Assuming you only do this for a hobby, although it can also apply

>>2726871
All of them. No reason not to.

>>2726884
Strongly disagree. It's best to focus your efforts on 1 or 2 sites. You will likely spread yourself too thin with more sites, as it takes a considerable amount of effort to significantly grow them.

>normie media such as Facebook and Instagram.
Get over yourself.

Tumblr's my go-to. Ease of use and generally if you tag it decently and you're not shit other blogs will do the work of promoting you. Deviantart is a pain in the ass due to the added steps (adding a category, submitting to groups, hitting the "no it's not NSFW let me post my fucking drawing" button, etc).

>>2726884

>No reason not to.

It being a time consuming annoyance is a pretty good reason not to if you just do it as a hobby. I tried to keep a deviantart, twitter, facebook and tumblr going but unless it's a piece I really like I just stick to tumblr nowadays. It's a lot of busywork and unless you're well established on a platform the busywork can potentially be for very little payoff.

>>2726891
>You will likely spread yourself too thin
You're just uploading files.

>>2726895

When it comes to DA at least there's more to it than that unless you want to be sitting at like 10 views, and even there you need to pick a category for it and shit before you even submit. If you submit to lots of groups though you can do alright on DA, too much effort for me though, especially since their system for submitting to groups is shit (you need to join the group, then find it again every time you submit, wait for approval, etc).

I dunno about if there's a trick to getting noticed on facebook or twitter but I get almost zilch on either of those, and facebook keeps asking me to pay them to boost my posts. $4 a pop to actually reach an audience isn't in the cards for me. My tumblr has grown pretty organically without me having to go out of my way a ton.

>>2726902
You can just submit to groups you're in from the submission screen nowadays. Groups aren't worth half a shit nowadays anyway.

Even then that'd be an extra 2 minutes work, at maximum, per platform. Honestly, you put 6-40 hours into a piece and you can't be arsed spending an extra 10 minutes getting your work out there?

Only gotta spend $4 a couple of times to grab Facebook likes, but I can understand not bothering with that if your work isn't enough to grab their interest otherwise. They do buy prints more than dA does.

No idea how to work with Twitter dudes. I don't even have one. It confuses and upsets me.

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i was told to try art station
but i dont know even the popular images have very low views

i want a platform where the community interacts and critiques


>>2726894
tumblr... ehhhhhh
i would just for the "everyone has a tumblr" butt the sjws... and ehhh

>>2726918
They've got their own little circle. Unless you follow them, their reactionaries, or Steven Universe blogs, you won't see hide nor hair of them.

>>2726918

I've not once in over two years on tumblr had a personal encounter with an SJW.

I've had like two second-hand encounters via my dash and I just unfollowed them, very minimal headache. Tumblr gives you considerable control over what sort of shit enters your feed.

You're liable to encounter more SJW and tumblr-tier shit on 4chan than you do on tumblr (unless you go looking - if you look you will quickly find it) because people actually save and post it here to try and make a point about how bad it is. It's also harder to avoid on 4chan because you have less control over what stuff shows up on your board's pages than your tumblr dashboard.

>>2726871
>>2726891
I mainly focus on deviantArt, I just upload to Tumblr and Facebook passively. I spend a considerable amount of time building up my watch base on dA. There's no way I can do that for multiple social media at the same time.

>>2726894
I feel like its hard to get any notes/reblogs unless its fanart. Haven't really figured out how to game it yet.

>>2726902
>>2726906
dA takes a lot more time investment but also has a lot more tricks you can use to get popular fast. I think I've more or less figured out the system in the last year.

>>2726918
You're going to have to find a small group to get what you're looking for outside of /ic

There used to be a lot of smaller art forums where people did exactly what you want but they've more or less been killed off by social media.

There's probably something similar in dA or facebook groups but it'd be hard to look for them precisely because they're not very big

>>2727066
>dA takes a lot more time investment but also has a lot more tricks you can use to get popular fast. I think I've more or less figured out the system in the last year.
wanna expand on that f/am?

>>2727071
I posted a bit about this in another post, but basically for dA everything comes down to, getting them to see your art and hitting watch, or getting them to come to your page and hitting watch. This sounds simple in principle but is actually extremely convoluted.

You'd think posting art and sharing to groups would get you watchers, but that's a very poor method. Let's say you're starting from scratch, posting new art would show up in the recent art feed for maybe a few minutes before it gets bumped. Even if you tag it when people do searches by default the most popular stuff shows up first, so its not like tumblr where you can add a popular tag and people will find it and reblog it because its new.

