Romenesko Misc.
I recently noticed from Facebook status updates and Foursquare check-ins that Fark creator Drew Curtis was spending some time at UC Berkeley. I asked him why he’s been vacating Fark headquarters (Curtis’ home) in Lexington, Kentucky. “I got in the Berkeley/Columbia eMBA program,” he told me. “I enrolled this summer; it goes for a year and a half and requires a visit to one campus or the other about every three weeks.
Are you preparing for life after Fark? I asked.
It’s not related to a life-after-Fark plan as much as it is a few tangents coming together all at once:
- I am in SF and NY about that often anyhow
- I read financial history for fun
- I pretty much figured out everything I know about business on the fly and I think I’ve got a hole in my knowledgebaseThe main thing for me is that second point. I got into computer science the same way – I liked the homework. I have no plans to change anything I’m doing but I’d like to learn more about things I’m already reading in cities I’m already in on a regular basis. So that’s the main reason for the studies.
Who’s running Fark while its chief editor is in school?
Fark can pretty much maintain itself with me just running the article queue (which only works when I’m on ET, I can’t get up early enough when I’m on the west coast). And while I’d prefer to run Fark forever if I could, when asked if I’d sell I say something I heard Jay Adelson say once when he was still at Digg: “when are we not for sale?” I don’t get frequent offers but there have been more than a few sniffing around as of late. I have no conception of what life after Fark would be like, and the greater issue is there’s nothing I’d rather do more.
Curtis told me that the latest theme of his speeches is “MSM: Rising from the ashes.” I asked him to elaborate.
“Rising from the ashes” – short version of this is that while MSM is on the ropes, no significant new players have arisen. Anyone who’s done reasonably well has pretty much been bought with the exception of Gawker – and Denton doesn’t want to sell. Fark runs its own ad sales, we visit media buyers and occasionally land deals like anyone else would. Except that other than Gawker, we never run into anyone who isn’t a member of a MSM conglomerate.
This tells me that MSM is still in the drivers seat. They keep complaining that “the ad model is broken,” but I’ve found that most journalists can’t tell me why this is. They recite the convenient excuses given by their executives, who have every reason to place the blame elsewhere.
The ad model is broken because MSM has not put concerted effort into trying to sell into the digital ad space. It’s still an afterthought. There’s also an inventory problem because now people have to actually read articles to generate impressions, and frequency capping limits this further.
However I’ve seen what some of the larger flagship operations are able to pull off on the ad sales front and it’s staggering – we couldn’t in a million years touch the levels of sales they’re getting. It’s still not enough to continue operations at a 1990 level, but they’re moving in that direction.
So in summary here’s what we’ve got:
- no new competition springing up in the news space
- revenues are improving
- MSM is figuring out how to leverage the digital side of their offerings
Which leads me to conclude they’re going to pull out of this in the near to mid term. I’m guessing 5 years or less.
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