Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark (Part 1)

If you like keeping up with what your favorite celebrity, sports figure, or even your best friend or favorite relative has said, then you’ll love Hark. Founded by David Aronchick and Fouad El Naggar in 2007, this Seattle-based company has become one of the 10 largest entertainment/movies sites on the Web, according to comScore.  Approaching 100 million users per month worldwide, content from Hark gives users an engaging entertainment experience while providing advertisers with a rich pool of potential customers for their clients.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Dave. Let’s start with a bit of context. Tell us about Hark, what you’re doing, and where the company is at this point.

David Aronchick: The idea behind Hark is that we want to be the world’s largest platform for pop culture sound bites. When we say pop culture, we mean everything under the sun: movies, TV, sports, news, religion, business, education, and video games. Sound bites mean things to people. What we want to do is take the same power you have in connecting with people face to face, whether it’s something professional like a movie you just walked out of or something amateur like my daughter saying the alphabet for the first time. The point is that it’s emotionally powerful. We want to take that same power and help it move online.

SM: What’s the audience for this?

DA: In some ways, we think everyone is the audience for it. This is how we’re wired to say a quote or say a particular sports call from an announcer or even repeat something that someone sitting near you had said earlier that was funny. This is how we’re connected to our fellow humans. That said, I might bond with my brother over something related to video games, whereas I might bond with my wife over something more personal like our son saying something funny. That’s what we see as the opportunity to target within these millions of pieces of content that we have on the site. Each person is going to find a particular sound bite that’s meaningful for him or her.

SM: You have a fair number of users already, right?

DA: That’s right. Last month, we have more than 70 million users to the site.

SM: What are you learning in terms of usage patterns?

DA: I think the most interesting thing is just how individual our site is to everyone in the world. We have a long-tail site. The one hundred thousandth sound bite on our site last month got more than 10,000 listens, which is extremely long tail. People find things they love and then share them. That’s what we’ve found. You want to be as broad with your content or content types as possible because you never know what’s going to resonate with a particular person.

SM: Are you saying that there aren’t trends in the behavior patterns?

DA: Well, I would consider a trend to be that there’s a sharp focus on a lot of pop culture on the fat [end], like huge bow waves of, like, the Olympics. [People] paid a lot of attention to the Olympics. There’s no question you’re going to see spikes around timely issues. I think the trend and the interesting thing is that if you add up all of the long-tail content we have all the way back, it adds up to far more than the spikes at the head. That makes a huge difference.

By biasing a site and having a site where we really do work hard to show everyone the variety of content that’s out there, you get a lot of opportunity to find someone’s favorite clip.

SM: OK. Talk to me a bit about where the content comes from.

DA: We’re a twofold kind of site. We do work with all of our users to make it easy to upload content to the site. You’ll have users uploading things from whatever they might have recorded on their phones or computers, maybe a sound bite that was captured from a recording that they’d previously made. You never know. Beyond that, we work with major studios and major content owners to get their content on the site in a licensed way and share the revenue with them.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark
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