Drew Curtis, a Lexington native, founder of the wildly popular Fark.com and author of "It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News" sits down for a Q&A with the editor. Learn how Curtis' penchant for news of the weird has turned an e-mail thread to a Web site with more than 56 million page views monthly and turned this small-town guy into a bastion of news analysis and entertainment and why he thinks Lexington is a virtual hot spot.
Anne Sabatino: Drew Curtis, thank you so much for joining us here today.
Drew Curtis: Yeah, glad I could make it.
A.S.: So let’s start off with a little bit of background on you because you are sort of a known unknown in Lexington. I started reading the site before I even knew that you lived here.
D.C.: Most people do, it turns out.
A.S.: Tell me a little bit about yourself. You’re from the area?
D.C.: I was actually born and raised. I was born at the UK Med Center 10 years to the day after George Clooney, but he wasn’t there at the time because you know, 10 years. Grew up around here, went to Lafayette (High School), went away to college for four years and then came back accidentally and put down roots here. It’s the good thing about running Fark is that I really don’t have to be anywhere; you know, I can do it from my house, I can do it on the road although it’s easier from my house.
A.S.: So what did you do in the middle before you came back?
D.C.: I was gone to college in Iowa for three of the four years and then right in the middle I did a year in England were I learned how to drink, which was very important later in life.
A.S.: As a matter of fact you joke in your new book that the concept for Fark was thought out over a few beers in 1999, is that right?
D.C.: I was basically goofing around, messing around before work trying to find weird news to entertain myself, ended up finding some weird news to send to some friends of mine…we ended up trading emails back and forth and then eventually it wasn’t just (one friend) but a bunch of people, and eventually it was going out several times a day and I thought, ‘This is probably real annoying.’ Because everybody’s got that uncle or that grandfather that sends out all that crap that we’ve all seen a hundred times already. And so I decided I didn’t want to be that guy so I’ll go ahead and start a Web site and I’ll just put all the stuff up there and it just took off.
A.S.: And at the time you were already sort of being an entrepreneurial, you had another business that you were running?
D.C.: Yeah, I started an Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Frankfort, Ky. It was their first and only one (at the time). I was running that when I started Fark, which was probably pretty good because the way that bandwidth costs were running at the time, Fark would have probably not made it had I not owned an ISP because otherwise it would have been in trouble.
A.S.: Explain that one.
D.C.: There was no revenue to be had in the Internet anywhere until roughly 2005…Luckily with Internet service provider traffic, everybody’s downloading so it’s coming from the rest of the world in, and when you buy Internet connections you get the same amount of traffic both ways. We had nothing going out so that’s perfect for a Web site. So it actually worked out pretty well.
A.S.: So for those who may be unfamiliar with Fark, you are very specific that it is not a Web log.
D.C.: That’s because it’s not cool anymore. Basically what we do is anytime somebody comes up with a new catch phrase for the cool thing we just say we’re that. So right now I’m starting to tell people we’re not Web 2.0 anymore. I’m not really sure where we’re going next though.
A.S.: Well you say in your book it’s a news aggregator.
D.C.: Yes that’s right. News aggregator—not too many people know what that is, but it’s where you take news that is already out there and you aggregate it. Kind of like running a restaurant, nobody in the restaurant grew the food but they’re cooking it and reshaping the raw materials and it’s something completely different and that’s what we’re doing. And I say we’re Web 3.0 (now) because we’re the only news aggregator out there which is edited, which I think is the next step in social networks because right now everybody is talking about the wisdom of crowds, and all that—which is complete horse shit, and I think the next step is realizing that what crowds pick is pretty much pornography and Internet spam, and as a result you’ve got to have some editing involved there somewhere.
A.S.: So ‘Web 3.0,’ ‘Fark’ as a whole term. Another term you refer to quite commonly is the ‘mass media.’ So how do you define mass media and what are the problems with it?
D.C: I was actually using the term ‘mainstream media’ until a friend of mine told me that, apparently, the right-wing talk show hosts have co-opted that one. I wasn’t aware, I don’t listen to right-wing talk radio, so I changed it to mass media. But generally it’d be the legacy media. The guys that were around before the Internet that are still struggling to cope with the fact that the playing field that they operated on for so long has now shifted, and the problem is neither they nor us—those of us that have shown up here recently, really know where the hell it’s going. But for people like me it’s not that big of deal, for people like them whose got hundreds of thousands employees, that’s an issue.
A.S.: So Fark takes all those things that the ‘group’ is finding or that the ‘crowd’ is finding and edits them according to what’s fun, entertaining and it’s sort of the collective ‘non-news.’
