SPOTLIGHT ON: Drew Curtis of Fark.com

Adrian: Can you tell us about the origin of Fark?

Drew: Back in 1997, I grabbed the four-letter domain name just cause it was available. It was something that I used to say on online chat instead of cursing. I wanted to have the domain name, but I didn’t have much use for it at the time. So it was a blank space for about two years.

The idea for the site came from the letters and emails I used to send my friends. I would always include a piece of really weird news because I had a real knack for finding that kind of stuff. It eventually got to the point where I was emailing them enough times in a given day that I thought they must be getting pretty irritated, so I better quit. I told them I was going to put all the bits of weird news up on a website, and they could just check it. I had this domain waiting, and I figured I would just use it. That’s basically all I did to get the thing kicked off and running. This was in 1999.

Adrian: Something I hear a lot is that these kinds of sites often go through a time where they are totally dormant. Then something happens, and they just take off. Is that what happened for you?

Drew: Actually, it happened exactly opposite. There was never any “Eureka” moment, it just continued to get a little better and a little better until eventually we had a bunch of traffic. There were a number of things that helped like early on the guys over at Tech TV would have me on once a week to do a spot, and due to the consistent exposure, we picked up traffic from there. It also traveled by word of mouth.

Adrian: So tell us about Foobies.com.

Drew: The site started because advertisers had problems with boobies links on the main page. We had to sequester them off to their own site. I’m still irritated by the fact that we can have a hundred simulated murders on broadcast TV every single night, but you put a nipple on TV and it’s obscene. So Foobies.com became just a funny way to make a comment on that.

Adrian: How does Fark compare with Drudge?

Drew: I think Drudge takes himself very seriously and wants to be a newsman in the style of Edward R. Murrow, has a conservative bias to his stuff, is very interested in politics, and we are none of that. We don’t pretend that we’re even attempting to do the news. We’re trying to have fun and trying to laugh.

Adrian: Where do your revenues come from?

Drew: Advertising and subscriptions. Right now, we are in an interesting spot with the advertising because we have so much traffic. We have more traffic than a lot of other major media properties online, and it seems to me that we should be able to knock down some major media dollars. We need to get to that level. So, the decision made recently was to let go of the low level advertising on the site.

One of the reasons the mainstream advertisers will not take a look at a website, in general, is because there is no mainstream advertising on it.

Adrian: Can you talk about what the percentage breakdown of revenues is?

Drew: Right now, it’s about half advertising and half subscriptions.

Adrian: Your site has similarities to the traffic of some of the social networking sites. When you visit those, you see the smilies and every other direct response campaign you can think of, but you don’t see those on your site.

Drew: The reason we don’t have those is more of a personal thing. My opinion is the quality of the advertising does affect the quality of the web site. Also, you need to find advertising that people actually want to see, which is pretty much the crux definition of viral marketing.

Adrian: I noticed on the articles you link to, you monitor the click through URLs. Why do you do that?

Drew: We are curious to see how many people go out. We wanted to know if we are sending out traffic and wanted to see how many people are doing it.

Adrian: What is your daily visitor count right now?

Drew: Uniques are somewhere between seven hundred fifty thousand to a million, Pageviews are about one point six to one point seven million, and this is all from Google analytics, which interestingly enough doesn’t count ad blocked hits, so it’s probably higher than that.

Adrian: So there is well over a million people looking at your site every day?

Drew: Probably, and click outs are around two million daily.

Adrian: That’s incredible. What’s your readership?

Drew: 90 percent male and 10 percent female. 18 to 35, but what’s really fascinating is under 18 is 1.6 percent, 18 to 22 is 20 percent. Our largest demographic is 22 to 26.

Adrian: I mean given that you’ve got a lot of traffic, have you thought about building a social network into Fark?

Drew: I don’t know that we could do anything that’s already been done and succeed in pulling people over. For example, if we changed everybody’s profile around on Fark so they have something like a MySpace page, would people leave MySpace and go over to Fark? I’m not convinced that’s the case.

I think in the meantime what we have to do is continue to concentrate on not messing up what we’ve got, and in the end, whatever we do, it has to be something that I like and interests me. Otherwise even if it’s a good idea I probably couldn’t even bring myself to do it.

