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Fark.com

Screenshot of the Fark.com page, redesigned on April 25, 2007, with the top link representing the most recently “greenlighted” item.
URL	http://www.fark.com/
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	News Aggregator
Registration	Required to post (free)
Owner	Drew Curtis
Launched	1999
Current status	Active

Fark.com is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows users to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. It is one of the top 100 English language websites,¹ receiving over 2,500 submissions a day and over 5 million unique visitors per month.² It is frequently used as a humorous source on CNN, Fox News, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and many radio stations.³⁴⁵ It is generally seen as a destination for strange news stories and snarky commentary.⁶⁷

Links are submitted by Fark members, which administrators can approve for posting on either the main page or one of the subsidiary tab pages ("greenlit") . All links, approved or not, have associated threads where users can comment on the link. Fark moderators police the discussion threads to delete forbidden content.⁸ Greenlit links can generate upwards of 300,000 page views in one month for the recipient,⁹ such an enormous amount of traffic that smaller websites are often "farked," meaning that their servers have crashed.

Contents 1 History 2 Fark, the Business 2.1 Future plans 3 Features 3.1 Tags 3.2 Photoshop contests 3.3 Total Fark 3.4 Foobies 4 Controversies 4.1 Redesign 4.2 Political bias 4.3 Preferential placement 5 Other projects 5.1 Fark TV 5.2 Fark Book 6 In popular culture 6.1 Notable Farkers 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

History

Curtis states that the word "fark" originated either from a chat room euphemism for the word "fuck" or from a drunken misspelling, although he tells people it's the former because it's a "better story that way."¹⁰ He registered Fark.com in September 1997, when a friend mentioned that all the four letter domain names were disappearing¹¹. Originally, Fark contained no content except for an image of a squirrel with large testicles.

Since 1993, Curtis had frequently read morning news stories and exchanged them with friends.¹² Although this would later become the inspiration for Fark, Curtis toyed with the idea of starting an online curry recipe database.¹¹ In 1999, eighteen months after registering the domain name, he launched Fark as a way to share interesting news postings with his friends rather than sending them numerous emails.⁴ The first story posted was an article about a fighter pilot who crashed while attempting to moon another fighter pilot.¹¹

In Fark's first year, it received 50,000 page views, and 1 million the year after.¹³ Features such as link submission and forums were added as popularity and participation grew. By January 2008, according to Curtis, the site received an estimated 52 million page views per month from 4 million unique visitors.⁴ As of June 2008, the site had more than 450,000 registered users.¹⁴

Fark, the Business

In spite of its laid back culture, Fark is considerably more profitable than most of its rivals.¹⁵¹⁶¹² The site earns revenue from advertising and membership to its TotalFark program.¹⁷ It was the first indie blog to earn one million dollars a year in profit¹² and its classifieds section alone generates as much as $40,000 per year.¹⁷ Technology writer Mathew Ingram described Fark.com as "staggeringly successful" and noted the disparity between Fark's revenue and the amount of press given to sites like Digg.¹⁵ Fark has also spoken about its steady, above average CPMs.¹⁴

Although Fark is a million dollar business, Drew takes a yearly salary of $60,000.¹⁷ The rest of the money goes to the site's legal 'war chest' and to pay other expenses.¹⁷ Additionally, Fark has been known to turn down advertising that interrupts the user experience such as pop ups or ads with sound.¹⁸ According to Drew Curtis, in 2002 he rejected a "six figure" advertising deal that he felt would have "made the site suck".¹⁸

Future plans

In fall of 2008, Curtis plans to launch Farkit.com, a pure news aggregator.¹⁴ Curtis states that the site will be based more heavily on user submission and voting rather than administrative selection. Curtis has also mentioned plans to start a travel site based on the data compiled by Total Farkers.¹⁴

Features

Tags

Submitters can give stories several different tags such as stupid, interesting, obvious, or dumbass. Tags that say photoshop, audioedit or videoedit are used for threads where digital content is edited for a humorous or artistic effect. In addition, the newsflash tag is used for news which is a matter of important breaking news, and an email is sent to the administrators notifying them that someone has submitted a Newsflash. Members are told to use this tag very sparingly and only for matters of extremely important breaking news. (In fact, members who submit Newsflash tags for subjects obviously not worthy of the tag — e.g. celebrity news or political commentary — can be suspended for a period of time).

So many headlines were contributed about the state of Florida that a Florida tag was created.¹⁹²⁰ Similarly, articles discussing Wil Wheaton — a Fark user himself — are given the Wheaton tag and articles discussing Christopher Walken are occasionally given the Walken tag, though Walken has never participated on Fark, except for that one time.^{citation needed}

In August 2008 Fark introduced the new fail tag, for submitted articles where the subject does something ignorant or when a major gaffe occurs.²¹

Photoshop contests

Fark.com also features regular "Photoshop contests" where users use a graphical editing program (such as Adobe Photoshop, from which the contest draws its name) to manipulate an image provided by the creator of the contest. The image is usually manipulated for humorous effect, but can also be edited to create an aesthetically-pleasing image or to showcase a poster's image manipulation skill.

