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Fark is sort of a compendium of "news of the wierd", exceptionally relevant current events that incite a response, stories of people being complete idiots, smoking gun type stuff, tech and web news, and photos of naked or partially naked college girls. (With both "safe for work" and "unsafe for work" labels to prevent embarrasing click throughs of soft porn on the office PC.)
Really.
They have super-high traffic. Millions and millions of hits daily. You can check it out at www.fark.com
Its primary readership is 18 - 35 year old guys. Think Maxim plus the New York Post plus Slash.Dot plus a healthy dose of the best of the BBC. It started as one of the first blogs years ago (1996 I think), when the gentleman who began it was an out-of-work IT guy looking for something to occupy him as he looked for a job. He started just posting links to stories and stuff on the web that caught his attention - everything from indiscreet photos of "girls gone wild" to news stories that outraged him...after a while, he saw that his traffic was through the roof, and realized he might have a marketable commodity in subscriptions to the thing, and the rest is, as they say, history. It's one of my brother-in-law's first stops as he skims his favorite blogs, newsletters, etc., each day. (And he's a perfectly nice, normal, intelligent guy, committed Democrat, IT manager, great husband and dad, etc.)
Being "Farked" is huge - it guarantees high exposure on the day the site is linked. It is now moderated, because there are SO MANY submissions daily for the front page. If you read through the thousands of comments from the beginning, you'll see that several "Total Fark" (high-end package) subscribers waged a battle yesterday morning to get the mods to post BBV.org to the front page.
My understanding is that the BBV.org people have been told by their ISP that there were over 2.5 million hits yesterday to BBV.org. If you look at how many comments it generated on Fark, that number seems about right.
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