I have now been a member of DeviantArt for a year and a half, and I was increasingly under the impression that people were favouriting my work for the sake of scoring themselves another pageview. I often visit people’s pages and find that they have pageviews coming out of their ears, even though their “artwork” is… well… not great.

So I decided to do an experiment. I made a new DA account and submitted some photographs that no-one in their right mind would think was a good piece of artwork. I then clicked on the ‘random deviant’ button at the bottom of the page about 50 times and favourited something from each persons gallery, no matter how good/bad the artwork was.

Now I usually have fairly high standards for my favourites, I will only favourite work that I genuinely think is good. But here I threw my standards out the window and favourited everything that came through the door. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that I only faved crap work. In fact, some of the things I faved in that account were very good, so don't go being offended if you were one of the people I faved. I merely faved all the newest deviations in an experiment to see how many pageviews I could get out of it.

Within the first hour of making the account and favouriting, I had 16 pageviews. Someone had even favourited my ‘murky water’ photograph that I had submitted, and 6 people had left me comments thanking me for the favourite I gave them. One person had even said to me ‘love your pics!’.

After the success of the first hour, I decided to fave some more. I went to the front page of DA and clicked on the twenty-four ‘newest’ deviations and favourited them all. I then refreshed the page and repeated the process. I now had approximately 100 favourites in my gallery.

Another hour later I had 82 pageviews, and another dozen or so comments. One person had sent me a note telling me that since I faved but didn’t comment on their work, they were going to add me to their friends list. Another person had favourited 2 of my deviations. I favourited a few more of the newest deviations, then logged out for a while.

I checked the account again about 3 hours after I made the account. My popularity had skyrocketed to 178 pageviews! I had 2 new faves on my deviations and a bucketload of new comments on my main page. I faved some more, I now had about 300 works in my favourites gallery.

Later in the afternoon, the friend I had made earlier had favourited my blurry ‘muffin’ photo, and had made me an animated muffin avatar! Also, my pageviews were now at 264! Time to favourite some more…

By now, each of my 5 terrible deviations had at least 1 favourite. My blurry 'muffin' had 3 different people comment on it. Three people had now added me as a friend. I had faved 448 deviations, and my pageviews were at 474.

At last, 7 and a half hours after I had opened the account, I managed to reach 508 pageviews. Even though my 5 deviations were pretty damn terrible, they had managed to get 7 favourites from other people.

So there you have it. I managed to scab over 500 pageviews in less than 8 hours. And even then I had only spent about 3 or 4 of those hours actually on DA. Conclusion? You don’t have to be a good artist to be popular on DA. As long as you spend an excessive amount of time favouriting a shitload of other people’s stuff, you can get pageviews.

Fave this deviation, and I’ll give you a pageview.