Chances are that if you've been on the internet at all in the past 17 years, you've come across DeviantArt. Maybe your first introduction to the online art community was a particularly tasteful nude drawing of a cartoon character, or maybe it was… Well, actually, that was probably it.
Anyway, DeviantArt just sold for $36 million.
The site was sold to Wix, a Tel Aviv-based website creation tool, Reuters reported. $36 million is a fair amount of money—not big kid money at a time when startups easily nab hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, but still a shocking amount to anybody who is familiar with DeviantArt as a home for anime fanart and pregnant Sonic the Hedgehog porn fantasies. (In the site's defense, it also hosts a diverse array of art spanning many genres and mediums.)
The move makes some sense when you consider how long DeviantArt has been around and how consistently popular it's been for a particular subculture of artists. The site was founded in Los Angeles in 2000, and nearly two decades later boasts 38 million members. Quantcast traffic numbers show that while it's just shy of being in the top 100 most-visited US sites, DeviantArt is still pretty damn popular.
As for what the value proposition of horny cartoon nudes might be for Wix, according to Bloomberg, the company hopes that the acquisition will improve its 2017 revenue by $8 million. DeviantArt runs ads on its site, and it seems like it's got a fair amount of eyeballs on them.
You know, when those eyeballs aren't staring at a pink pony's ass.
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from The Home of Pregnant Sonic Fanart Just Sold for $36 Million
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