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Speaking from a personal perspective, I use DAZ Studio because I don't have the artistic skills or resources to produce the pictures that I imagine by other means (digital art that involves drawing or photographic art requiring equipment and human models). So when I discovered DAZ Studio it provided an outlet for my creative imagination. I'm guessing I am typical of many DAZ users so I think quite a high propotion of those who download the software stick with it. I tried Poser - I actually bought the software - but didn't like the interface and could see no benefits over and above the free DAZ Studio so I went back to being a DAZ Studio user. Again I suspect I might be typical.
I am not a gamer so I was never drawn to Game engines and still do not really know what they are capable of compared to DAZ Studio. I am not a programmer and I think there is a fair amount of coding required to make the best use of gaming engines.
I also download every new release of Blender but my use is limited to the tools that eneble me to make morphs for the clothing, etc., that I use in DAZ Studio. I do have the Diffeo bridge add-on but I find it takes more time and considerably more knowledge to complete a scene in Blender than if I don't transfer it out of DAZ Studio and finish it there. I admit, however, that I am very frustrated with the slowness of dForce and the IRay render engine (even with my prized RTX 3090). Also, I am dipping my toes in the animation waters and quickly realising that DAZ does not provide a toolset that will take me any deeper. I may soon be forced to extend my knowledge of Blender after all. Again I think these are all considerations that the user base will be familiar with and the shortcomings might be a strong limiting factor to the wider uptake of this software.
I think there are several "sites-that-shall-not-be-named" here. Just sayin'.
At the hobbyist level, I'm guessing it's moderate, with a lot of overlap with similar sites. To where it wouldn't take too long to have some small degree of prominence if you reached out to others. Beyond that I have no idea.
I'd assume the average gross spending per customer is much lower than that. Sure, there's some big spenders, but I suspect they're heavily outnumbered by customers spending less than $400 per year. Daz's usual marketing efforts seem to involve casting a wide net to capture a hobbyist market rather than a narrow focus. And the pricing strategy with the constant discounting would seem to appeal mostly to the cost-conscious rather than money-is-no-object free spenders. Look at the Daz+ coupons and other discounts--Those are clearly aimed at customers interested in saving $6 or so off of a shopping cart totalling in the $15-$50 range. And then there's a large number of customers who spend so little and so infrequently that Daz+ doesn't make sense for them--paying for monthly coupons when they only make 4 to 8 purchases per year.
Of course, Daz (or almost any business) loves to expand the base of big spenders because they're so profitable. If you look at the NFT push, that was clearly aimed at potential customers who would see the money spent on Daz content as a minor investment leading to some jackpot NFT sales. Daz's NFT push has quieted down considerably, though. Don't know if it got any sort of traction. I doubt it was transformative for their business model.
If one is a 'big player' especially in a big company, I would expect them to use 'heavy duty' tools that can manage the process from the ground up, with tons on inhouse produced assets that have no licencing issues - Also considering the huge number of creators with varying levels of experience... A 'big player' would expect the assets to follow certain standards and would be willing to pay for it much more for having the standards followed.
So, it does look like the target audience are the hobbyists, individual artists and small (tiny) businesses, but hey, who didn't get drawn in by the possibility of creating scenes with almost realistic human figures doing whatever ones imagination comes up with?
So does Renderosity have more than 25K regular customers? If 5K of DAZ 3D's regular customers also were regular customers of Renderosity then that's a lot of money in monthly sales.
Actually thinking about DAZ's staff, including programmers, sys admins, & CS and 3rd party hired internet cloud services maybe DAZ has 50K regular customers. Note: I buy regularly for 2 or 3 days each month, usually not eceeding $25 for the month, but don't buy enough to consider myself a regular customer. Regular customers spend $10 a day minimum, 4 or 5 days a week.
We don't know how much the whales are skewing the average revenue per customer metrics or how does the bell curve appear when one considers the cash flow from these whales (Does it even look like a bell anymore?) Just to illustrate the point, consider this guy in Diablo Immortal who spent $100,000 in that supposedly free-to-play game and is now stuck because Blizzard did not account for scenarios that would arise from such early whaling.
In another video, the same guy claims that there are some 30 people in his Discord group that have so far "invested" more than $50K on that game. And all that despite the game getting massive review bombed with just 0.3/10 on Metacritic for its greedy monetization. All that in a f'king game that would probably become obsolete and forgotten within 3-4 years.
