Good piece from NPR on the site fark.com and webmaster Drew Curtis who sounds like a regular family working guy running a site and business that does 1.5 million page views a day. His expense ratio is on the high side:

He pays several workers a total of up to $200,000 a year to handle his servers, do Web design and police the site. He says he spends at least another $150,000 on lawyers for advice on contracts and libel.

Curtis also seems abnormally concerned that his site is going to generate a lawsuit, saying:

“I’m just waiting to get sued. It’s just a matter of time before somebody comes after us…”

Haven’t spent very much much time at fark.com but what I have has left me with the impression that it is one of those sites that hovers between adult and mainstream regularly posting links to NSFW (not safe for work) sites. If Fark stopped with the adult (deep) links I wonder what would happen to the traffic? I would imagine a higher percentage of the community is based around the adult links than the mainstream ones, but that’s a guess.

The Total Fark numbers aren’t as good as I’d thought they’d be either. Only 2,000 people paying $5/month? Maybe the subscription model for sites is dead. Hot or not jettisoned the subscription model recently in favor of being completely ad-supported and saw $500,000 a month in revenue disappear.

Fark came under fire for allegedly selling links with preferential treatment without marking them as advertising back in 2004. The advertising there today shown in the picture at the top of this post is clearly identified. I didn’t see any links in the editorial section marked as advertising, so no clue how that all worked out. Comments are below for any Fark regulars to provide an update or ending to that story.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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