Let me tell you a little story. There was once a great website called TheSpark.com. It was really, really funny and was always popping with new hilarious projects like the “Stinky Meat Project” the “Fat Project” and the “Date My Sister Project”. Some seriously funny writing! Well, they also made a site called “SparkNotes” which had a boatload of handy notes for high school and college-level students. This appears to be the start of the end. TheSpark.com and SparkNotes.com were both bought up by iTurf.com (a teen-centric website with message boards, articles, etc, inexplicably headed by Delias.com, a clothing store). iTurf (and parent company Delias) was a little too heady with the Internet land-grab in 2000, and in November of 2000, Delias cut the cord, canned the staff of iTurf, and so affiliates like TheSpark and SparkNotes (among others) went into a little bit of a limbo. SparkNotes, however, had a relationship with Barnes & Noble to sell their SparkNotes study-guides (Cliff Notes, sorta). In March of 2001, TheSpark and SparkNotes is sold to Barnes & Noble for the paltry sum of $3,555 (according to this SEC filing).
So, from then on The Spark apparently becomes a bit of Bastard Child to Barnes & Noble. They focus more on SparkNotes, as that can produce revenue while, apparently, writing articles about decaying meat does not. I don’t know when Christian Rudder (the creator of TheSpark.com and SparkNotes.com) parted ways with TheB&NSpark, but it appears to be in early 2001 when Barnes & Noble bought TheSpark and SparkNotes from Delias. And now, as of June 2004, Barnes & Noble shut down TheSpark.com as we knew it, and put up a re-director from TheSpark to SparkNotes, which is minutely similar. I, among many, many others, were terribly dismayed to see this. Notsomuch the revival of SparkNotes.com (which I really didn’t visit that often), but for the complete and total scrapping of TheSpark.com and its content. It would have been one thing to shut down the site and swap it for something COMPLETLY different, but this is some sort of half-baked clownshoe attempt at melding SparkNotes with little tidbits of TheSpark.com. Why not just leave up an archive of TheSpark.com? Hard to say.
Now, for the bad news. According to the FAQ page on his latest web-venture, OKCupid.com, they sold all of their content to Barnes & Noble, and cannot get access to that old content (due to the deal I presume took place in 2001). I don’t pretend to know the particulars of that deal, but one must presume that Christian Rudder either A) got hosed/railroaded, B) took the money and ran or C) just washed his hands of what, on paper, seems like a great big implosion that TheSpark/SparkNotes was involved in. Also, hard to say.
If you want to read a cutesy history of SparkNotes, then read this. Perhaps I’ll dig a little further and flesh this out, but right now I’m just a little muddied with a feeling between fury and sadness.
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i was just doing a web search on my hero, Christian Rudder, and i came across your blog.
i thank you for your information and links helping me answer all the questions i hard about the beautiful, but now gone, thespark.com
i feel the same pain :)
oh, how true. Maybe he’s got a bad taste in his mouth from theSpark, but I wish he’d try something like that again, even on a small scale.
Well, I found this blog after a random search to find the Stinky Meat project, and saw The Spark is gone. But hey, our friends at archive.org do have some parts of the site archived. Check this out:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010330123058/www.thespark.com/content/sparkive/sparkive.html
so THATS what happened to the site… sadness. thanks for the info tho
MY COMMENTS
MY COMMENTS
Thanks for this blog entry! I used it and the comment about the Internet Archive to reconstruct those links and posted my travails there. Thank god for that Internet Archive!
Where did you \”post your travails\”?
ahhhhh, thanks for clearing that up. those projectws they featureed were so good!
ahhhhh, thanks for clearing that up. those projectws they featureed were so good!
I used to be a big fan of the spark then kind of lost track with it. I was looking around for some of the content. Thanks for posting what happened.
This type of occurence makes me physically ill.
Luckily I still have sites like fark and maddox to give me a few cheap laughs. Who needs the spark? And I will never EVER purchase anything from Barnes and Noble. I’ll use the public library, thanks.
I know I’m over a year and a half late in terms of this thread, but as someone who worked at both websites and someone who worked with Christian, I felt the need to fill you all in on the truth of what happened with TheSpark.com and SparkNotes.com.
First of all, despite what you might have heard, Christian was never the owner or “head” of TheSpark.com. He was hired by the founders, as I was, in the Fall/Winter of 1999. TheSpark.com’s founders and chief officers created TheSpark.com and SparkNotes.com while Seniors at Harvard University.
From the very beginning, the plan among the founders, as well as SparkNotes.com head editor, Justin Kestler, was to use the popularity of TheSpark.com to fund investment and growth for the then small study guide sister site, SparkNotes.com. The thought was that the chances for long-term sustainability lay with SparkNotes.com, and not with TheSpark.com. And in the end they were right, the internet bubble burst, all the comedy content sites on the net except for a few disappeared.
But let’s get back to one of the reasons I wanted to sound off. Both sites were initially bought by web property iTurf. Remember iTurf? I didn’t think so. They were a web community that never took off, but they paid us a lot of money in stock to bring us into their network. Most of us cashed our iTurf stock well before they went belly up. It was the iTurf acquisition that was truly profitable for the founders, as well as Christian.
You can look it up, but the SEC filing for the sale of TheSpark.com & SparkNotes.com to Barnes & Noble was around $3,500, pretty small potatos compared to what iTurf poneyed up initially. I’d say B&N got a pretty good deal, seeing how SparkNotes has continued to flourish in their stores and online.
It’s also true, though, that Christian turned away from TheSpark.com in order to pursue other interests, like his music and film projects with friend, Andrew Bujalski. But the real truth is that TheSpark.com was a short-term phenomenon that was sort of planned as such. It was a pretty good plan, too, seeing as how all the guys made out compared to lots of other sites of the time. And SparkNotes continues as a legacy, you can’t do much better than that!!!
One more factoid, there was once an interest from Hollywood to develoip a TV show around TheSpark, but the guys didn’t like the pitch that the executive gave them, and passed on it.
Thank Dan, this makes a lot of sense.