Compared to that, here the whales (or collectors) receive digital goods that would still be serviceable for another 5 years at the least. I won't be surprised if the average revenue per customer gets skewed to that extent.
The same goes for the NFT side of their business; which is a separate discussion on how the massive number of NFTs does nothing but push up the _rarity_ of the few that actually brings home the revenue...
If you can be counted on to buy a certain amount during a given period of time on average, no matter what the amount, you fit the exact definition of a regular customer. Honestly, I think your number is a bit high for the average customer here, but that's just a gut impression based on the fact that at one point I noticed that if I bought different items a few hours apart, the escalation of the Invoice number wasn't as big as I thought it might be. Of course, you can't do that now since as of 11/01/2020, the invoice numbers have all been coded in such a way as to prevent easy decryption. That said, the value of a customer can often be the result of things other than sheer dollars, with two of the sub-groups that are often sought out are the WoW (word of Mouth) customers, who increase awareness of products and sales even if they buy relatively little themselves, and Connected Customers, who are highly active in ways that drive up click count statistics. Beyond that, of course, are the traditional "Loyal Customers" and Big Spenders.
Keep in mind that those similarweb numbers numbers are guestimates based on who knows what. A different site, Grojo, estimates DAZ at 17.5M a year https://growjo.com/company/DAZ_3D and others are all over the map... It's a private company and DAZ/Tafi isn't letting that kind of financial data out for obvious reasons.
Interesting question...there are many smaller forums that people who use Daz or Poser hang out on. Not everyone who uses Daz Studio hangs out here or even on a forum. I know that many modding communities are now on places like Discord and would be surprised if there are not Daz Studio communities on there also.
That said having been using DS for many years and having bought or downloaded many items from a variety of places I no longer buy much at all as I'm more interested in making my own things to use.
I think it would be impossible to truly work out how many people currently use the software and various stores would have the figures.
I agree with what someone else said earlier about Renderosity. It has a large number of different software users that would buy from them including Photoshop. That said they have more DS products than poser in their newer items.
These days(as I get older) I find the store and forums harder to navigate and tend to prefer a smaller site to hang out on.
Despite all this I'm still very much a DS user.
I am not aware of other forums (other than Rendo) where DAZ Studio and its content are discussed. I have found a couple of Discord servers and one on Slack but not forums. Indeed, I would like to know about any because I dislike the Discord way of chatting (practically impossible to keep track) and prefer a forum with organised sub-folders and threads. This official one is essential but the TOS is severely limiting and maybe that puts off a large part of the DAZ user-base?
I have similar problems with Discord...I will pm you a link to the forum I hang out at. It's a lot smaller and definitely less busy.
I don't think that's just a result of getting older. What I've found is that most websites are getting harder and harder to use rather than simpler, for two basic reasons - 1.) if they're not constantly re-doing a site, there's no reason to hire web designers full time, is there? and 2.) the fact that one of the major goals of far too many web teams is increasing perceived web traffic, irregardless of whether that actually makes for a better user experience or increases sales. Thus we have websites that used to take three clicks to get to any given section now taking six or seven, as in the minds of many bean counters, more clicks is always better, and of course they want to stick some kind of survey in there before you can walk away with your product. Now, in some cases that's partially because that site is selling ad space nad the more pages equals more potential revenue. But on the flip side, honestly, has ANYONE here ever seen a website that was actually improved by making it more complicated? Or gone to a webstore and said "Gee, I wish I had to scroll through more pages before I can buy what I want"?
Cybersox said:
After a fortunately brief set of stints doing web design, I think there are several factors:
When you start digging around, you start finding them, maybe not that many in english though... I have found ones in german, french, russian and japanese - Over the years, some have closed down and new ones have surfaced.
Terrified by the amount of customization? No, or at least not in the way that I think you mean, as Amazon has handled the back end for many of the projects my companies have worked on over the years. The thing is, the majority of that customization doesn't benefit either the end users or the original vendors, and no small amount of it is actually detrimental.
There are obviously many reasons why people find websites confusing. For me I find as I get older that a website that has too much going on makes it harder for me to find things and depending on how they word things that can also have an impact. I avoided using facebook for years due to this(plus an innate dislike of it). There are actually a lot of older people who use either DS or Poser.