D.C.: It’s mostly non-news but sometimes we put real news up there when it happens, which is rare. I’d say about two or three times a day does anything happen that anybody needs to know about. But what we’ll do is we’ll take a tag line and we’ll make it funny and then we’ll just run it from there. For example, there was an earthquake here recently in England, and so we did one something to the affect of ‘it caused a bunch of soccer players to fall down clutching their knees.’ Which is what they do.
A.S.: And you do have a lot of user generated submissions? And a lot of interactions?
D.C.: About 2,000 a day and what we’re doing is just going through it and picking out the stuff that makes us laugh and posting it up and that’s basically it.
A.S.: So what to you is real news?
D.C.: That’s the problem. Real news is this amorphous thing that bleeds over into a gray area. And (in) the book I wrote about it, I’m more concerned with—sometimes you can’t say what is news and what’s not news, but sometimes you can definitely say something is not news. That’s my point, if there’s a gray area then ok, fine, go ahead and run that, but for the stuff that has nothing to do with anything, just to stay out of there.
A.S.: It’s interesting that you’ve managed to parlay this recreational thing into a career.
D.C.: Well, it’s really funny because you wouldn’t think from reading the Web site that I actually care about the real news but, believe it or not, while I really enjoy doing this funny stuff, at the same time I do want to know what is going on in the world. And the problem is that, over the years since I’ve started this, which has been 9 years now, I’ve seen this real shift from real news to just garbage news like Brittany Spears. And I’ll tell you the one I’ve seen recently which is really funny, ‘Digg,’ another news aggregator, had a top link that got 15,000 ‘digs’ on it, which is something phenomenally high—maybe a record for all I know. (It was) puppies playing around, which again, goes back to the whole idea of the wisdom of crowds. No. They’re stupid they want to see puppies. Well I swear to God since that actually hit the top I’ve seen puppies, ferrets, newts—any kind of small furry animals running on CNN, on FOX—everywhere, because all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Wow man, people will click on fuzzy cute animals. We need more of these.’ So they’re trying to dress them up like they’re news…they were actually using it as a teaser during the presidential debate so that they would cut away from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and show a really cute ferret attacking a microphone. It was really cute but not exactly what you what to call news on CNN—at least I don’t think so.
A.S.: So there’s definitely a pull between this new media online stuff and what is considered the legacy media, but at the same time you mentioned in the book that they look to people like you, the site, the news aggregators to note what is news worthy.
D.C.: And also they really like to try to get us to link stuff because we drive a lot of traffic to them and that turns into money on their end. One of the shifts that they all do know that’s happened, although I don’t know if they really comprehend it, but they have noticed it is the way that news is consumed now has gone from an all in one package to a la carte. Previously if you bought TIME magazine, you bought the entire magazine and, as far as their marketers were concerned, you consumed every ad in it in the process. The problem is now, on TIME.com, people aren’t reading every article they put up there. They’re reading one, maybe two; in some cases zero articles that get put up every week. And the problem is that they don’t get paid unless the people actually go there and check it out so now all of a sudden they can’t count on like one cover story driving all the traffic for the entire site. It doesn’t work like that. People pop in and they pop out. So there’s this real issue with revenue shortfalls as a result because, all of a sudden, with people not reading every single article, now you can’t claim that all the ads were consumed so that’s where it’s at. To give you an example, the technology exists right now to run anything that happens to be on FOX online right now. They could do it, but they don’t, because it doesn’t make any money. They can’t sell the ads on it because once you can track people that are actually viewing advertising, it turns out that it doesn’t look like it’s that effective at all in reality.
A.S.: So, how are you making Fark profitable?
D.C.: Pretty much by advertising. We’re lucky in a sense that, because we came up during the .com bust, I didn’t do things like hire people or get an office or any of that stuff. We’re real stripped down, very slim operation because we had to be in the beginning, and now because there’s really nothing for anybody to do. I’m all for hiring people, don’t get me wrong, but there’s no full time stuff for anybody to do. So we’re lucky in that respect as opposed to say, the newspapers and the TV stations and whatnot, that are going the opposite direction. They’ve got thousands of employees now that don’t do anything thanks to news wire services and they’ve got to crunch down and we’re seeing that happen like…the Chicago Tribune is laying off something like 3 percent of its workforce. And that probably won’t be the last time that happens either.
A.S.: You’ve had a few other opportunities since the growth of the site to do some talking with people, some consulting, that kind of stuff. What are some of the opportunities you’ve had there?
