Fark CEO Curtis on surviving the downturn

Bambi Francisco Roizen · December 4, 2008 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/5bd

Drew Curtis lasted through the 2000 bubble burst, and came out stronger

In February of 2009, Fark - an aggregator of strange and humorous stories, and the granddaddy of news aggregators – turns 10 years old. That means that Drew Curtis, Fark’s founder, who runs the popular site out of his home in Lexington, Kentucky, with essentially 16 virtual part-time moderators, has survived the last downturn. With 70-plus million monthly pageviews today, he's done more than OK.

To that end, he's a good person to ask how an entrepreneur can survive the current one. 

"One thing you have to do is to be prepared for revenue to shift away from advertising," he said, suggesting that if your site relies on ad networks, such as Google's AdSense, expect those rates to "plummet."

Having faced a crumbling ad market back during 2000-2002, Curtis came up with a subscription plan. 

"There was no way to make revenue at all," said Drew. "What we really had to do was come up with a way to entice people to pay $5 a month," he said, recalling the time prior to launching Total Fark, which is a subscription to see all of the feeds submitted to Fark. At Fark, feeds are submitted, but only a select number are actually posted to its pages. 

"The upshot is that it augments our revenue to the point that even if advertising went away, it would be extremely painful, but not a disaster," he said.

As for how to know what your community would pay for? Just ask them, said Curtis. But keep in mind that even if they say they'll pay, they most likely will not. One percent of the Fark community (who were asked) said they'd pay for Total Fark, said Drew. About 1/10 of 1% actually signed up.

No matter. Subscription isn't the company's model. As Curtis puts it: "Subscription is life support."

That said, subscription may be a significant portion of revenue in the coming months, given the downturn.

"Ask me six months from, it'll be more than 50%."

 

 

 

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Bambi Francisco Roizen

Founder and CEO of Vator, a media and research firm for entrepreneurs and investors; Managing Director of Vator Health Fund; Co-Founder of Invent Health; Author and award-winning journalist.

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Fark.com

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Fark is a satirical news forwarding site.  The Fark community identifies
odd, funny and entertaining news stories from across the Web and Fark
presents them in a clever and engaging way.

In January the site had over 4 million unique visitors and 60 million page
views - and there's tremendous growth potential beyond these numbers.  The
Fark community also submitted 60,000 stories and posted almost 900,000
comments in January alone.

In addition, the site is in a pivotal strategic position as it directs
substantial traffic outbound to other sites (Fark generated approximately 50
million outbound clicks in January).

4188

Drew Curtis

Joined Vator on

Founder/CEO/Sole Owner Fark, Inc