“I just wanted to make myself laugh.”

That’s what Drew Curtis said during a recent panel on successful community-based web sites, when moderator Guy Kawasaki asked the group about their business models.

Drew is the founder of Fark.com, which is a fine example of what can happen when you combine coding with an active sense of humor. Its name is derived from a conversation Drew had with a friend in the mid-1990s - they were pondering the fact that “all the four-letter domain names are already gone” - and is defined on the web site as follows:

Fark isn’t an acronym. It doesn’t mean anything. The idea was to have the word Fark come to symbolize news that is really Not News. Hence the slogan “It’s not news, it’s Fark.”

Fark.com got its start in 1999 (a lot of us got started in ‘99, I’ve noticed; it was a good year), when Drew finally found a use for that domain name. As he tells the story, “I kept coming across really weird stories and I would email them to my friends. I was sending these emails out a lot and I decided, ‘You know, this is probably irritating somebody and I’m not going to be that guy.’”

“So, I told them, ‘Look guys I’m going to stop emailing you and I’m going to start putting them on a web page and here it is, it’s at Fark.com, and if you want to check it out you can,’” he concludes.

The site occupies a rather peculiar place in the sensibilities of the American public. It’s one of those all-or-nothing web destinations: most people have never heard of it but, among those of us who have, it’s famous. It’s even used as source material by writers at several big name television comedy shows, from the venerable (The Tonight Show with Jay Leno) to the irreverent (The Daily Show).

Heady stuff for a guy who just wanted to put the silliest news stories he could find online, so he could laugh at them with his friends.

Silly nor not, Fark.com is wildly popular - unless you want to measure its traffic against Google. Drew says he gets about 1.7 to 1.8 million site visits per day. That’s traffic to die for, from the microbusiness perspective. From very early on, Drew firmly established what the founders of YouTube have since discovered, that there appears to be a fairly huge appetite for silliness on the Web.

Much to the astonishment of Guy Kawasaki (as expressed in his blog), Fark.com is a non-employer business that has “defied many conventions of tech entrepreneurship.” It grew into a successful silly-news aggregator and community without the “proven teams, proven technology and proven business models” that are considered normal by the tech VC crowd.

But, however much this type of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants business is a mystery to venture capitalists, Drew Curtis’ adventure will make perfect sense to his fellow microbusiness owners. As a general matter, we’re a pretty fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants bunch.

Drew runs Fark.com from five servers that are so extremely well-coded that he doesn’t use three of them.

(In fact, he uses that fact to illustrate the microbusiness reality of limited resources, although he doesn’t put it that way. When you have a ton of money, says Drew, you can just dash out and buy another server. When you don’t, you have to actually solve your problems. That’s a mindset that is common to microbusiness owners and it applies to more than just server issues.)

He has one independent contractor, rather than a full-time employee, who works with him to keep those servers purring in all their well-coded glory.

What is remarkable about Fark.com is not how the business operates but the sheer magnitude of its success.

But, in spite of all the site traffic, Drew says he isn’t making buckets of money and he doesn’t believe the independent online content producers who say they are. In fact, when you ask him what his biggest business headache is, he’ll name the timidity of mainstream advertisers, who aren’t sure if Fark.com is ‘safe,’ as his greatest current challenge.

Safe?

No, we’re not talking about watered down, milquetoast content suitable for the whole family. We’re talking about what is already familiar, what will not disappear from the Web next week, what operates within a recognized corporate media structure. Media buyers fear ad purchases that they think might cost them their jobs.

“Nobody ever got fired for buying a full-page ad in the New York Times,” as Drew puts it.

Fighting for ad dollars is an uphill battle for online microbusiness content producers. Recent industry research found that a whopping 92% of online ad spending in 2006 went to just four companies: Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Of course, that still leaves $1.3 billion of a $16.8 billion market but it also illustrates how skittish online advertisers are.

Faced with this kind of climate and lacking Fark.com’s traffic, most online microbusiness content producers are turning to multiple revenue streams rather than trying to make a go of it solely on ad-based income.

As for Drew Curtis, he is working to overcome advertiser timidity through increasing his brand recognition so that those media buyers will begin to perceive Fark.com as a ‘safe’ buy. So, in addition to participating in shindigs like that CommunityNext conference panel, Drew is pedaling his new book, It’s Not News It’s Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News, due out in May.

The idea is to make Fark.com as well-known as the online grandfather of news satirists, the Onion, so that the ad buyers will feel that his site is as safe a purchase.

Drew is optimistic about his prospects. He has the traffic, he has a thriving community of loyal users, he has his cost containment ducks all in a row (in typical microbusiness fashion). He expects to crack the timid advertiser problem within the next year or two.

I wish him well. Fark.com is a fun site and he deserves his success. Besides, Drew is well positioned to explode another of those microbusiness myths - the one about how a nonemployer business simply can’t have that much success or make that much money.

The day that we can point to Fark.com and say, “Yes they can,” Drew Curtis will have done us all a very big favor.