Media Orchard has an interview with Drew Curtis, creator of Fark.com.
The whole concept of Web 2.0 is great if you have a small dedicated group of loyal readers (TotalFarkers). The problem is it doesn’t scale because the vast majority of people are goddamn idiots. In general, voting sites are great ways to generate traffic but they suck at putting out a quality product. I’m a huge huge fan of youtube for example but let’s face it, 99.99% of the stuff on there is utter crap (but the other .01% is really amazingly good).
I don’t care what anyone says, the masses are morons. You can’t count on them to pick good stuff. Just check out Network TV to see what the masses want for entertainment. It all sucks. Don’t even get me started on how they vote for elected officials. There’s certainly a place for that kind of thing but it’s not on Fark. Just watch, Web 3.0 will be something called Good Editing.</i>
Perhaps most surprising part of the interview, from a journalism perspective, is Drew talking about how many journalists submit links:
I’d say at least 30% of all submissions are sent in by mainstream media outlets themselves. It could be as high as 50%. I haven’t done any studies, mind you, but it’s a lot more than people would think.
Drew also riffs on advertising models for a bit, saying that ultimately, media companies are going to have to figure out how to operate on much tighter budgets.
Check out the full interview here.