To be the site it started as would require somehow disallowing images of text but magically allow meme images (some text). That might end up starting an arms race as users skew their messages onto billboards, tvs, signs, and other things to try to make them not look like just an image. Like I said above, I have no idea if they want the site to be mostly images instead of mostly text. Only that it's another site that changed character over time and I'm sure didn't start as a site expecting mostly images of text.
    - thinkingemote 2y ago
      4chan has censorship and extensive and active moderation but the levels for what is acceptable are lower than most other sites. Unlike Reddit, moderators are hidden there's no way to know if a user is a mod or not. I like this way of removing ego and moderator abuse but this makes the place seem more chaotic, unaccountable and lawless. In theory it's possible to have the same kind of site with the regular family friendly content and with strict (i.e. normal) levels of moderation. In practice we don't see this. I think it's because the levels of active moderation by humans needs to be high. So 4chan can get away with less spent on moderation because their levels are lower.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - bitcharmer 2y ago
sph 2y ago
> This had consequences for deviantArt's revenue. It meant that we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective involuntary ally of the Puritan movement. It is a shame that the Internet that we have created depends pretty much solely on that form of revenue.
- eloisant 2y ago
  It's not just ads, it's a lot of B2B services that ban you if you don't have a strict rule on sexual content (or even nudity).
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    Unless it's a conservative religious service, why would they care? Money is money, and porn isn't a crime.
    - SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
      In some places it is.
      - echelon 2y ago
        How silly.
- zbentley 2y ago
  > Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective involuntary ally of the Puritan movement. The usual defense by advertisers is that their clients do not want their businesses to be associated with adult material, so they insist that advertisers do not place ads on adult-content-friendly websites to reduce the risk of that association happening due to ads adjacent to adult content. I'm curious as to how valid that is. Are many/most businesses (or many/most businesses that are highly valuable to advertisers) materially concerned enough about association-with-adult-content-via-ad-placement that they would switch advertisers over it? Or are advertisers manufacturing family-friendly ad placement as a competitive selling point that their customers never really asked for? I'm also curious about the next level down the stack, as it were: if a significant subset of businesses who hire advertisers are concerned about adult-content-association-via-nearby-placement, why is that? Is it merely disgust/discomfort on the part of business leadership and prevailing culture? Or does data indicate that there's a material risk to enough businesses' bottom lines that it's fiscally prudent to avoid that association? (Reasoning from first principles without data, so probably wrong) I'm skeptical about the validity of both claims. Adult content is really popular across many demographics whose behavior is otherwise quite different. Given that broad base of popularity, is it really that risky for a business to have its brand appear in an ad next to pornography compared to, say, appearing on a politically extreme news site, or next to algorithmically-prioritized ragebait content on social media? Unlike adult content, I feel like the associations formed by seeing a company mentioned next to something anger inducing are more likely to be negative than the associations formed by seeing it next to adult content that the viewer presumably sought out. In both cases, the chance of behaviorally-significant associations being formed at all seems quite low, so I'd imagine that effects here (if there are any) would only be visible in the very very large.
scotty79 2y ago
> It meant that we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks [...] It's funny how significant percent of Facebook ads I see are an outright scam, phishing etc. It's been like that for years.
- 20after4 2y ago
  Back in 2012 there was a very large gap between the quality of ads on Google AdSense vs. all of the other options. DeviantArt was banned from using google adsense and thus had to run ads much more similar to the crap you see on Facebook these days.
20after4 2y ago
For what it's worth, I really think DeviantArt should have focused much more on the other revenue sources and abandoned display ads. I'm not sure how that would have turned out but I suspect it might have been good for the company. The sponsorships were far more aligned with the interests of deviantArt's users and I think it was a significant source of revenue that could have been expanded with the right focus and execution. I'm pretty sure that sponsorships amounted to $60k to $150k per deal which usually ran for 1 or 2 weeks with a sponsored art contest, judging and awarding prizes, it wasn't a lot of administrative work for deviantArt AFAIK.
- neom 2y ago
  For what it's worth, a very very long time ago, when it was just getting going, 500px had me design a go to market for them, that is what I designed.
  - 20after4 2y ago
    Interesting!
- numpad0 2y ago
  Then credit card payment processing/PayPal would have been weaponized earlier, and the result would be the same. It's App Store. Centralized censorship through App Store destroyed the Internet.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- creer 2y ago
  It's still an issue for most publishing on the internet. How to fund it. Advertising is still the obvious, easy way. Not much else comes to that level of available funding. Subscriptions are next - but then again most of them only if you can accept credit cards - same problem again. How does 4chan fund itself?
  - 2y ago

neom 2y ago

imo once the suicide girls and the suzi9mm stuff started to be "the thing" - and we allowed a bunch of people from that crew into GD, things started to change really quickly. Honestly, I hated it so much, it made me really upset. I have no issue with that style of art, but it really took over the narrative for a while, and that was silly, and I'm still surprised some 20+ years later it was allowed to happen.