Posting to groups is basically required as a new user, as its really the only way you could get people to actually see your art, but because of how many people do this and how few people actually browse their group watches (I've pretty much unwatched all my groups at this point) you basically need to submit to 20+ to get enough views for even a few watchers. I think the majority of views actually come from other people trying to submit to a group and seeing what's the latest in the galleries (most people go to the gallery page to submit art to the group). So to hit usable numbers you're looking at submitting to 50+ groups (which is pretty time consuming).

The exception is if you can get featured in a group that has selective features, that usually gets you a lot more views over a longer period of time.

Frankly, if you can submit new good art multiple times a week you can probably build up a watcher base organically just by doing this. But I generally can only post at most once a week and maybe times only once every 2 weeks so only getting new watchers after posting new art wasn't going to cut it.

The next step is to get people to view your page. There's a bunch of less scrupulous ways of doing it.

>>2727077
>cont

You can do it by spamming watches, favs, or llamas. Watches are kind of the whore way of doing it, There's groups that do watch for a watch, and often if you watch someone they'll want to come to your page to thank your or check you out. However, this only works for other people who are not very popular, ie, people only get watches occasionally so every new watch is a big deal. Although there are some autists who have 50k+ watchers but still thank every new watcher. However, if someone looks at your stats and see that you're watching like 5000+ people they're probably not gonna think very highly of you, its also going to make your actual watch page unusable. If you unwatch people they can get pretty pissy if they find out. I don't do this and I don't think any artist that's any good should do this.

Next is favs. Doesn't make you as much of a whore as spamming watches, and a bit less effective, since people get a lot more favs than watches, so there's even less people going to bother checking out all the favs they get. Not to mention it might be hard to figure out whether you're fav'ing someone who you haven't already fav'ed. I've found one artist that was able to go from 0-10k watchers in a year by spamming this tactic.

Last is llamas. Conversion rates for this is probably the lowest out of the 3, and there's a spam limit of 60 per hour, but its definitely the least likely to make people think badly of you. Since you can't give a llama to the same person, its impossible to make people think you're spamming them, and it also makes it so that you're always targeting new people since you can't give llamas to those you've already given one to (unlike favs). With the one-click llama add-on you can give 60 llamas in a few minutes every hour, making it much less time consuming than the other methods. This is the one I use.

>>2727088
So spam groups and llamas. Yikes, dA is a bit fucked.

>>2727088
>cont

All this really only works if you have decent/popular art. If your art is shit or not very popular with normies you're not going to be seeing very high returns. If you keep doing this you can probably get a sizable watcher count. However, to reach the growth rate of the popular artists like Guweiz/Kr0nz you need to be able to consistently hit front page.

I've been observing a lot of the artists in the 50-100k range (especially those that became popular recenlty) and I've noticed they usually get something like 50 watchers a day even when not posting any art, and when they do post get 150-200 watchers in a 24 hour period. If you can on average gain 90-100 watchers every day, that's over 30,000 watchers in a single year.

The only way I've found to be able to hit that watcher gain count is to get your art in the top 10 slots on the popular 24/hour page when you post it. My last deviation I was able to stay on the #4 slot for about 17 hours, and was able to get 165 watchers in the 24 hour period I posted it, and additional 80 in the next 24 hours before dropping off to normal.

Getting onto that top 10 slot is pretty difficult, you need a sizable watch count because without enough people fav'ing your stuff its hard to hit the high ranks in the categories you post to. Also, sharing your art on other social media might not be a good idea because even though you get more views, unless they fav your art too you'll get a low view/fav ratio, which effects your rankings too.

You can game the categories system to get an edge, but that's already well documented, just google deviantArt categories abuse for more details. Just don't go too overboard with it, as people will use it to stir up drama.

So basically slow burn every day to get constant stream of watchers so when you post new art you'll have enough support to try to get into the rankings.

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>>2727093
this is shit advice. i hate those people that fave/comment/watch just for views. You can spot them easily by going to their favorite folder and seeing that even though they favorited your piece a minute ago, there's already 20 more in front of you. And when they watch you, just scrolling down to their page's comments you'll find nothing but "thanks for the watch!". Doing this is far more time consuming than submitting to groups, pointless, and annoying to anyone that sees what you're trying to do.

the key to becoming popular in deviantart is
#1 fanart. if you're decently good and can produce at least 2 a week of popular characters, you'll probably get a decent streak of watchers and page views. Sakimichan used to have 9M views in 2014 when she first made her patreon (despite being on DA for many years already), but after beginning to upload as many as 20 fanart pieces a month to generate more attention to her patreon, she now has 30M views.

#2 porn. pic related is an ultra shit copycat of sakimichan, but makes fan art nude/yuri pieces and uploads them each to 100+ groups, even though she's slow at producing them (said in a video it takes her 13hrs) and can thus only upload about 4-5 a month, though she stays active in that time by uploading WIP. She's making $1,009 biweekly on patreon right now, and has over 100k views on her profile despite her account only being 9 months old. all this because of FAN ART & PORN.

