Drew Curtis hosted the 25th anniversary celebration of Fark in mid-October at the Lyric Theater in Lexington. He noted that many attendees traveled from out of town, with some coming from as far away as Alaska and Australia.
Fark (fark.com), founded and owned by Curtis, is an early news aggregator website known for its humor and irreverence, which has attracted a wide audience and evolved into an online community. Members post links to news stories, comment, and interact in forums. During the COVID pandemic, Curtis started a weekly live video stream, which he continues to this day. Of the stream, he said, “I pull stories that I think are funny or flew under the radar.” He and friends then “riff” on the stories. The anniversary celebration followed a similar format, but with live audience interaction.
Curtis was born and raised in Lexington, where he attended Lafayette High School. He discovered a passion for computer programming while attending Luther College in Iowa. After graduating in 1995, he owned and operated DCR.NET, an internet service provider based in Frankfort. In 1999, he founded Fark. He later earned an Executive MBA from the Berkeley-Columbia program, a joint venture between Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley. Curtis lives in the Lexington area with his wife, Heather, and their three children.
Did Fark start as a lark or did you begin it with a business plan?
It absolutely started as a lark. I was just going to put some links on a page, and that was done with editing by hand in Notepad and Windows. Then, as these things usually go, two things happened. One was that it became obvious that there were better ways to do it, so you build the tools to do it better. At the same time, it started to gain traction with readership, so there became a compelling reason to keep doing it.
I started it in 1999. That was the last year of the dot-com boom, which had nothing to do with why I got into it. There was no digital advertising industry at that time — that didn’t get moving until 2005. There was no playbook for starting a digital media company then. Nobody knew how that would work, so I basically winged it. It turns out that I’m a good guesser.
I was running a small ISP at the time, so I’ve always been an entrepreneur. My ISP started to go under, because DSL and cable appeared on the scene, and people started unsubscribing and going to those other technologies. I’m sitting there with a website [Fark] that at the time had about 100,000 readers and was growing. It had no path to making any money whatsoever, but I had nothing else to do, so I was like, all right, let’s see what happens.
In 2002, literally nobody knew what to tell me. Legacy media was not entirely sure this whole digital thing was going to keep going. I was invited to speak for a national newspaper association in Tampa. It was interesting to discover in talking with dozens of people who worked for newspapers on the digital media side that really nobody knew how to do it. That was kind of reassuring in a bizarre way, because I felt that if I made a mistake, at least nobody else knew better.
Again, it was 2002, we had a million readers at that point. It was massive, cracking the top 1,000 [in website engagement] in the United States. How can this not make money? When I looked around the landscape, I couldn’t find anybody doing anything [monetizing] either. So if advertising was not a thing I could have access to, maybe we should add subscribers. I thought of the idea in November, and it took me until February to code it. We launched an online subscription offering on Fark in 2003, which wasn’t the first online subscription offering, but it was close to the first.
What did the subscription offer?
The subscriber got a little tag by their name, which didn’t seem like a big deal, but it turned out people loved that. That was a surprise. We get about 2,000 articles submitted every day, and I pull from them the ones I like and post them on the main site. The rest of the articles aren’t seen. If you want to see all that gets submitted, that’s what you get with a subscription. Eventually, we finally got advertising, but it was pretty clear that having no ads for subscribers was the way to go.
Is it true that late-night and other comedy shows found material on Fark?
Pretty much everybody in radio and TV uses it to find ideas for their shows. They still do. We can see their IP addresses. A lot of people wouldn’t believe me, but we used to float fake articles just to see if we could catch everybody. We stopped because we caught everybody. It wasn’t exactly endearing me to people. I get it. I wasn’t trying to cause problems for them. It’d be nice if they mentioned that they use Fark once in a while. The only guys who do mention that they use this a lot — and I love them to death for it — are the guys from Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.
Can you talk about the TED talk you gave on patent trolling?
That was a weird thing that happened, where I got sued by a patent troll. I got mad about it, and I did everything the opposite way that you’re supposed to do it. I ended up winning a $0 settlement and getting the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) struck, so I could actually talk to people about it, and then I flipped that into getting a TED talk. They [TED producers] helped me out a lot with it. They said, you need to memorize this, because TED Talks are performances. It’s not speaking from an outline. So, I rewrote the whole thing.
One thing about giving a TED Talk is you become an expert in whatever that subject is. Lawyers are not allowed to give legal advice, but I am, because I’m not a lawyer. A lot of attorneys actually had their clients call me because they knew I was going to tell them to fight and tell them how to fight.
How is Fark currently doing?
We peaked in 2012 and then started to lose audience size. Pretty much everybody else on the web was also, unless you were Facebook or Twitter. It was because of the social networks and partly because of the App Store being a kind of walled garden. Around 2019 we leveled off at about 1 million people in the audience. We’ve been kind of treading water ever since.
Our demographics are bizarre. Half of the audience is 50 and older, and the other half is 35 and younger. We hardly have anyone between the age of 35 and 50 reading the site, which is the Facebook generation. What’s happening is that GenZ folks are finding Fark, and it’s very similar humor to what they like. They’re bringing a lot of ideas. I plan to keep on doing it, especially as the traffic is not going down. It’s leveling off, but I could fly forever at this level.