Adrian: Social networking sites are doing a lot of interactive advertising. It’s a huge brand opportunity. Have you thought about doing that kind of stuff?

Drew: Yeah. In fact, that’s we have to do in order to sell major advertising.

I recently talked to some guys about doing something like that. They saw the photoshop contests, and we were talking about maybe having them host one.

Adrian: Are there other things on your site that are interactive?

Drew: Yeah, we don’t have as many of them, but we do audio stuff. A strangely hypnotizing contest that we’ve been doing lately is a Farktography which is a photography contest. Some of that stuff is down right inspiring, depending on what the theme is.

We’re experimenting with a make-your-own-joke contest, either making a punch line or starting a joke out and having people finishing it. There’s also an ongoing discussion on Total Fark about some kind of writer’s contest.

Adrian: You have a section on your site called site friends, where people are link trading. Can you explain how that works?

Drew: Basically with those guys, it’s folks that have done us a good turn, either through sending us a ton of traffic or helping us out other ways. It’s the thank you, the return favor type thing. For some of them, it was awhile ago. That doesn’t change our indebtedness to them.

Adrian: You’ve never considered doing any kind of arbitrage, and you know what your average page value is worth and maybe it’s just not worth enough to even be doing something like that?

Drew: Well the problem is that with our advertising revenues being so low, we really can’t even consider it. We have so much traffic already, I’m not really sure we need to get any more. If we’re selling out 100 percent of the ad inventory, that’s probably when I’ll even consider it.

Adrian: So your big focus right now is to figure out how to sell your inventory properly?

Drew: Yeah.

Adrian: Do you get buyout offers as well?

Drew: We’re getting no buyout offers at all, and that’s a weird thing. My thinking on that is, I think people are looking at what we’re doing, and they think, “That’s easy, we can do that.” They’re trying as it turns out, whether or not they succeed will be another thing.

I actually hope that buyout offers are postponed as long as possible because I enjoy what’s going on right now. I really could do Fark for the rest of my life, but I know better. I know that I won’t be doing it for the rest of my life.

Adrian: Anything else you would like to mention?

Drew: I’ll tell you something that we tried recently, and it had interesting results. Drudge Report has Meta Refresh set at around 240 on their website. You go to Drudge’s site and it will refresh once every 240 seconds automatically. I think he’s addressed it before saying basically, “Well you know if breaking news hits you’ve got to be able to see it. We refresh the page for you.”  Sounds plausible enough.

People accuse us of wanting to have some kind of bigger penis contest with Drudge, but that’s not what got me interested in this test.  The site that really pissed me off that used this trick was FoodTV.com. They have Meta Refresh turned on around 1,800. So every 30 minutes, the site is refreshing. I love to cook, so I would load these recipes, figure out four or five, take it over to the counter, start working on it, and Meta Refresh would kick in, the thing would timeout. It was Thanksgiving so because of traffic and I’d lose my recipe right in the middle of what I was doing. I was like, “Why are these guys doing this?” So I thought, “Well they must be getting a big traffic hit out of this, what else could it be?” I was always curious as to exactly what. So one morning we decided to do it on Fark, see how that would work.

We had initially planned to do it all day long. We turned it on at midnight and then immediately the hate mail came rolling in.

We set it at the 240 just like Drudge Report to see what would happen and we had to turn it off at nine o’clock in the morning because the traffic was so high, it was crashing our site. I thought it was going to be a 20 percent boost in traffic. It turned out to be a 500 percent boost in traffic.

Adrian: How much hate mail did you get from doing that?

Drew: Oh my God it was outstanding. Nothing we have ever done on Fark has even remotely approached it. It started, and it did not stop, all morning.

Adrian: What were they upset about? Why was it such big deal?

Drew: Because they would be reading down the page and the thing would refresh, and they’d lose track. On Fark, our comments’ pages are so long they couldn’t read past five or six comments. Basically it pissed them off for the same reason FoodTV.com pissed me off, I couldn’t keep my place on the page. That and people basically knew what we were doing. They were accusing us of trying to generate traffic. We were just testing, we weren’t actually trying to do it, but they didn’t know that. They were making the assumption that we were trying to artificially inflate our traffic numbers, and honestly, that’s what we would’ve been doing had we left it up.

Adrian: This had been an interesting interview. Thanks a lot for you time.

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