Not Freaking-A! Back in the day when I was a teenager, a curious-looking VW Minivan pulled into our driveway, and out came a scruffy hippie dude. He was John Draper, who had gone by the handle, Cap'n Crunch. He was the guy who discovered that the toy whistle that came in the box of Cap'n Crunch cereal happened to sound at the frequency of 2600 Hz. This frequency was the same as a signal used by U.S. telephone companies to trigger long-distance phone calls. By blowing the whistle into a phone, Draper found that he could place long-distance phone calls for free! Well, he went to the slammer for that, but he was the grandfather of a subcommunity of so-called Phone Freaks or Phreaks, as they were called, who explored the intricacies of the telephone systems. Some of them were the first hackers, but others simply want to understand how things worked. But I digress.

You might wonder about some of the underworkings of deviantART, too. While hacking dA is not cool, understanding dA and how it fits into the the greater internet community is cool. By merely viewing the HTML code that comprises any dA page, I discovered the following. On every main page, there is a tracking pixel, a JPG image that is one pixel in size. When a page is visited, this tracking pixel causes an external server to be hit. The external server tracks things such as the number of unique visitors who view your page, your overall traffic over time, the demographics of the people who visit your page, and where your visitors go when they leave your page. If your page is very busy, the system tracks more statistics, because you're more valuable to dA. That is, if you are popular, dA may benefit by getting more click-throughs on advertisements that appear on your page, or dA may benefit by being able to target their audience more effectively.

But a few of the cool things that the demographics show are who are the most popular deviants, and how popular deviantART is as a site, compared to other websites. Also, while your Pageview count tells you how many clicks your deviations have received, now you can see how many people you reach! The demographics tracking is done by a company called QuantCast.com. If you want to see your demographics, you can append your dA URL to their URL. For instance, to view the statistics for the most popular deviant for June 2007, *snapesnogger, go to the website www.quantcast.com/snapesnogger.deviantart.com.

As you can see, *snapesnogger has a boatload of statistics, such as how many unique visitors she attracted, and whether they are in the U.S. or not. Also, you can see a graph of the traffic for the last six months. In addition, you can see if her visitors are drive-bys, fans, or stalkers. You can see the age, gender, income level, ethnicity, education, and family composition of her fans. How they figure this out is a mystery to me, but I'm sure if has something to do with the the hyper-geometric probability theorem, or some other Haitian voodoo. Then you can see what other sites have a similar demographic, and see the most popular sites your deviants navigate to from your page. What's scary is that in June 2007, *snapesnogger got about as many viewers as deviantART's Help system and had more viewers than dA's Store! Oh the pressure... You can also see that *snapesnogger is ranked 29,036th out of 20.2 million.

What else can Quancast tell us? If you click on the Top Sites link at the bottom of their site, you can see the ranking of the 20 million websites that Quantcast tracks. The most popular site is Yahoo, followed by Google. Well, duh. Followed by MSN, eBay, MySpace, and Microsoft. So where is deviantART? We come in at number 129! Just a couple of days ago we were at 133, so dA is blowing up! But when you look at who we are ahead, you can see just how HUGE dA is. deviantART has more unique visitors than Domino's and Papa John's Pizza, combined! And dA is ahead of limewire (number 134), blockbuster (161), toysrus (177), fedex (185, blogger (199), and even hotmail (235)!

Now, if you look at dA's stats (www.quantcast.com/www.deviantart.com), you can see that we get over 14 million unique visitors every month, with less than half of them in the U.S. deviantART is truly a global site. And 54% of the visitors are dA addicts. I wonder if there is a 12-step program for dA addicts... The demographics further say that: "The site's visitors' interests are clothing (Levi's, Snorg Tees, Candies, American Apparel), specialty retail (Hot Topic, Claire's Stores, Game Stop, Electronics Boutique) and specialty clothing (Threadless T-Shirts, Christian Dior, Charlotte-Russe, Tillys)"

Which means we're a bunch of bad-ass mofos.