For many years now I have been a member at Deviant Art, sometimes active, and sometimes not.  An early criticism of the site was that it was a marketing engine and not a community as one might think of a community.  Who really cares, right?  It is up to them to make their money and they don’t have to promote themselves as an actual community.  I am sure a site of that size and traffic would require a healthy amount of money thrown at it in order to keep it working.

My interaction with that site has been both positive and negative, with most of the negative stemming from their print program.  I have long been a heavy critic of that service and also seen it drastically improve.  I had a membership for about a year which has since expired, so now I have been getting a taste of what a free member experiences.  And I am nauseated.

First, the functionally is clearly limited.  I have no issues with that.  I do not expect a site as large as DA is to run for free and to offer unlimited capabilities to everyone.  I would expect that as a paying member I would get something that unpaid visitors do not.  That is just how it works.  The advertising, however, is a different ball game and also illustrates how out of touch DA actually is.

Here is one advertisement:

Are you a committed artist?  Then sign up and “get the respect an asterisk next to your username demands”.  I guess by having a free account I am announcing to the world the lack of seriousness.  I have never paid any attention to any special character in front of any name and wouldn’t really know why having an asterisk would afford more respect to the work that I upload.  For me, I would take more pride in knowing that I am supporting a site that I enjoy participating in rather than feeling like donating money makes me more of a committed artist in the eyes of others.

It gets better.

Here is another ad.  Maybe I am not the target demographic for these ads, which is why I throw up in my mouth when I see them.  I am a 30-something dad.  Reading some of the ads makes me feel as if the targeted audience is much younger.

Now that I see my profile page is getting “tiredzZzz!” I guess I should really jump on the ball and give DA my money.

As I continue about my business, uploading an image, toward the end, I see this:

I have heard too many people say that they never received quality feedback on their work at DA.  Comments such as “OMG! tHat is awesome!” and “kewl” were not just to be expected, but standard operating procedure.  If you know that and understand that about the site, then you are good to go.  But to me, to be able to request serious comments about work only as a subscriber is sad.  What does that say to non-subscribers?  More importantly, that very option drives at the heart of the level of seriousness, or lack of, with many users.  If you feel the need to market that to people, then one could make the argument that it has been lacking.  Why else would there be the need to ask for it or promote it?

While I am not a paid member and cannot request a “real critique” of my work, I do get to see the critiques of pieces I follow through the message center.  Here is one that caught my eye.

Gee, if only I could pay to get that type of feedback.

As I said, perhaps I am no longer the targeted audience for these ads.  It is just a shame that the features and advertising does not appeal to a different group to make it more tempting to subscribe.