About a year ago, I was invited to beta test ArtistsnClients.com and to provide feedback for its development team. I did so with more gusto than expected.
AnC is basically a reverse Elance for the hobbyist and semi-professional art market. I want to call it the “fandom art market,” which I’m sure is a very poor term for it, but you know what I’m talking about. AnC is aimed primarily at the artists that have, over the years, peddled their wares on sites like Livejournal, deviantART, FurAffinity, and most recently, Tumblr. It aims to provide a better platform to facilitate commission transactions, which are frequently rife with problems, many stemming from the simple fact that none of these other sites were made to handle commissions.
The site launched to the public in late July and has been growing quietly since then, adding and implementing new features on a fairly regular basis. In January, deviantART launched its own platform for commissions — it’s pretty awful, but dA is the big fish in the pond, and people will use their platform because they’re young, poorly-informed, and already on the site. AnC is the little fish, and while it’s also not a perfect platform, it’s off to a far better start. So I think it’s worth talking about, because there really does need to be a better way to deal with commissions on the Internet.
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