#3 is getting something like a Daily Deviation, being featured on DA's facebook page, or have a piece appear in the "hot new stuff" or whatever it's called. This is a combination of being good, and luck. I've seen some people with very few followers and accounts that are years old randomly jolt up because of this.

#4 git gud and amass followers simply from how insanely good every piece is.

>>2727106
>this is shit advice. i hate those people that fave/comment/watch just for views...

I already pointed this out in my post. That's why I only do the llamas. The person you posted, customwaifus, also uses the llama spam tactic. They've sent 148,000 llamas.

>#1 fanart...

Fanart is good, I forgot to mention that. I mentioned high frequency posting in the first post.

>#2 porn..

Porn is good if you're trying to find a good patreon base, but its harder to spread because of the mature filter. The main thing is the ratio of Favs to Views is much lower on porn art, because even though people might like it they might not want it to show up in their fav. This effects your ability to rank to hit front page.

>#3 is getting something like a Daily Deviation, being featured on DA's facebook page, or have a piece appear in the "hot new stuff" or whatever it's called.

These are either too luck based or too rare. I've been investigating DD for a while now and its significantly worse now than it was before. In the older days DD was featured on every page so you could rack up HUGE amounts of page views by getting DD'ed. Nowadays you have to go the DD section to see it, which most people don't. If you look at the page views and watcher history for recent DD's they're all around the same or less than what you can get from front paging (find a random top 10 in 24 hour popular category with very low watch count and see how much his page view history and watch count jumps just from being in the top 10). Getting in that top 10 in the 24 hour popular category is basically like having a DD every time you hit it.

>#4 git gud and amass followers simply from how insanely good every piece is.

If nobody sees your art how can you get followers? DeviantArt is pretty bad about this. There are tons of japanese/korean/chinese artists that are popular on other platforms but have < 5,000 watchers because they just post art and don't do much else.

>>2727106
Also nobody cares about llama spamming. There's a guy who's given over a million llamas and he has 78,000 watchers as well as a Deviousness Award.

>>2727127

>There's a guy who's given over a million llamas and he has 78,000 watchers as well as a Deviousness Award.

Over a million? If that's not hyperbole that's pretty ridiculous. At that point though is it seriously worth the time investment?

At a llama every 15 seconds (I think that's a relatively generous estimate to find a page and send a llama) that's 173 fucking days (if I did the math right) of sending llamas. JUST sending llamas. Every 15 seconds. That's 4166 hours. What's the meme for mastery again? I think it was 10,000 hours of practice at a skill, and he spent nearly half of it clicking "send llama" to have 78,000 watchers on Deviantart.

I understand that self promotion and having followers can be important for an aspiring professional but jesus, the legwork required for DA popularity is astounding. And what if the platform ended up closing? You'd lose most of those followers.

>>2727130
Thems the breaks.

Random page and one-click llama, you could easily set up a mouse macro to do that on the hour 60 times on a crummy laptop and forget about it.

>>2727132
>Random page and one-click llama, you could easily set up a mouse macro to do that on the hour 60 times on a crummy laptop and forget about it.

That's not a bad idea, I hadn't considered that. I guess at that sort of rate he must've automated it, because that's a mindboggling amount of time to be spending sending llamas.

At that point I guess it's the equivalent of sending flyers to everyone's doorstep to advertise your business.

>>2727130

Maybe he's using a bot, it's human impossible to spamming shit every 5 seconds,

I don't like DA too much, because 90% of the community scares away some people.
I do like Behance, though. And aside from that I'd say you need a site of your own and maybe just an instagram if you want to gain visibility. Facebook is stupid, because the visibility you get is more based on who you know, when in instagram complete strangers get in contact with your work no matter how many likes you get. I even got some artist I used to listen back in the day liking one of my stuff there.

>>2727130
They have llama giving Bots... it makes it as easy as deleting messages.

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>>2727089
DA is not all that bad..
I think if you enjoy art and you're posting your art as a hobby then you would enjoy looking at other peoples art as well. I've used it for 6 years now. I have a few good friends and it's exposed me to a lot of different artists. If you're about numbers and you want watchers then the site would lose a lot of its fun.. but da is an artist community it's so you can talk to other artists, not just sell your art. Everyone's so wrapped around making money that they don't see the bigger picture. I'm not saying making money is wrong. I'm just saying it shouldn't be first priority.

>>2727171
Making friends with other artists is easy. If you're not an impossibly socially anxious fuckwit, just approach a peer and strike up a convo and boom, you're pals.

Money is the sticking point because it's hard to get.