Social bookmark analysis: Fark.com
One of the best way of getting traffic online these days is using the power of social bookmarking and social networking. There are two categories of sites in here, the ones that allow you to bookmark your favourite sites and share them with your friends, like StumbleUpon, Furl, Del.ici.ous, and the ones that accept posts submitted by regular users, like Netscape, Digg or Fark. I’m going to take a look at all of them, and analyse them from my personal point of view. Today, it’s time for Drew Curtis’ Fark.com .
This site is a massive compilation of articles and news submitted by users all around the globe. All the submitted links are available for TotalFark subscribers, for just a mere 50 $ fee every year. Only the best stories reach the site’s top page, that is available for every user, and that’s every webdevelopper’s target on Fark.com . Submitting something to Fark is very simple: just create an account and start doing it. But be careful, don’t spam them, as it’s not ethical and it would get your banned. And try to keep you description short and concise.
From my experience with Fark (I had a couple of stories reaching home page, in Geeks section), the editors seem to love weird and unique stories. Posts about the new phone from Nokia or the latest Ferrari might do well on other social sites, but not here. It’s all about crazy stuff, that catches people’s attention right away. That’s why the title is the most important thing you have to take care when submitting to Fark.com.
Fark.com’s home page. That’s your goal!
Fark traffic
Getting on TotalFark might be OK for small sites, as it could get you up to 100 uniques right away. Regularly, the number is a little low. Getting on home page is actually the big break. Loads of users will come to your site in a couple of hours, depending on how interesting the story is and how many comments it gets on the site. This spike lasts only 1-2 days, with the peak on the day you submit it, between 16 PM - 04 AM. That’s because most of the Fark readers are Americans.
As you can see from the graph, my first Fark happened in April, with a tiny 2000+ visitors, but the latest one in May brought many more visitors, with a peak of 4500+ just in the first 4 hours. And most of the visitors come from USA
As for traffic quality, things aren’t so great. It’s true, Fark users aren’t so "ravaging" as the ones from Digg and Slashdot, but after all many more would come from those sites if you were to reach Home page there. I have to mention that i only had stories related to Technology and Gadgets on Fark, so all my opinions here are related to this domain.
First of all, Fark users don’t make page views. No, they just get to the submitted link, read what’s there and then go away. The graphs are a testimony to this. Without making page views, it’s almost sure that they won’t click your adds, not even contextual ones like those provided by Google’s Adsense. CTR would suffer a severe breakdown, depending on the traffic volume. Another thing you should worry about is the "Fark effect" : having many people loading your site in a short period of time might crack your server as long as you don’t have a good one, so be careful before submitting, you might cause your site a lot of damage.
Fark users make very very few page views
But does it worth the effort?
So, why should we submit to Fark.com anyway? It’s simple, for the traffic. Even if you won’t get any clicks, you will still get some (1% CTR if your regular one is around 5%). And the most important thing is exposure. People will find your site, will bookmark it maybe, will join your RSS feed and will even link to your articles if they find them good enough. And all these make the Fark effect great. Not as great as others, but still it worth 100%.
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