ANGELO SOTIRA

Age: 27

Networth: $87 million

Angelo Sotira, is a co-founder of DeviantArt.com. With a system of message boards, personal pages, and forums which embrace and encourage artists of all types to showcase their work for free.  DeviantArt is viewed by some as an artist’s heaven, and by others as the drag on the artistic experience. One of the main criticisms of DeviantArt is that their lack of a filtering system results in one’s having to sift through the dirt to find gold. Plus the sheer amount of traffic on this site is close to 120 million visitors per year.

While we’re not denying that this may be true, we at Redefine know that sometimes the best talent comes from the most unlikely places. It was first launched on August 7, 2000 by Scott Jarkoff, Matthew Stephens, Angelo Sotira and others.

As of October 2009 the site consists of over 11 million members, over 100 million submissions, and receives around 100,000 submissions per day.

DeviantArt was originally launched in August 7, 2000 by Scott Jarkoff, Matt Stephens and Angelo Sotira, as part of a larger network of music-related websites called the Dmusic Network.
At this year’s first-ever DeviantArt Summit, our writer Jeanette Liang met up with Angelo Sotira, DeviantArt’s CEO, and got to speak with him about the whole motivation behind creating the site.

The domain deviantart.com attracted at least 36 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study.

Here are a few interviews that have been done with Angelo.

Jeanette Liang of redefinemag.com asked Angelo Sotira a few questions on how deviantart.com was created.

CLICK HERE to read the interview.

You can also check out a written and audio/video interview of Angelo Sotira by Phokki.com

CLICK HERE to get access to this interview

Entrepreneur Magazine (February 2011, Vol. 39, No. 2) Angelo Sotira’s Deviantart / Brilliant Marketing Ideas / the Small-business Social Media Challenge