Interview with Fark Founder, Drew Curtis

When I wrote a post about the ‘Definitive Guide to Fark and Getting Mass Traffic‘, the last person I expected to comment on the post was the founder of the website itself. I emailed Drew in private to let him know that none of the traffic stats there were from spamming the site and nor was it encouraged, just to keep things on good terms.

I also asked if Drew would be interested in doing an interview and to my surprise, he seemed very keen to answer my questions so that’s what we have today. Following are some  pretty interesting stats and intelligent responses.

What is your policy on Webmasters / Bloggers submitting their own content to the site?

I’m absolutely fine with it provided that they don’t submit every single article on there.  Only the best stuff is going to make it anyhow, just submit the best two or three

What are your plans to grow the site in the next 12 months?

We’re adding a few extensions of stuff that is already on there; stay tuned to see what that means

You’ve introduced a form of voting on submissions, how is that going and will it become more prominent?

People seem to like using it but we don’t like what ends up getting voted up all the time.  We’re looking to start a parallel site where that can be the whole point, allowing us to draw on that to help build regular Fark

Do you think Marketers have any place in Fark. Not in terms of ‘gaming’ but trying to engage the userbase.

Yes, however, only in rare circumstances.  For example, sometimes people do want to know about marketing.  We all want to know when Ben and Jerry’s are giving away free ice cream cones.  The problem is it has to be the rare mix of message and product that is compelling to all comers.  If that was an easy thing to find there wouldn’t be any advertising.

I would love your thoughts on the battle of Digg vs Mixx vs Propeller vs Reddit and how you think it will end up…

All unedited news aggregation sites will either turn into wastelands of shit and spam, or become edited to some degree.  Some would argue that’s already happened

Are there any statistics you can give us on the site. Monthly / Yearly traffic, daily number of submissions, income etc.

• 4 million uniques per month
• 60 million pageviews per month
• 50 million outbound clicks
• 2,500+ daily submissions

Do you run any other sites or have plans for new web projects in the near future?

Some extensions of what we’re doing already but no completely new site ideas.  This one isn’t played out yet

How many people are working behind the scenes on the site?

3 employees and 20 or so moderators

Where do you see the future of Social Media and what the next big thing will be. Personally, Twitter surprised me as being a new idea that has really taken off…

Currently advertising is driven by the pageview but most social network stuff takes advantage of this by generating shit content pageviews (such as a “thanks for voting” screen, etc).  Response on these pages is horrible, and advertisers are just now figuring this out.  Once this metric changes we’ll see a shift to the next big thing.  It’s going to be a while though, newspapers have every reason in the world to not want to switch their hardcopy editions from the CPM model.  It’s the same reason Comscore doesn’t want to do embedded code statistics, the numbers are so far off their polling data that their entire organization’s accuracy is called into question.

The other issue is going to be monetization.  No doubt Twitter is huge. It’s also not what the founders intended it to be, and so far doesn’t seem to be monetizable.  The first one’s no big deal; the last one’s kind of a problem.

Finally, just a fun question. Which three websites do you spend most of your time on besides Fark?

Stratfor is the big one.  Local news after that.  Facebook and twitter as much as anyone else.  I don’t spend a lot of time cruising around, since so much content comes straight to me via Fark’s submission queue

Thanks for the interview Drew!

If you are looking for more interviews we have also done them with the following people:

• Aaron Wall of SEOBook
  
• Lee Odden of TopRank
  
• Donna Fontenot of SEO-Scoop
  
• Shawn Hogan of Digitalpoint