Well, I've officially been a member of DeviantArt for a whole year as of March 2012. It's weird; I never considered myself the sort of person who would join something, and trust me, I really don't. I'm probably the only person in North America who DOESN'T have a Facebook account. I only ever became a member of TWO forums. I've never joined and barely even looked at 4Chan or Gaia. I'm lucky I even know what those are, I'm such a reclusive non-joiner type. For the longest time, I utterly REFUSED to get a DeviantArt account. I had made my own website with a gallery already in it, so why should I, right? People who mysteriously found me online would notice I was an artist and immediately ask me if I had a DeviantArt account. Like having my art posted anywhere else didn't really count, or something.
The thing of it is, having your own website and making it up to a decent standard is hard work. I posted to that thing every week for YEARS. Good updates, too. All original stuff. My art, contests, reviews of various things like books and movies, and a new "rant" every single week. Ah yes, The Rant. Every week you could count on one of those. I would ramble on about everything from Harry Potter to tooth brushes on there. It was good fun, but after writing several hundred of them, you start to run out of ideas. I think The Rant is what made me kind of "give up" on my own website. The writing was getting too difficult. It was running weak. I couldn't produce anything of any semblance of quality. But I like the website in general. I like having a place to post my images and host stuff online. I felt as though it would be "cheating" in a way, I suppose, to keep on adding art work to it and NOT writing the Rant every week. Loads of people liked the Rant. How would people see my drawings if I stopped updating my website? DeviantArt seemed to help with this problem: I could post my arts online and let my own website sit undisturbed. I wouldn't post updates there AT ALL and art would come to DeviantArt and still be seen. I like my arts to be seen. It makes me happy. (I bet for a while you were wondering how paragraph 2 connected to paragraph 1, but it did, see? It came around.)
I am rather pleased with how this first year of DeviantArt membership has gone. There are some cool groups and/or clubs or whatnot that I have joined and submitting my pics to them really does increase the number views they get. I've gotten a few new watchers literally MINUTES after sending an image in to a group, and that feels fantastic. There are also some sweet contests and challenges that have given me ideas on what to draw when I was in the mood but had no inspiration. This is a big help, trust me. It has BLOWN MY MIND that my Jane lane as Coraline Jones pic, by far my most popular, has itself crossed over 1,000 views this month. My pics were not getting this sort of traffic on my own website!
In December of 2011, I was so amazed and grateful that my profile on DeviantArt had gotten 2,000 views. It took me an entire year to get that on my own website, and here it is three months later and I'm about to reach 3,000 views. That's an exponential jump, is what that is! I mean, I'm here so folks will look at my pretty pictures, and damnit, they're LOOKING. Mission-fraking-accomplished.