Fark.com was born 10 years ago in a dial-up world, when a cell phone was only a phone and twittering sounded kind of naughty.
Today, the way Fark readers consume and read the clever news aggregation Web site has changed radically. And, by the way, there are a lot more people reading it.
But whether the Versailles-based Web site's 2.2 million to 2.5 million daily readers get it through a phone wire on their desktops or through the ether on their smart phone, the content hasn't changed all that much: witty riffs on headlines from around the world.
For instance, a story about Warren Buffet's financial recommendations was titled, "It's time to buy U.S. stocks, according to 'Buffett's metric,' so load up on Margaritaville Inc."
A story about a beermaker's falling revenues: "MillerCoors: Great taste, Less profit."
It's the kind of snark that Fark readers have come to expect during the past decade.
"In general, we've been trying to keep it pretty much the same," Fark founder and owner Drew Curtis says. "We've added some more complicated stuff, and the site looks slicker, but we have archives that go back to Day 1, and it's essentially the same content."
Curtis, 36, bought the domain www.fark.com in 1997 because he liked the sound of the word. But it languished for a few years before Curtis started using it as a way to share offbeat headlines with friends. In its first year, Fark attracted 50,000 viewers.
Now, it is read around the world, and Curtis is something of an Internet celebrity, doing what even many major media outlets dream of doing: making money online.
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