There is a lot of creative talent out there, but for a long time, designers, artists, and creative professionals were underrepresented in the digital world. Not only that, but the Web happens to be a perfect medium for artists to showcase their talents, distribute their portfolios, and hook up with benefactors. So, back in early 2008, Scott Belsky and co-founder Matias Corea, along with engineering leads Dave Stein and Chris Henry, launched Behance, a platform for creative professionals to showcase their talents, designed, in the big picture, to put control back into the hands of creatives and give their ideas the opportunity to see the light of day.
After fits and starts, Behance has become one of the go-to resources for creatives to efficiently organize and showcase their work in an effort to give their careers a jump start. The Behance Network, the team’s flagship platform, allows creative types to create multi-media portfolios and distribute those across Behance partner sites and, most significantly, LinkedIn.
Last year, Behance launched the “Creative Portfolio Display”, which allows users to bridge creative and social networks and connect their portfolios right to their LinkedIn accounts. While Behance is not revealing exact figures, Behance CEO Scott Belsky did confirm that over 100,000 LinkedIn members are now using the application to showcase their creative portfolios on their LinkedIn profiles and keep them in sync.
Behance also launched “The 99%”, its research arm and think tank, which includes an eponymous webzine and conference that offers creatives tips, articles, and the opportunity to network in an effort to move ideas to execution and assist creatives in the endeavor to removing “starving” from “starving artist”. Both the Behance Network and its 99% wing have become a great resource for recruiters, editors, and fans to find inspiring creative work and talent for hire.
In fact, today, Behance has revealed a few new, cool stats to TechCrunch, which provide a glimpse into the network’s growth. Today, over 1 million projects have been published by creative professionals on Behance, with over 20,000 new projects launched every week that contain over 100,000 images and videos.
As Behance tracks the data behind each of these projects, including what tools were used to create them, who the client was, who collaborated on the project, and how many people viewed and “appreciated” them (Behance’s equivalent of Facebook’s “like”), the network is taking strides to build a “creative graph”. Just like the social graph, the interest graph, and more, Behance is using this data to give creatives a glimpse into trends like which equipment, resources, and software are most popular among certain channels of the creative world.
In the future, says Behance Co-founder and CEO Scott Belsky, this could mean that Behance pursues a LinkedIn-type business model, wherein it helps top brands and companies explore its database in very specific ways to search for, track, and hire talent — in an effort to assist companies in the searching and tracking of everything made with their product or for their brand.
Beyond powering creative networks and portfolio display on LinkedIn, AIGA, and AdWeek, Behance is behind more than 12 sites that are now receiving over 51 million pageviews per month, from over 7 million visitors, and Apple, Nike, Netflix, and Facebook (among others) are regularly posting jobs and searching for talent in design, illustration, creative direction, etc. What’s more, creative work on Behance received over 16.5 million “appreciations”, and its projects and portfolios received over 11.5 million views on LinkedIn.
The creative network also recently launched its “ProSite”, which provides users with a portfolio-website builder to create customizable portfolios without any prior coding or engineering experience, which also happens to be pretty affordable at $11 a month. With ProSite, Behance adds to the suite of features available on its network, and gives creatives a robust resource to get their work discovered and into the hands of the people who write the checks.
For more stats and information on Behance, the team has created a nifty infographic, which you can check out here.
Or check out the video below for additional info on ProSite: