SPREAD: no, DEVIANTART WON'T shut down- here's whyEDIT Aug 6th, 2015: THE RUMOR WAS OFFICIALLY DEBUNKED! THE SITE IS NOT SHUTTING DOWN!
Also, I heard from a reliable source that DA is NOT in any kind of financial trouble to begin with! I made this journal entry in the assumption that deviantArt was trying to cover up for potential losses but that has since been proven to NOT be the case! They merely want more income, but are not covering up for losses.
EDIT 2: Jul 18th, 2016:
The journal I linked above has since been deleted as the group itself is gone; but basically, the founder of dA himself said dA IS NOT shutting down, and actual information found online (with charts) proved that financially speaking, dA is doing just fine.
So, no need for any kind of panic! 
I wrote this journal originally to adress the uproar that followed when people were signing the petition against CORE approximately a year ago, frightened that dA might be losing money and hence be closed down. This assu
Forget my last entry here is
's
Lately there has been a lot of
uproar on the risk of losing deviantArt entirely if you sign the petition against CORE.
A lot of
misinformation has been spread and I need to assert them.
First off, you do not need to worry! Website-based businesses such as deviantArt do not work that way, they do not go bankrupt anywhere near as easily as other forms of business.
Also, we do not aim for this.
The only reason why we wish for the Core boycott is to make Deviantart listen to us. It has failed to do that for years, and we have finally had enough.
Second, we need to clear up a few things.
We do not want to remove what CORE represents. We want only to change it back to 'Premium' and bring back the prices to the level they were, or lower. And here is why it should happen:
1. The reason Premium has been deviantArt's #1 source of income is naturally because so many people use adblock that prevents them from gaining more ad-revenue. Why do people use adblock instead of buying the Premium?
Simple!
The Premium was WAY TOO EXPENSIVE TO BEGIN WITH.
When the only perks the average user were interested in it were the removed ads and a chance to change your username, you understand why people would simply not buy Premium. The other available perks then
were completely useless to 98% of deviantArt users, so you understand why
the concept was faulty to begin with.
What does deviantArt do, though? It does
the exact opposite what it should do, which of course was to
make Premium more attractive to paying members, and this would have been
by giving us better and more usable perks, and
REDUCING ITS PRICE to around $15-20 a year, and the same for Super Groups.
For that money there would have been more paying customers guaranteed,
AND THE PROBLEMS WOULD HAVE BEEN SOLVED!
2. Another thing they did that was
incredibly stupid was doing this
without informing us about it. And the logo is really ugly. You can understand people do not take such things well, and while these were definitely problems as well, the bigger problem was the beforementioned;
that they do NOT do the SMARTEST THING to do.3. If deviantArt needs more money, it needs to make it users happy. Currently, it is failing at that. It does not listen to our concerns especially regarding art thievery and these updates, it changed things we did not ask for nor consent to, and it unannouncedly rises up prices to
cover the costs of the FARCE that was the community "facelift" redesign and the mobile application - both of which were near-flops.
They are doing the exact opposite a smart business is supposed to be doing and if they do not realise it on their own, they have to once we vote on our feet. It is likely the only way they will actually ever listen to what we have to say.
We do not want Deviantart gone. But we want Deviantart to realise the mistakes it has made, and to fix them and that happens by making us HAPPY.
And currently they are not doing that.
Deviantart has brought this in on itself by failing to listen to our concerns in the past.
We only want to help, and the only way we can is by making them listen to us and this seems to be the only way it can be achieved.They have not listened to what we've had to say about anything in the past. They do not respond to issues regarding art-thievery, they update the site with near-useless features and changes that do not go well with the community. Of course people don't like it and members leave! And with this expensive project messed up added to it, you can guess why they need the money.
But here is the thing:
IT IS NOT OUR JOB TO PAY FOR THEIR MISTAKES.
tl;dr: Raising the prices was the last thing they should have done.
The wisest thing to do would have been to keep Premium as it was and reduce its cost to around $15 and advertise the **** out of it. That is how you fix up for losses AND keep your members happy, and perhaps even make them even happier than they were! That said,
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HELP DEVIANTART, DO NOT USE ADBLOCK!