lmm 2y ago
Who or what do you think it "was allowed" by? Nothing kills an edgy contemporary art platform faster than censorship, plus they would've got bogged down endlessly in fights about you let someone away with x so why are you blocking y. The place is called DeviantArt FFS.
- neom 2y ago
  I'm happy to say it: Daniel and Richard. But especially Daniel.
- nox101 2y ago
  > Nothing kills an edgy contemporary art platform faster than censorship I don't know the solution but isn't 4chan an example of what happens with no censorship? That would also kill an edgy contemporary art platform as the "4 teh lulz" crowd drowns out the "for the art" crowd. As another semi-related example. Imgur used to be interesting "images" but now 25-75% are posts of text (like a screenshot of a tweet for example, or of a blog post, etc...). That might be good for Imgur's bottom line, I don't know, but it's not the site it started as. To be the site it started as would require somehow disallowing images of text but magically allow meme images (some text). That might end up starting an arms race as users skew their messages onto billboards, tvs, signs, and other things to try to make them not look like just an image. Like I said above, I have no idea if they want the site to be mostly images instead of mostly text. Only that it's another site that changed character over time and I'm sure didn't start as a site expecting mostly images of text.
  - thinkingemote 2y ago
    4chan has censorship and extensive and active moderation but the levels for what is acceptable are lower than most other sites. Unlike Reddit, moderators are hidden there's no way to know if a user is a mod or not. I like this way of removing ego and moderator abuse but this makes the place seem more chaotic, unaccountable and lawless. In theory it's possible to have the same kind of site with the regular family friendly content and with strict (i.e. normal) levels of moderation. In practice we don't see this. I think it's because the levels of active moderation by humans needs to be high. So 4chan can get away with less spent on moderation because their levels are lower.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - bitcharmer 2y ago

sph 2y ago

> This had consequences for deviantArt's revenue. It meant that we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective involuntary ally of the Puritan movement. It is a shame that the Internet that we have created depends pretty much solely on that form of revenue.

eloisant 2y ago
It's not just ads, it's a lot of B2B services that ban you if you don't have a strict rule on sexual content (or even nudity).
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  Unless it's a conservative religious service, why would they care? Money is money, and porn isn't a crime.
  - SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
    In some places it is.
    - echelon 2y ago
      How silly.
zbentley 2y ago
> Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective involuntary ally of the Puritan movement. The usual defense by advertisers is that their clients do not want their businesses to be associated with adult material, so they insist that advertisers do not place ads on adult-content-friendly websites to reduce the risk of that association happening due to ads adjacent to adult content. I'm curious as to how valid that is. Are many/most businesses (or many/most businesses that are highly valuable to advertisers) materially concerned enough about association-with-adult-content-via-ad-placement that they would switch advertisers over it? Or are advertisers manufacturing family-friendly ad placement as a competitive selling point that their customers never really asked for? I'm also curious about the next level down the stack, as it were: if a significant subset of businesses who hire advertisers are concerned about adult-content-association-via-nearby-placement, why is that? Is it merely disgust/discomfort on the part of business leadership and prevailing culture? Or does data indicate that there's a material risk to enough businesses' bottom lines that it's fiscally prudent to avoid that association? (Reasoning from first principles without data, so probably wrong) I'm skeptical about the validity of both claims. Adult content is really popular across many demographics whose behavior is otherwise quite different. Given that broad base of popularity, is it really that risky for a business to have its brand appear in an ad next to pornography compared to, say, appearing on a politically extreme news site, or next to algorithmically-prioritized ragebait content on social media? Unlike adult content, I feel like the associations formed by seeing a company mentioned next to something anger inducing are more likely to be negative than the associations formed by seeing it next to adult content that the viewer presumably sought out. In both cases, the chance of behaviorally-significant associations being formed at all seems quite low, so I'd imagine that effects here (if there are any) would only be visible in the very very large.

scotty79 2y ago

> It meant that we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks [...] It's funny how significant percent of Facebook ads I see are an outright scam, phishing etc. It's been like that for years.

20after4 2y ago
Back in 2012 there was a very large gap between the quality of ads on Google AdSense vs. all of the other options. DeviantArt was banned from using google adsense and thus had to run ads much more similar to the crap you see on Facebook these days.

20after4 2y ago

For what it's worth, I really think DeviantArt should have focused much more on the other revenue sources and abandoned display ads. I'm not sure how that would have turned out but I suspect it might have been good for the company. The sponsorships were far more aligned with the interests of deviantArt's users and I think it was a significant source of revenue that could have been expanded with the right focus and execution. I'm pretty sure that sponsorships amounted to $60k to $150k per deal which usually ran for 1 or 2 weeks with a sponsored art contest, judging and awarding prizes, it wasn't a lot of administrative work for deviantArt AFAIK.

neom 2y ago
For what it's worth, a very very long time ago, when it was just getting going, 500px had me design a go to market for them, that is what I designed.
- 20after4 2y ago
  Interesting!
numpad0 2y ago
Then credit card payment processing/PayPal would have been weaponized earlier, and the result would be the same. It's App Store. Centralized censorship through App Store destroyed the Internet.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
creer 2y ago
It's still an issue for most publishing on the internet. How to fund it. Advertising is still the obvious, easy way. Not much else comes to that level of available funding. Subscriptions are next - but then again most of them only if you can accept credit cards - same problem again. How does 4chan fund itself?
- 2y ago