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DeviantArt

social media and art website

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 22, 2026
Entity authorityQ46523 ↗
Source-derived summary

DeviantArt (formerly styled as deviantART and thus abbreviated as dA) is an online community that features artwork, videography, photography, and literature, launched on August 7, 2000, by Matthew Stephens, Scott Jarkoff and Angelo Sotira, among others.

DeviantArt is headquartered in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, California. DeviantArt had about 36 million visitors annually by 2008. In 2010, DeviantArt users were submitting about 1.4 million favorites and about 1.5 million comments daily. In 2011, it was the thirteenth largest social network with about 3.8 million weekly visits. Several years later, in 2017, the site had more than 25 million members and more than 250 million submissions. In 2025, it reached a new milestone with 110 million registered users.

In February 2017, the website was acquired by Israeli software company Wix.com in a $36 million deal. Since 2020, the site has seen an exodus of much of its userbase following decisions related to site design, AI, NFTs, and a large number of scam accounts populating the site. In 2025, DeviantArt reported that community sales totaled more than $23 million in artwork, purchased by over 260,000 users.

Editorial summary

“DeviantArt” enters the record as social media and art website. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what DeviantArt, social and media can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2000, 2008, 2010, 2011—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2000-08-07. Its strongest next move is a source search built around DeviantArt, social and media.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“DeviantArt” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, DeviantArt, social and media provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q46523. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2008, 2010 and 2011.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “DeviantArt”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow DeviantArt primary sources, DeviantArt archive and DeviantArt research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “DeviantArt”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “DeviantArt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.