Curtis graduated from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa in 1995. From 1996 to 2002, he owned and operated DCR.NET, an ISP based in Frankfort, Kentucky.

Fark.com

Fark's history began in 1993 when Curtis was a student in England, sending links back to his friends. Curtis registered Fark.com in 1997 but did not begin posting links on the site until 1999. The first story on Fark was a news article about a fighter pilot who crashed while attempting to moon another fighter pilot. Since then, the site has become one of the most popular link dump sites on the internet with nearly 50 million pageviews a month. As of 2006 the site was getting over 2,000 link submissions every day. It was the first indie blog to earn one million dollars a year in profit and its classifieds section alone generates as much as $40,000 per year.

Although Fark is a million-dollar business, Curtis takes a yearly salary of $60,000. The rest of the money goes to the site's legal 'war chest' and to pay other expenses. Under Curtis, Fark has purposely shied away from the Web 2.0 mantra of total user control. "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. There's certainly a place for that kind of thing but it's not on Fark." According to Drew, Web 3.0 will be "something called Good Editing." Speaking at a media conference in Washington, DC hosted by the Poynter Institute, Curtis stated, "The 'wisdom of the crowds' is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb. It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter."

On November 28, 2007, Curtis filed an application to trademark the phrase "not safe for work" a common phrase on Fark.com. His application was denied.

Curtis published his first book How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News in May 2007. It soon became a bestseller. An in depth analysis of the state of modern media, It's Not News, It's Fark slams news organizations for running smaller versions of his not-real-news. Farhad Manjoo of Salon.com when reviewing the book says "he even seems to go after the audience -- his audience -- for indulging in [not-real-news] Curtis seems to want us to be repulsed by them instead."

Press and accolades

Curtis's book peaked at #12 on Amazon.com's non-fiction bestseller list. Media critic Jack Shafer noted that despite the book's success, it surprisingly received "scant attention" from mainstream media outlets. The book was later released in paperback.

In 2006, Curtis was featured on the cover of Business 2.0 magazine as the feature in a story about successful websites. Lexington Weekly named him one of their businessmen under 40 to watch

Notes

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