The DeviantArt community is famous for being a gathering of all kinds of artists ranging from experts to apprentices, from deviants sharing the same taste in certain deviation categories and deviants who thrive for competitions to prove themselves, this is when art contests come in; Great and fun opportunities to compete with others to achieve a victory by challenging not only other deviants but youself!

The sad part about many contests held place in our community is the lack of participation coming from the members, most hosts are astonished at the lack of entries without knowing what went wrong, in this article i bring you an analysis of contest prizes and how can you lure more people in participating into them.

The following analisys covers how to get strangers to participate in your contest, your watchers and friends are excluded because they probably participate for the sake of friendship.

Prizes

Prizes are important if you want a contest to skyrocket into popularity, as human beings we are attracted to shiny, valuable objects and on the internet valuable objects are the equivalent to those that we can appreciate, save and/or find an use for. A good start is to define three winners for the contest, this gives more motivation to the artists with they thinking "hey, no matter if i don't win first, i could still get the second prize!"

Top examples of these prizes on deviantart, in no particular order, can be (but are not limited to):
1) Deviantart Subscriptions.- People with no subscription or even subscribers themselves will flock around your contest even if you're offering just one monnth subscription, apart from supporting Deviantart by buying the subscription, you're allowing one deviant to experience Deviantart's awesome subscribers features!
2) Money.- Without needing much explanation, this is one of the most effective ways of filling your contest with entries, even a small amount is enhough to bring a wide variety of styles to your contest.
3) Prints.- Self explanatory.
4) Drawn Deviations.- So far i've listed prizes that needs you to spend money to, since a lot of deviants doesn't have the resources to afford having that sort of rewards, this has been adopted as the standard prize for a contest, wether is a full colored picture or a sketch. While this is completely acpetable, it must be noted that this won't always work as a succesful lure, mainly because people can obtain art made by others by making art trades or appliying to someone giving requests, also, supposing that people do enter because of that prize, depending on your art skills the chances of the entry being exceptionally good vary. This is because there is a jerarquical order in wich the entries will come, in decreasing order as:
Drawing Skill of the host > Drawing Skill of the participants
It's rare when a participant's art skill is greater than the host's when the prize is only a drawing and the reason for this, as stated above, is that they can get better art by doing art trades. This is mere speculation of the analysis of course, you are open to debate it.
5) Artisan crafts and physical objects.- Plushies, jewelry, armbands and sculptures created by you can be a great prize wich will be fought for the simple reason that we, the artists, can get a hold of it, touch it, feel it and place it in our desks to contemplate the marvelous work you did or in the case of plushies, hug it and put it on our beds. The main problem with this price is that most of the time you have to limit the entries to your location, or else you'd have to pay the shipping for the winner. Remember that DeviantArt is a worldwide community and there are artists of all levels and tastes around the globe.

And finally, i advice to not offer any of these as prizes:
- A watch
- Favorites on deviations
- Comments
Or anything of the sort, artists can find watches, favorites and comments just by displaying artwork and involving themselves in deviantart's community, offering this kind of stuff as a prize won't get you too many participants.

A few extra tips that could help you have a more enjoyable contest is to extend your deadlines to a reasonable amount of time, most artists that do put effort in their pieces take time and dedication to make a good job. Not just because you can make ten and a half deviations per day means that everyone can keep up that pace.

I hope this helped you get more participants and entries into your contest, remember that the whole point of a contest is to have fun and challenge yourself.