jarkolicious

deviantART; A Little Story, Part 2

• deviantART

It was during a long weekend, with a rather bad fever, before August 7, 2000 that deviantART was born. deviantART was coded from the ground up by myself, in its entirety, throughout this hot summer weekend.

The consciousness of the “Collective Rectum” was conceived.

deviantART was finally live, in all its glory. Matt and I went promoting the site every way we could. We were able to get a couple of the sites within the community to post news about our grand opening but did the majority of publicizing via popular artist and skinner IRC channels.

Slowly but surely the site took off. In what we like to refer to as “the early days,” Matt and I would comment on every single piece of art that was submitted to the site. It was easy to do and we really enjoyed leading by example.

We figured that if we, the leaders of the site, would comment on everything then the deviants would follow in our footsteps and offer as much critique as possible.

It seemed to work because in “the early days” deviantART was known for the amount of comments that submissions would receive. Feedback was great in comparison to the various other sites in the community.

deviantART was growing massively. In a few short months our traffic had already surpassed that of what DeskMod was receiving. WinCustomize was a relative new site on the “scene,” in an attempt to replace skinz.org, and it was seeing a lot of traffic as well. The “old guard” was slowly falling apart due to various issues.

At this juncture the site was hosted on a single web server at Tera-Byte. All the sites that were part of the DMusic Network were hosted on one of four servers, if memory serves me correctly. The servers were merely rented by DMusic, and paid for by DMusic, though owned by Tera-Byte. It was part of your standard, run of the mill, virtual hosting package where you pay so much a month and you get to do with the server as you wish, for the most part.

We continued to introduce radical new feature after radical new feature and that, along with the freedom to submit just about any form of art, was allowing deviantART to thrive. deviantART slowly began to see as much traffic as DMusic did and people were taking notice.

Then the dot com bomb came about in the fall and winter of 2000 and many sites started disappearing.

The DMusic Network was in trouble. Michael Ovitz had invested in a number of online ventures, only to be hit hard. As an example, the folks at Scour, who created Scour Exchange, lost their lawsuit against the RIAA and were forced to close shop.

Because of his troubles with his investments in internet start-ups, and their many failures, he decided that he wanted to get out of the Internet game completely. This meant liquidating all the sites that he could or simply shut them down, one by one.

The prospect of deviantART being shut down and lost forever was an imminent reality.

I was stunned and upset, as there had been countless hours put in to the site by Matt, Tack, Arc, Attila and I. We had dedicated the last 8 months of our lives “working” on deviantART as often as we could. There was no way this was going to happen without a fight of some sort.

At the time that this was happening I was informed by Angelo that I was not allowed to speak about these issues. For this reason, Matt, Tack, Arc and crew, were all left in the dark about what was happening behind the scenes. It was creating an aura of distrust and added a lot of strain to the staff.

But we were close and pushed forward in an attempt to work through this trying time.

Angelo was the liaison between the DMusic Network, deviantART and Lynx Technologies, the Ovitz owned company responsible for all of his Internet investments at the time. He set up a phone call between one of Ovitz’s lawyers, himself and me, so that we could discuss ways of saving deviantART.

No matter what I said this guy could care less. He was as evil and uncaring as any high-priced Hollywood lawyer. Cocky was a better word for it though.

The end of deviantART was surely coming.

Angelo saw the light that was deviantART and the potential it had. He was interested in helping fight to keep the site alive. I can only speculate as to his reasons though I am quite certain that I am not far off. Once a capitalist, always a capitalist.

Seemingly out of nowhere, he calls me and explains that he has a plan to save deviantART. Apparently he spoke to the lawyer and worked it out so that if we could locate a buyer within a month then the site would have the possibility of living. In at least as much as the buyer was interested in keeping the site alive.

Many people were confronted with the option of saving deviantART from ruins. Unfortunately, due to the times, nobody was interested. The dot com bomb had burned too many people and so it was hard to find a buyer.

Angelo remembered that he was friends with Andrew McCann and Ian Lyman, of Sonique fame. We all spoke to each other via a phone conference and discussed the possibility of their helping rescue deviantART.

Initially they had reservations and almost balked but somehow came through in the end.

deviantART, Inc., the company, was setup. Based on the investments made to the company, in the form of technology, monetary or business development, we came to an agreement about the share percentages.

Because of the amount of time and technology that I had put in to the site I was the largest single shareholder. I was “lucky” enough to be one of the four original shareholders in deviantART, Inc.

Part of the “deal” was that Angelo had to be named the CEO. Seeing as I am a “geek” by nature, and Angelo is a businessman by nature, I had no issue with this setup at the time. The foremost goal on my mind was to save deviantART, even if it meant allowing Angelo to be the CEO of the company.

However, I was still not allowed to speak about the deal and had to keep these matters confidential. Therefore I could not disclose this information to Matt, Tack, Arc and crew.

On one hand I was overjoyed that we were able to save deviantART. On the other hand I was distraught that I could not share the deal with the others.

In the background Angelo did little business development while Andrew worked on the first version of the thumbnail system. Ian never really was interested in the site and stayed a silent partner, for all intents and purposes.

deviantART kept trucking throughout these trying times. The site continued to thrive as traffic continued to grow each month, without an end to the evolution in sight.

The site expanded so rapidly that at one point it was the slowest site on the Internet. Pages would rarely load because we were being bombarded with visitors.

The “Great Bandwidth Crisis of 2001” was upon us.

deviantART had officially outgrown its existing architecture.