Fark and Something Awful have a friendly rivalry which culminated in a Photoshop contest between the two sites, judged by Wheaton. Something Awful went on to win.²²

Total Fark

In February 2002 Fark.com founder Drew Curtis introduced TotalFark.com as a subscription service, charging US$5 per month, a fee which has remained unchanged. It has an estimated 8,000-10,000 subscribers, which generate $120,000 per year.¹⁷ Subscribers, known collectively as TotalFarkers or TFers, have the privilege of seeing and commenting on all links submitted by Fark.com users, as opposed to only those approved for inclusion on Fark.com's main page. In a typical 24-hour period, TotalFark's main page includes 2,600 links with associated comment threads, whereas Fark's main page includes only 60 to 80 links from among this number. TotalFarkers are able to give TotalFark subscriptions for non-subscribing Fark users.

Foobies

In 2006, Curtis launched Foobies²³ as a NSFW (not safe for work) offshoot of Fark.²⁴ Curtis sells NSFW links through Foobies at a price of $400.²⁵²⁶

Controversies

Redesign

On April 25, 2007, a new design for the website was published. The new design was received with some controversy due to a number of issues, including a change in layout and a seemingly indifferent attitude by site moderators to user impact or feedback. The launch was announced with the simple Fark caption "Fark site redesign is now live. Hope nothing breaks, we're all out drinking."²⁷ Longtime site administrator Jeff responded to user complaints by saying that they would "get over it",²⁸ a statement meant to defend designer Mike's hard work and effort.²⁹ After complaints about his comment, he subsequently issued an apology via Curtis and took an extended break from website administration.²⁹ During the days following the redesign, the site layout was fine tuned based on suggestions.

Political bias

To dispute claims of political bias, Curtis has stated that rather than trying to keep it in the middle, admins enjoy running both far-left and far-right articles.² The top four hated “groups” on Fark.com are (in no particular order) PETA, Catholic priests, the French, and Duke University, according to Curtis. This could be anecdotally extended to 'crotchfruit' and theists. ³⁰

Preferential placement

Fark has been accused of selling preferential placement of story links on the main page. The accusation stemmed from an exchange between Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis and third party sales employee Gogi Gupta, where Gupta claimed Calacanis could buy an editorial on Fark for $300 to $400.³¹ Curtis dismissed the incident as the result of an overenthusiastic salesperson, and subsequently fired Gupta.³² Gupta worked for a company called Gupta Media and according to Curtis did not have the authority to speak for the company.¹⁸ Curtis stated that the issue could have been resolved through direct conversation with Calacanis and himself and that Calacanis' post was purposefully aimed at creating a "dramatic incident."¹⁸

Fark does sell paid placement for pornography as an attempt to enforce its ban on hardcore pornography.¹⁸ By selling links, the company claims it can avoid a bait and switch where the content of a submitted link is changed after being greenlighted.¹⁸

Other projects

Fark TV

In January 2007, Fark launched Fark TV.³³³⁴ The first video was a spoof ad for a mock product called "Meth Coffee."³⁴ In May 2008, Turner Broadcasting announced that it would be folding SuperDeluxe—Fark TV's host site—into the Adult Swim brand, and laying off most of the staff, effectively canceling Fark TV. ³⁵

Fark Book

Main article: It's Not News, It's FARK

In 2007, Curtis penned It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News, a critical look at the Mass Media industry and the go-to stories used when there is a lack of hard news to report.³⁶ It peaked at #12 on Amazon.com's non-fiction bestseller list³⁷ and was reviewed positively by Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Chez Pazienza — a CNN producer.³⁸³⁹

In popular culture

As the site has gained in popularity, Fark has appeared numerous times in pop culture. Fark was referenced on the game show Jeopardy!, with a category titled "Fark.com Headlines."⁴⁰ Curtis went to the same high school as bestselling author Tucker Max and will reportedly have a cameo appearance in Max's upcoming movie I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.⁴¹ Curtis and Fark were once featured on the cover of Business 2.0 magazine as part of the feature story about successful websites.⁴²¹²

Notable Farkers

Besides Curtis, several well known people have Fark accounts, including:

• Science fiction writer Mike Brotherton
• Fox News anchor Alan Colmes ⁴³
• Author James Lileks (using the Fark handle "Lileks")⁴⁴
• Sports commentator and owner of "Sports By Brooks" website Brooks Melchior.⁴⁵ (Also on the Fark Top 100 Submitters list.)⁴⁶
• Science fiction writer Lawrence Person ⁴⁷ (Also on the Fark Top 100 Submitters list.)⁴⁶
• Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage ⁴⁸
• Science fiction writer John Scalzi ("I have a TotalFark account") ⁴⁹
• Actor Wil Wheaton⁵⁰
• Actress April Winchell⁵¹

See also

• Drew Curtis
• It's Not News, It's FARK: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News
• Worth1000
• Photoshop contest

References

External links

• Official Website (RSS)
• Farktography — site for Fark photography (NOT Photoshop) contests
• Fark Photoshop Scrutinizer — Fark Photoshop contest results and statistics
• Grampy's Cliché City, a comprehensive Fark.com Photoshop cliché reference (currently unavailable)
• Hosting site for FarkTV

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 30 December 2008, at 01:08.

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