D.C.: I’ve been trying to make myself into a talking head just because that looks like a lot of fun for practically no work, because I am lazy. And it has worked out. I’ve been on FOX’s Redeye a few times, which is a show they’ve got on late at night which is pretty much built entirely off my Web site, as has been told to me by multiple people that work on that show. But they had me on so, good for them, I have no problem with that. It’s pretty cool. And I’m enjoying doing the writing thing and just taking it easy because, for me this has always been about flexibility and lifestyle, not as much about the money. There’s all kinds of things we could do to grind more money out of the Web site but it’s a pain in the ass, so I’m not going to bother with it.
A.S.: And I think you hit on something there, it’s interesting to see this flux of young professionals kind of coming in and moving out, or folks who are from here not maybe seeing the opportunities that they’d like to have that are leaving. Then we’ve got you who has made a tremendous success with all these different areas that you are getting into so, what has kept you here? What is it about Lexington that appeals to you as someone who is a creative, you know someone who is trying to continue building this but also manage your quality of life?
D.C.: Well you know, it’s funny, if you had asked me that in high school I would have said I hated this place. But now as an adult I actually kind of like it, mostly because the people I didn’t like in high school, all the douche bags that hang out at Malone’s all the time, are pretty much people I don’t need to come into contact with at all. So I don’t have to worry about. But in general it’s really nice, it’s very inexpensive to live. It turns out it’s very easy to get out of here if you have to. If I have to take a meeting in New York I can just basically take the nonstop flight out of Lexington airport or pop over to Cincinnati to get out to LA or whatnot because it’s very convenient to the national and international stuff, it actually makes it really easy to live here. And so it’s kind of nice because you have a lot going on. If you need a big city you can go to Louisville, if you need a large town you can stick around Lexington. It all works out pretty well and the same time we’ve got a lot going for us in this state that most people probably don’t realize, those that live here and those that don’t.
A.S.: And you’ve got a wife and kids, so your comfortable having them being here and they’re having a good time.
D.C.: Oh yeah, definitely, they love it here, which is great. My wife is from Iowa so it’s not a heck of a lot of change. It was a little emptier than Kentucky, I guess but still, where we live—we live outside of Lexington—it’s kind of farm-ish you know so she’s familiar with that.
A.S.: You do get out to a lot of places: New York, LA, even international. What are some of the favorite groups, or who are some of the favorite people that you’ve run into and talked to over the course of the last several years?
D.C.: Oh there’s all kinds of folks, but I tell you the ones that were really bizarre was Fountains of Wayne, the group—it turns out they are all big Fark fans. I ran into them accidentally while they were on tour. I happened to be over at Fenway Park watching a Red Sox ballgame with my dad the night they were playing a benefit concert. So I got to meet them and that was interesting because I got to meet them twice over the period of three years. The first time I met them all of them were basically drunks and alcoholics and crazy rock-star type guys, and now only two of them are out of the four, and it’s been very interesting to watch that transition as well. But great guys though. I catch up with them all the time and it’s really funny how connected the music business is. When you get to a certain level they all know each other. So it’s interesting sharing stories with them. I run into a lot of people in the media, tons of folks. Allan Combs was one of them. I did his radio show and I had not idea that he was a big fan of the Foobies Web site, which I don’t recommend anybody go check out at work but it’s pretty tame when you get right down to it. But yes, I’m trying to think who else; I got to meet Gail King, who is very interesting. She is a large , and I don’t mean big, fat, I mean like she’s tall, she’s like six-foot something or other and I think she could kill me if she wanted to, not problem and very, very smart. Whip smart.
A.S.: Drew, if you had to leave some of the young Lexington professionals—or even Lexington folks who have been here for a long time—with some advice about what you’re doing, for example, getting out in the web media or watching the media change, what are your thoughts on that?
D.C.: There is actually some tremendous opportunity around here and I don’t think anybody really realizes it and not just around here but also in Silicon Valley. I was having a conversation with James Hall, who is one of the founders of hotornot.com, which just sold for $20 million…or something like that. And he was talking about how difficult it was to run an operation in Silicon Valley because you can’t find anybody to work for him. They have so many competing startups there and it’s just impossible and I told him, ‘What are you doing in Silicon Valley, why don’t you move to Kentucky? There’s tons of people around here, obviously not as many as there are in Silicon Valley but there’s no competition.’ It wouldn’t be difficult at all to put together a team of really talented people to do a Web site or that kind of thing. And because of the transportation network that we have, being able to get out of here very easily and travel, you could absolutely transplant probably any Silicon Valley company out there right into Central Kentucky, no problem. In fact, maybe easier and save a ton of money. So for people who live around here or happen to know anybody who is thinking about it, this is actually a great place. You can save a ton of money operating out of here and, because it’s the Internet, you can reach pretty much the entire world without having to go anywhere. So there’s actually an amazing amount of opportunity here.