Behance, stylized as Bēhance, is a social media platform owned by Adobe whose main focus is to showcase and discover creative work. Behance was founded by Matias Corea and Scott Belsky in November 2005. It was acquired by Adobe in December 2012. As of October 2020, Behance had over 24 million members.

History

Behance was founded by Matias Corea and Scott Belsky in November 2005. The company initially relied on revenue, generating income by selling banner ads, job postings and later, 99U conference tickets. In May 2012, their first round of outside funding received $6.5 million from investors including Dave McClure and Jeff Bezos's personal investment firm, Bezos Expeditions. The company was acquired by Adobe Systems for $150 million in December 2012. In 2021, Behance added a subscription feature for users to sell their tutorials and other services. It also added crypto wallet integration.

Corporate affairs

Products

Users can sign up to Behance and build profiles consisting of projects. Both registered and unregistered users can view any particular project, as well as comment on them. Members of Behance can follow other users' profiles. Co-founder Belsky compared the first version of Behance's online porfolios with "project" structures as providing an organised art showcase, in comparison to DeviantArt and Saatchi's digital community.

Adobe Portfolio

Adobe Portfolio (formerly ProSite) is Behance's DIY web design application, similar to popular tools such as Weebly and Joomla. It is a personal portfolio site creation tool on the web and it syncs with a user’s Behance project. Adobe Portfolio can only be accessed by buying an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.

Served sites

Content from the Behance Network gets fed into a network of sites called the Served sites, which display work in specific categories such as fashion, industrial design, and typography. In September 2010, more were added, including branding, digital art and toy design. In April 2012, advertising, art, architecture and more were added as categories.

Action Method

Action Method is a productivity methodology targeting creative professionals. It includes a line of paper products (since 2014 sold by The Ghostly Store rather than Behance itself) and an online application called Action Method Online (although this was discontinued 1 June 2014). Its purpose is to connect every event with a set of specific tasks which the user can perform, called action steps.

99U

99U is a consulting service and annual conference in New York City that focuses on marketing. The name 99U comes from the Thomas Edison quote that "Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration." In 2011, 99U won a Webby Award for "Best Cultural Blog."

Awards

Criticism

Adobe's acquisition of Behance in 2012 prompted concerns that the company would start monitoring the activity of its users, which may limit users' trust in the site There has been studies done on the gender demographics of the creatives that use behance. Studies have shown that majority of users on Behance are shown to be male while female designers on Behance were the minority and also were shown to have a much smaller following compared to the male designers on Behance.