There are still forums around many are not very active. Hivewire still has a forum despite not being a store any more and I prefer the site because I find it friendlier and less mod interference. I never know when I'm going to have a post deleted here and sometimes don't understand the logic behind it.
I say that as someone who once loved this site and who actually was a community volunteer at one point.
It seems to me looking around after not being active for a year or so that there are less sites and people seem to be less interested. The only sites that seem active outside of here are facebook groups and there are a number of those.
Thing is Daz has always been the place to go for content but I wonder if with the trend for ai that this type of software is on it's way out. Many of the people on facebook who used to play with daz seem to be very occupied with ai these days.
Hi @Pendraia :
Good to see you back.
And, thank you for clueing me in to Hivewire forums still being alive -- I haven't been there since the store closure announcement, because I believed they were killing it all (like the others before them).
Will have to visit soon.
Take care...
Ken
I don't use Facebook (or Twitter or TikTok, etc.) so I am not up to date with trends involving AI. What kind of AI is involved in replacing the kind of work we do in DAZ Studio? I'm always interested in alternatives seeing as this hobby dominates my free time and if there's something better or just as creative, I'd be interested. I looked at game engines but when I watched tutorials, I was put off by the amount of coding involved (not my thing).
Maybe you mean something like this?
https://www.louisbouchard.ai/ganverse3d/
More like this: https://alexanderwales.com/the-ai-art-apocalypse/
Oh dear - that's depressing.
Here is a use case: https://youtu.be/O2FV_iWVk58 and if you have seen something like Jepegraphics work in Instagram or Deviantart, it is possible for talented people to make truly beautiful images but often people leave the ai image unmanipulated which leads to a certain sameness.
Hey Ken, I'll look forward to seeing you over there.
@nemesis10 yes similar to that. Funnily enough the image below was by a friend on facebook and it inspired me to try and recreate the character. The image is a dialled morph but eventually I want to try and create a custom character in zbrush as the jaw, chin and eyes aren't quite right.
I know this is going even more off topic, but I really don't quite understand that part of the AI discussion where it's about AI 'replacing the artist'. Art needs intent, and meaning. Algorithms by their nature cannot form either. They sure can make very decent looking graphics, don't get me wrong. But not everything that's nice to look at and / or useful is art. I thought that was like, something basically everyone involved in any kind of creativity agreed on?
On second thought, maybe I'm getting this wrong, since the discussions are about 'replacing the artist', not 'the art'. In that sense, I guess what people mean is that jobs that took a skilled CG artist before can now be handled by an AI and some dude typing in a few keywords instead, because he's not interested in creating 'art', just some nice graphics to go with his new product / website / whatever. Would that be more to the point?
@tsroemi It is off topic. You should go ask in this thread here
Oh thanks, didn't see that one!
Edit: Am back, question answered itself, and this thread is somehow more interesting, actually. Even have something to add that's more to the point: I think there might be a much broader 'occasional user base' to DAZ than one would think. Reasons: My brother who's a lawyer recently casually mentioned that he dabbles in DAZ from time to time, and I would have never ever guessed that. It seems he stumbled upon it because of games, and since it's really quite accessible, he got into it a little and now plays with it now and again. Myself, I'd been fumbling with Poser and DS back in the olden days when V3 was all the rage, then had a hiatus until 2019 when Iray sucked me back in again. So I'm like a DAZ sleeper ;-) I guess there might be quite a few of these, ready to wake up and spring back into Studio (and the vortex that is the DAZ store) any moment. Because Studio STILL is accessible and easy to back into.
This wouldn't surprise me...I haven't been using DS much in the last few years so I'm a bit of sleeper also. I originally got into DS through a games forum there was a group of us who were playing with DS while waiting for Oblivion to come out. All into modding and wanting to play with some of the new types of maps which we could do in DS. So yes there is probably a lot of people out there who don't come to the Daz forums.
Add me to the list of those who came to DAZ Studio from a game. In my case it was playing The Sims way back in 2004. There was (and probably still is) a thriving character modding community and you could find props and clothing etc., as well as character mods. DAZ Studio was mentioned and I looked for it and never went back to playing The Sims after that. I could make my own stories, mod characters myself and it was altogether more creative than any game.
Ah yes, good old Simsies! I bet there's tons of players around here, it just makes so much sense. Still play them myself, actually, not so much for the characters or the actual gaming but for the world and house building.