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Don’t choose the wrong acquirer: how Tiny killed Dribbble & Creative Market

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How Zach Onisko & Andrew Wilkinson killed Dribbble and Creative Market in 24 months

Dribbble started as a promising online community: founded in 2009 by Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett, who beta-launched the invite-only site for designers to share their work. Over the following five years, the site added several new features (ie. API integration, Attachments, Player Stats, Pro, Job Board, Meetups) and the community grew to 486,771 members. Their invite-only, designer-oriented approach helped make Dribbble one of the top online communities.
In January 2017, Dribbble was acquired by Tiny (founded by Andrew Wilkinson — the guy who tried taking credit for designing Slack before being publicly corrected for his gross exaggerations). Shortly afterwards, Zack Onisko was appointed CEO. This was the beginning of the end:
Onisko led Growth at Hired.com prior to being the CEO of Dribbble. The first of many changes under Onisko’s leadership was to remove the invite-only component that helped keep Dribbble’s content of high quality. Dribbble also acquired Crew in 2017 and CreativeMarket in 2020.
In the last two years, Dribbble has dropped from 4.5 / 5 stars to 2.1 stars on Trustpilot.
In this time, CreativeMarket has dropped from 4 / 5 stars to 1.5 stars on Trustpilot.
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Why this precipitous drop? A slew of changes implemented by Onisko & Tiny to inflate short-term revenue and growth at the expense of customer (and seller) satisfaction:

Dribbble

  • Removing the invite-only feature that kept the community high-quality
  • The job board is now paid for by freelancers, rather than posters — as a result, nearly all the posts are Telegram/WhatsApp identify theft scams:
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  • Feeds are now 99% paid — at most 1 in every 18 posts is from a non-Pro/Team account (if any at all), even on "New & Noteworthy" pages.
All but one post are from paid accounts for the search "Typography”
All but one post are from paid accounts for the search "Typography”
Every single post is from a paid account for the search “Web UI”
Every single post is from a paid account for the search “Web UI”
Every single post is from a paid account for the search “Presentation”
Every single post is from a paid account for the search “Presentation”
  • New “Boosted” post feature: costs hundreds of $ for a fraction of the engagement Dribbble posts used to organically receive just two years ago
  • Changed the Dribbble 'popular' page from featuring new & fresh daily finds to only posts by “curated” designers (aka. paid accounts):
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  • Thanks to these algorithm changes, you’ll find masterpieces like the below at the top of Dribbble feeds today:
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Creative Market

  • Reducing the cookie window from 1 year to just 30 days for Affiliate sales
  • Increasing their (already very high) take rate on sales from 30% to 50% — sellers now only take home ~20% of their sales revenue, as opposed to the original ~70% four years ago
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  • Introduced a slew of new hidden fees:
    • New "Platform Fee" added to all purchases
    • New membership model with expiring credits that both creators & buyers hate
    • New “inactivity fee” that drains seller’s earnings
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    • New “tax” fee that further reduces creator’s commission by as much as 30%
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  • Altering the search algorithm to hide new products
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  • Deleted the Shop Owner forum to silence negative feedback
  • Continuous CAN-SPAM violations: making it impossible for users to unsubscribe and sending unsolicited, suspicious emails
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  • Several users (both sellers & creators) have reported Creative Market support agents deleting their accounts without cause after responding with abusive & insulting messages:
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Andrew Wilkinson bragged on a podcast that the total revenue of Dribbble was in the “10s of millions” — but this revenue uptick does not seem sustainable. According to public filings, the Dribbble holding company (under which Dribbble, Creative Market, and FontSpring operate), earned $62M revenue in 2022:
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Needless to say, the changes above do not bode well for the future of either Creative Market or Dribbble; it would not be surprising if either were no longer around in a few years, given the current rate of degradation.
 
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