Ever wonder where those morning radio shows get all that wacky news they read on the air? Odds are their sources include a website called
Fark.com. Loyal Farkers say they've heard DJs read straight from the site, and Fark.com's founder, Drew Curtis, says he's aware of memos circulated inside radio powerhouse Clear Channel that direct personnel to Fark.com as a source of things bizarre.
"Employment office shooting in Huntsville."
"Computer program has 93 percent success rate at picking hit songs."
"Man opens mail, finds deadly spitting cobra."
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Zero Second News |
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Poynter Multimedia Editor Larry Larsen told us about Fark.com and hooked us up with Drew Curtis.
Larry is, by his own admission, a massive, massive consumer of news. We asked him to elucidate on his news habits:
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The headlines above are a sampling from a single day of Fark.com -- a mix of weird stuff, frat-boy headlines (plus the occasional link to "boobies"), geek alerts, and breaking news. Fark.com is like an Internet tour guide -- and if it points the way to your site, you'd better brace yourself, because the Farkers are coming. They are coming
en masse. Want to talk numbers? Fark.com gets more than half a million unique visitors every day.
By virtue of its wide array of sources, its massive audience (multipled when Fark.com items are recycled on the radio or on other websites, as they always are), and its comprehensiveness, Drew Curtis' domain has become like the AP newswire -- only much weirder.
Pretty good for a site started only a few years ago, in February of 1999. Today, Fark.com is hosted in Virginia, but its heart is in Lexington, Ky., where Drew Curtis, 30, makes his home.
Poynter Online caught up with him in St. Petersburg, Fla.; he was on his way to the
Newspaper Association of America conference in Orlando, Fla., to speak about Fark.com's traffic.
Poynter: What is Fark.com?Drew Curtis: I tell people it's a news distillery -- 'cause that's a Kentucky thing, it works out well. We get about 1,800 link submissions a day, and filter them down to about 50 good ones.
Who submits?It's actually readers. I used to do it all myself, but the problem nowadays is it's in so fast that I can't find it all before they've listed it. On top of that, going through 1,800 links a day takes a lot of time.
Do you do all the selection?I do most of it when I'm around.
How did it start? As a hobby?Yeah, I wouldn't even say a hobby... I've been finding weird news all my life.
After I got an e-mail address at work, I used to find stuff every morning and send it to my friends. Eventually I figured, they've gotta be getting annoyed by this stuff -- it was getting to be five or six times a day, and there are probably people who just don't care. So I figured I'd stick it on a website. I had this domain I hadn't used, so I just put it over there.
[The
full story is on Fark.com.]
Why "Fark.com"?Well, I grabbed it because it's something I used to say -- I used to work with a MUD [a kind of online game], long time ago, and I used to say that all the time, and became known for it. So I reserved it back in 1997, just because... why not?
At that point, the only thing you could do with the web was vanity sites. I was like, nah, I don't wanna do that -- nobody gives a rat's ass what my favorite links are. Although I guess they do now.
It's all about what your favorite links are!I just figured I'd wait until I came up with a good idea. I was gonna do either what eventually became Fark or a curry recipe database. I think I chose the right one.
How many visitors do you get a day?It's about half a million. We get 800,000 visits a day, 500,000 on weekends. So it's about 5 million a week right now.
Wow.It's going up, too -- we always have a big burst in September and January. I think all the kids get back to college, change their classes, everybody's sitting around, and they're like, "Oh, you gotta check out this website!"
How does "Total Fark," your paid account, work?Initially it was just access to all the links we get -- you get the same Fark page you get normally, but instead of just the 50 I pick you get all of them. And why anybody in the world would want to see that, I haven't got any idea, but on the other hand, there are news junkies out there, and you might be one of them, who go absolutely ape over this stuff. Cause I mean, it's like non-stop stimulus -- you can stick it on the latest 50 links page, and that sucker refreshes every two minutes.
It's really amazing when something big happens, like a news flash, because you get news flashes all the way up and down the page. I can actually gauge -- I get an e-mail every time one of those gets put into the queue -- and I can usually tell how bad something is by how many news flashes I get on it.
If something bad happened, and you're trying to find all the information you can about it, you can pop into the Total Fark queue and find all the sources -- they're all there. Every permutation has been punched in by somebody.
How many people pay for Total Fark?Just a few hundred right now, but it's growing pretty quickly.
Did you run into challenges along the way, as Fark.com grew more popular and you had to scale your systems up?We had a couple of interesting blips. One of them was when 9/11 hit, our traffic just skyrocketed -- and all that morning, it was all we could do to keep the server from melting. The problem was no one could get to any other news sites, and we had all the stuff up, and everybody was at work, had no TV, so they just went crazy.
We've got all sorts of contingencies. If something like 9/11 ever happens again, we put a flag in -- we've only used it a couple of times -- but if we start getting a lot of traffic, it turns all the images off except for the big Fark banner and some other stuff.
We try to make everything on the back-end as automated as possible. People have been bugging me, saying "You ought to do a newsletter." I'm not entirely convinced, but I'm thinking if we ever do put one together, we'll make it automated -- whoever wants to can submit an article for the newsletter. Total Fark votes on it.
So your audience would edit the newsletter.Exactly. That way it's a completely user-generated newsletter; and I think enough of the good stuff would float to the top to make it work.
So how did you get invited to NAA?Rusty Coats is a media research consultant. He called me up and said he wanted to ask me some questions. He did, and they were questions I'd never been asked before. I was trying to figure out, what the hell's he getting at here?
We were done, and he said, "That's really interesting -- I didn't expect those answers at all. So you know what I'm asking you these questions for, right?" I had no idea. And it was about this whole 8-to-11 problem. [Many news sites have trouble getting traffic during the middle of the day.] So he said, "I'm doing
this research to deliver at this conference, how about you come down and sit on the panel?"
It seems that Fark has jumped many of the hurdles that news sites struggle with. It's got a large user base that comes back regularly, a kind of community --I guess in my mind "community" is a little different from that. One of the interesting stats about Fark is that only 5 percent of the people that come and read actually even look at the comments. It's even a much smaller percentage than that that posts comments.
Most people don't -- and I don't have a problem with that, to tell you the truth. It's not like we're trying to hide it from them, but if they haven't got enough time to fool with it, obviously it's not gonna help them any.
And I think that's the real problem with a lot of websites out there -- they try to thrust too much crap in your face. I think that's what a lot of newspaper sites do wrong, too -- they try to follow the newspaper paradigm, which is "get on the front page, split the article up, snake 'em through so they have to look at all the ads on the way in."
That's just not how it works. It's not gonna work that way ever. I think it really gets people mad. They get frustrated because they can't figure out where stuff is -- they have to go through a lot of crap.
I saw a funny thing the other day. Somebody sent in an article on site registration, about how all the newspapers that do site registration are reporting an increase in traffic. And you know what? I think they're all lying. I really do.
Every time I've talked to a newspaper, I tell them how much traffic we get, and they're not impressed, they're like, "Oh, we get three times that!"
No, you don't.
I've been pulling the stats. There are only like four newspaper in the U.S. that get more traffic than we do. So, I don't think they're necessarily lying -- I think they're being told that by their tech guys.
Any sites out there that really impresses you with their design?No, not really, unfortunately. I mean, there's a lot of stuff I'm neutral about... and there's a lot more after that that I hate.
