Back in the very early 2000s, deviantART was a tentpole of digital fandom. All sorts of fans–from Fullmetal Alchemist enjoyers, Harry Potter lovers, and Star Trek enthusiasts to Transformers aficionados, Supernatural brethren, and even the early Marvel Cinematic Universe stans–gathered there to share, see, and discuss fanart (and sometimes fanfics, too, though those had more of a home over on Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal).
Fast forward to the early 2020s, though, and things looked quite different. Tumblr‘s 2007 introduction was the start of what deviantART itself calls a “slow bleed” of traffic loss. Between 2013 and 2019, dA’s overall engagement dropped ~43%.
The company wanted to staunch this bleed, grow its userbase, and start making more money. So, it overhauled the dA website, removed third-party ads entirely, and tried “building a real creator economy powered by a true creative network” with a focus on creator monetization,” CEO Moti Levy wrote in a recent post.
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There was just one problem. As dA pushed into our industry and pitched itself as a haven for artists to make money from their work, it also embraced generative AI. Not only did it decide to allow generated works, it also released its own generator: “DreamUp,” running on Stable Diffusion bones.
“The team interviewed hundreds of Deviants to understand creators’ thoughts, pains, fears, and needs with regards to A.I. art,” Levy said at the time. “DreamUp lets you create A.I. art knowing that creators’ work is treated fairly.”
Welcoming AI and introducing DreamUp resulted in significant backlash from its community, and a number of artists left the platform entirely.
But Levy says any claim that dA has lost artists and/or that it’s dying is “a convenient web troll narrative” that’s “also dead wrong.”
“Let’s address this ridiculous nonsense once and for all. There has been no ‘downfall of DeviantArt,’ nor any mass exodus,” he wrote in January 2026. “Quite the opposite; today, the community is larger than ever. Around the time of the Wix acquisition, we had roughly 36 million registered users. Now, we’re approaching 110 million–more than 3X growth in our user base.”
Now, dA is on the charm offensive with a sponcon post in ARTnews that says in 2025 alone, “DeviantArt creators made $23 million in sales–12 times that of 2022, and more than the previous five years of sales combined.”
It says a chunk of that revenue is driven by its Subscriptions feature, which lets artists offer up to 10 paid tiers for viewers to unlock extra content, Q&As, live drawing streams, etc.
dA also boasts that its platform fees/cut of artists’ earnings is “as low as 2.5%,” and cites case studies of creators like @Sakurai-Outfit-Adopt, who draws adoptable characters and sold “over $14,000 in less than a year.”
“Today, DeviantArt makes money when our artists make money,” Levy said. “We’re betting on our artists, the way a true creative network should.”
He added, “After years of foundational work, and after proving both the network momentum and the creator economy, we’re entering a new phase with no constraints. We’ve leveled up and are ready for this stage.”
Will we see deviantART be a creator economy force alongside YouTube and TikTok in 2026? Thousands of artists are looking for a new home platform after X’s descent into Grokland–but will they be willing to make money on a website that is still doggedly pro-AI? Levy makes it very clear dA is not only going to continue with AI, but is also pretty smug about its position on the matter.
“Boy, we got A LOT of heat,” he said about dA introducing AI. “But, we were also 100% right. Since then, we have been seeing waves of new creators leveraging this tech and co-existing with traditional digital artists, and the lines between them are starting to blur. We have no plans to stop and will continue to champion all our creators, whatever tools or tech they use in their creative process (obviously as long as they abide by our policy and the law).”
