Social Media: DEVIANT ART

Deviant art

• long established since 2000
• has a wide user base
• holds contests frequently
• the group system allows you to target an audience easily

•  Groups

Groups are more often used than tags now, groups are where you are able to watch, and submit art that is targeted to a certain audience, and this can be as targeted as possible.

This is a small sampling of some groups.
Groups in my opinion are one of the best features in deviant art as you can expose your art directly on someone's feed, not relying on them going to the tags. Groups allow you to reach an audience outside of the people that currently follow you and also allow you to see easily what other artists are doing.

• Points

The Points system was introduced in 2010, It is an in site currency that has both helped and harmed to community. 1 point at this point in time is 1 cent, this in site currency can be donated to you and you may buy premium content with points, this effectively opens you up to a much younger audience that may not always have access to a credit card or paypal. This can be a dangerous thing, both as you may have people buying your work and miss using it, and the ability for the same creates a culture of undercutting commissions through cheaper "point" commissions.

However points are not all bad. The micro currency is effective in that you can easily chip into someone's donation pool to help pay for their next subscription fee, or to keep a groups subscription fee paid. Small amounts of points are often exchanged for features in groups and it helps with paying for subscription fees that would other wise be difficultly split between founders.
In that way a community can pay small amounts for a group.

• Advertising

The core feature allows no adverts to be shown on your page, however this may differ from platform to platform.

• Uploading images

Uploading images is very easy, you can upload images in full size and constrained sizes to help stop people on-line stealing works. Tagging work is very easy, you are able to choose from a multitude of options about licensing rights and being able to write up your own terms and conditions, what platforms you want your work to be able to be quick shared from. Choosing from turning off and on the ability to comment on work or give critique to a work. Gallery options and what folder it is going in. Tagging work, has become more contrained into a hashtag like system that hasn't smoothed out too much over time, and you may find alot of overlap with what your subject matter is tagged as.
And placing work into category is accordion style so filtering works is very easy.

Core features 

• user page html/CSS editing to give a larger personal touch

This by no means is a perfect feature as you are limited some work arounds with the widgets to put on your personal page and it largely seems to be fighting against a system that doesn't want to work with it. Things like artist ID's are still constrained, and you are overall largely stuck with the overall Deviant art look.

 we can see personalization however the standard heading are intercut with the personal deco and

 However having a custom page is largely a mark of professionalism within the community, and having that HTML/CCS editing available to you allows you to be able to link up images to other accounts and cross promote yourself on your front page.

• Open thumbmail use

Thumbnails or "Thumbs" are what largely makes up deviant arts coding side.
On a free users account this use of thumbs is constrained to chat features and the journal.
Core features allow you to use them anywhere on your page, Art descriptions and comments.

This actually is quite handy in creating short hand in your descriptions as you can create assets to just copy and paste into your page at any time.

• More open widget use 
• polls 
• visitors 
• custom widget
• twitter feed
• shoutbox 
• forum
• art collection (sharing a sub folder from your favorites)

 You are largely paying for Polls and custom widgets, however some people use the twitter feeds and the shout box.
Useful widgets for engaging with your audience!

• Stash space

2GB of Stash space on a free user account, 10GB for a core member. The stash space is largely like a cloud or a drop box where you can upload and store work and if you give someone a link to your stash space or a spesific work stored in your stash they can visit it.
The Stash space is largely best for communicating with other users, sending WIP's of your work to clients, or storing your work in that space connected to Payware. You can easily stack work into folders and mark it for premium content that people can buy from your page.

• full page analytics's

 a full and comprehensive breakdown of what your page and individual works are receiving, when are you uploading the most, what are you uploading.

• Option to change your user name

Changing your user name is actually quite handy, especially if you had a older account, it was quite common to close down or leave older accounts to just change names without a core account.

•  Gallery Folders and sub folders

With a regular account you can have as many Gallery Folders as you can, with the core feature you can make sub folders to that main folder.
With the core feature you can arrange your folders by date, adding a personal icon to the folder, and personal CSS.

Bottom line

Deviant art is a long standing website with a large standing community, with a lot of features that make it very easy to expose your work to a large and buying audience, however you may not have a high paying clientèle with it. The community is very active, and there are many contests going on constantly. However with the lower paying client there is a culture of undercutting prices and can make selling art difficult.