Traffic and Users
As of June 2009, the site receives approximately three to four million unique visitors per month, and garners 60 million page views and 75 million outbound links. This puts it in the top 100 of English language websites. Fark's Alexa rating is 2,310, with the average user spending 5.8 minutes per day on the site and 5,337 sites linking in. 67.2% of users originate from the United States. The site receives approximately 2,000 story submissions per day from users, and approximately 50 of them are displayed on the main page of the site, or "green-lighted". Subscribers to the subscription TotalFark service, are able to view all 2,000 submissions per day for a $5 per month fee. There are around 500,000 user accounts on the site (including both TotalFark as well as unpaid accounts), although only about 5% actually read comments, and only 1% actually post in the forums. Greenlit links can generate upwards of 300,000 page views in one month for the recipient, which is such an enormous amount of traffic that smaller websites are often "farked", meaning that their servers have crashed.
Normally, in the absence of serious news, comments in the forums on the site tend to be of a more sophomoric nature. However, during major events such as the September 11 attacks or the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, usage spikes and the site can actually be seen as a more serious outlet for news. Some users can also contribute greatly to reporting actual events; for instance, the citizen journalism of the events during the 2009 Iranian election protests was recognized by several major media outlets. In response to this coverage, Drew Curtis placed a green band on the letter "K" in the site's logo at the top of the page, to show support for Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
In a June 2009 interview, Curtis said that almost all traffic coming from the People's Republic of China and India was from spammers, so he blocked both countries from the site.
Read more about this topic: Fark
Famous quotes containing the words traffic and and/or traffic:
“If you don’t have a policeman to stop traffic and let you walk across the street like you are somebody, how are you going to know you are somebody?”
—John C. White (b. 1924)
“There was a girl who was running the traffic desk, and there was a woman who was on the overnight for radio as a producer, and my desk assistant was a woman. So when the world came to an end, we took over.”
—Marya McLaughlin, U.S. television newswoman. As quoted in Women in Television News, ch. 3, by Judith S. Gelfman (1976)