I was recently turned on to Hark.com and have to say I’m having a blast with it.
Here’s the short version: Hark is a repository of movie audio clips, each with their own permalink so they can be shared all over the web. So if you want to find Will Ferrell’s complaining about a massively painful broken leg in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, you can do a search for “austin powers mustafa” and it will be one of the options available.
Each clip page has options to buy the movie on Amazon as well as any other official outlet that might be available and it’s my understanding that revenue from those purchases, as well as advertising income, is shared with the studios, who provide official versions of the audio so there aren’t any rights issues at play.
There are options to share each clip automatically via Facebook, email and other platforms to encourage viral spread of each clip and the site in general.
So back to my having a blast with this site.
If you know me at all you know that approximately 73% of my conversational makeup is either direct movie quotes or derivations thereof. And that’s just in person. Over email and in IM conversations I’m constantly sharing links to YouTube clips of a scene with a quote that I’m going for. But sometimes this isn’t the best way to do things.
By creating shorter clips – and more of them – and working with the rights holders the repository is exponentially greater. Yeah, there are sites that have similar deals for video clips but I’ve yet to come across one that’s as extensive as this. And quite frankly I think Hark is a lot more fun because of the fact that it’s just audio, meaning you don’t have to wait for load times and other considerations. The clip more or less just plays.
Hark’s just a blast to play with – I’ve even begun integrating it into some client programs as a more interactive and interesting component to some regular features that are run.
There’s a lot to like here and, again, because all the rights issues are clear it’s free of a lot of the guilt and other problems that creep up when we’re talking about finding some random fan-uploaded clip on YouTube or elsewhere. Check out Hark.com and see for yourself.
