Ten year-old online art community DeviantART has announced that it will begin helping its 15 million members sell their art as stock photography next year in partnership with low-cost stock community Fotolia.
There’s something counter-intuitive about DeviantART, a community filled with dark and brooding illustrations among other works, entering the world of stock photography, typically a world of empty-eyed smiles and imagery that’s inoffensive to a fault. Reader comments on the DeviantART blog post about the news are positive so far, though.
DeviantART contains a wide variety of art and many of its users will no doubt be interested in making small sums of money for their work. In a statement today, Fotolia said “DeviantART is the purest of all artist communities throughout the world. It works on democratic philosophy that complements our goals with Fotolia.”
Stephen Shankland reported this morning that DeviantART “wants to launch special collections for those who want a more flavorful departure from traditional microstock imagery.”
Though ten years old, DeviantART continues to blaze new trails. This Summer the company released an HTML5 painting app that works well on the iPad, for example.
The site says its users consume a substantial amount of stock photography itself, and this partnership will also facilitate that. It will be interesting, though, to see how the introduction of small-scale commercialization impacts the culture of one of the web’s largest sites for artists.
