DeviantArt
Before Instagram, before TikTok, there was DeviantArt — launched in August 2000 as a software-skinning offshoot and grown into the gallery where every teenager who'd ever held a stylus posted their first drawing and got their first comment. Anime, fan art, original characters, wallpapers — the site called submissions "deviations," and being different was the point.
DeviantArt launched on August 7, 2000, born from the custom-software-skinning community thriving around the Dmusic network of music sites. Scott Jarkoff, Matthew Stephens, Angelo Sotira, and others founded it, but it was Stephens who pushed the concept past skins into something bigger: a full community for artists of every stripe. Styled "deviantART" in its early years, the site hosted artwork, photography, videography, and literature — everything from anime galleries to fan art to the original characters and wallpapers that filled a 2000s teenager's hard drive.
By 2008 DeviantArt was pulling in about 36 million annual visitors. In 2010, users were posting about 1.4 million favorites and 1.5 million comments every single day, and by 2011 it ranked as the thirteenth-largest social network with about 3.8 million weekly visits. By 2017 it counted tens of millions of members and over a quarter-billion submissions. Along the way it added a Creative Commons licensing option in 2006 and a film category in 2007, expanding what could count as a deviation.
Wix.com acquired DeviantArt in February 2017 for $36 million, and longtime CEO Angelo Sotira stepped down in 2022. By 2025 the site reported 110 million registered users. But its real legacy is smaller and more personal: for millions of people, DeviantArt was where they learned they could draw — and where a stranger first told them so.
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