Back in the early days of the internet, a young business man named Angelo Sotira started one of the first social media sites that allowed artists to come together to upload and present people’s art. That site is DeviantArt.
Angelo Sotira is an American entrepreneur most well known for the creation of DeviantArt, but he was doing some big things even before that. At the age of 15 he created a music file sharing site called Dimension Music. Dimension Music was bought by Michael Ovits, the previous president of the Walt Disney Company. After Sotira had sold Dimension Music, at the age of 19 Sotira went on to create DeviantArt with Matthew Stephens and Scott Jarkoff. The three of them created DevientArt for people to share their photography, digital art, traditional art, literature, and filmmaking with a community of other artists.
DeviantArt is the 13th largest social network with over 28 million members who have posted over 265 million images. The site is sent around 140,000 submissions a day! To this day DeviantArt is still the largest internet art platform.
Through DeviantArt, Angelo Sotira has made over 75 million dollars. The website continues to thrive as more and more artists want to express themselves and get feedback from other artists. Sotira reached out to a market that had not yet been given attention on the internet, and it proved to be a worthy market to enter.
I remember learning about this site in my graphic design class in high school. It’s like a more legit version of pinterest with art that is 100x better and more original. This is a very inspirational site and a great way to get and share ideas.
This is sweet because it applies an existing principal to something new, which is art. Many people would love this concept because it is very visual, and the internet is very visual. DevianArt gives people an outlet for their art without having to figure out how to put it out there themselves somehow.
Connecting people with good ideas or talent is a sure-fire success story as Sotiria found out . What a great platform for aspiring young artist to find their style and voice in an endless pool of artwork. Great find, Zach