More than 25 years after its founding, the site has evolved into the internet’s leading platform for artists to grow and monetize their audience. If you spend much time online — especially around Gen Z — you may have noticed that Y2K internet culture is having a moment. Scrolling fatigue, coupled with a reliable nostalgia factor, has sparked a return to the user-generated, creator-centric format and aesthetics of the Blogosphere and early social media. Launched in 2000, DeviantArt is to many an avatar for this era and synonymous with Web 2.0’s niche subcultures. But in 2026, DeviantArt is more accessible, widely used, and creator-friendly than ever before. After a period of network decline through the 2010s, the platform underwent a multi-year overhaul to modernize its user experience and strengthen its core offerings. As a result, usership has been on a steady rise since 2019; DeviantArt now boasts more than 108 million users worldwide. The site calls itself a home for artists of all kinds, with more than 100 million new artworks across 150 distinct artistic genres and categories uploaded in 2025 alone. The bottom line: Whether you’re a creator, a collector, or a seller, your peers are on DeviantArt. This resurgence is undoubtedly driven in part by DeviantArt’s robust creator-first functionality. DeviantArt’s Protect feature uses state-of-the-art image recognition to help safeguard creators’ work against unauthorized use, and the platform employs a dedicated team to investigate and mitigate the impact from spam, scams, fraud, and other bad actors. As of 2019, DeviantArt is also completely free of third-party ads, unlike other mainstream social media platforms whose business model relies on virality and advertising revenue. Dropping ads wasn’t merely an aesthetic choice, though. One of the most significant shifts driving the modern DeviantArt user experience is a revamped monetization model that shifts