Adobe Acquires Social Portfolio Platform Behance To Power Its Creative Cloud Community Features
Adobe just announced that it has acquired Behance, a New York-based online platform where creative professionals can showcase their portfolios and where businesses can find talent.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Behance deal lands at the end of a pivotal year for Adobe: the company launched Adobe Social out of beta in September 2012 to tie social campaigns to business results, retired mobile Flash in August, and has been steering customers toward the Creative Cloud subscription model. Buying Behance gives that subscription a community layer — a place where the work made with Adobe tools gets showcased and where businesses go looking for talent.
The pickup was broad: Behance itself, The Next Web, GigaOM, Engadget, VentureBeat, ZDNet and Adobe's own blogs all carried the announcement on or about December 20, 2012, signaling how closely the industry watches anything that touches the Creative Cloud strategy.
First-order effects
- Behance's New York team joins Adobe, and the portfolio platform becomes the built-in community feature for Creative Cloud subscribers — showcasing work and discovering talent moves inside Adobe's own ecosystem rather than sitting alongside it.
Second-order effects
- Standalone portfolio and talent-discovery platforms now compete against a service bundled with the dominant creative toolset, pressuring them to differentiate on neutrality or deepen their own tool integrations.
- Behance's stream of published creative work feeds the same social-marketing ambitions Adobe staked out with Adobe Social, giving the marketing side a proprietary content source its rivals lack.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, creative-software vendors will keep acquiring the venues where their users' output lives — complementary assets around the tool, not just better tools — making ownership of the showcase layer as strategically valuable as the applications themselves.
The trend: Creative software companies are expanding from selling tools to owning the surrounding community and distribution surfaces, with acquisitions like this one marking each step.