Adobe announced this afternoon that it is acquiring Behance, "a leading online social media platform that enables creatives to showcase and share their work," to become part of their Creative Cloud suite of tools and online services for designers. The privately-held portfolio powerhouse has one million members and also host portfolios for LinkedIn, AdWeek, AIGA and all the leading design schools.
In a statement released today, David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager at Adobe, writes, “Behance will play a key role in Adobe’s efforts to serve the creative world in the years to come and will accelerate our efforts to enable a more open and collaborative creative community.” It is these community capabilities that Adobe wants to foster by turning its suite of products and services into the backend for a social network. In a nod to the ascendent role of social media in our professional lives, Adobe wants to make the public publishing of a designer's work an integral step in the process of making the work. To that end, Senior Marketing Director for Creative Professionals, Scott Morris, tells me that Adobe is planning "deep integration" between Behance's portfolio platform and its own creative tools. Think of the way Facebook and Twitter buttons are integrated in iOS for an idea of what that might mean.
Adobe just announced that Creative Cloud is over 300,000 paid members, with a million trying it out on the freemium model. Behance's 1 million members have uploaded 30 million images in 2 million projects generating 90 million page views in the last 30 days. The community-building (and cross-marketing) possibilities are large for this new nexus of Adobe, Behance and LinkedIn.
This combination of a creative online workspace through which participants gain community visibility sounds an awful lot like GitHub, and that model could be what Adobe is after with this acquisition. GitHub, I suppose, could have tried to extend their reach in the design direction, but it's environment and core-competencies may be better suited to text-based collaboration—code and content more than high-bandwidth visuals. GitHub does seem interested in becoming some kind of universal collaboration platform, but if they want to move into serious visuals there are other sites to partner with, like Dribbble or Sortfolio.
This acquisition caps a year in which Adobe launched Creative Cloud in May and has made significant additions and updates to the tools and services every month since. Unlike selling packaged software for a lump sum or upgrade fee every year or two, when you sell a service month-to-month or year-to-year you have to keep delivering and reminding your customers that they are happy with the services you are providing. Creative Cloud aims to be an offer that designers cannot refuse. Baking easy portfolio updates into the workflow is yet another way to seal the deal.
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