By February 2009, server costs were running Poole $6,000 each month, and he was charging them to his personal credit card while living with his mother. In 2005, Poole attempted a donation drive to raise the $20,000 he needed to keep the site running - and fell dramatically short. The site was famously founded, and run until September 2015, by a then-15-year-old kid named Christopher Poole, who considered it "a hobby and not a business."įor its first few years, Poole kept 4chan's servers online largely by the graces of an online anime retailer called J-List, which sponsored a few ads on the site's more savory boards. In many ways, this is business as usual for 4chan, which has - over its 13-year history - only occasionally broke even. Instead, he says, display advertising is no longer profitable for 4chan because so many of its users have installed ad-blocking extensions. The message boards, never exactly havens of godliness, have become closely associated with the most racist and vitriolic extremes of the alt-right - even lending the movement their mascot, Pepe the Frog.īut Nishimura insists that he has not had any problems finding advertisers and that the site's current difficulties do not spring from its content. It's tempting to see 4chan's financial difficulties as a referendum on the site itself - certainly its image has grown only darker in recent months. We tried other ways, but it (was not) enough." In emails to The Washington Post, Nishimura explained that 4chan's current operating expenses exceed the money it brings in from advertisements and sales of special memberships called "4chan passes." To close the gap, he plans to reduce the size limit for uploaded images and, potentially, to begin accepting donations, as Wikipedia does. Those changes will not be the total shutdown that critics hoped for - at least not yet. "We had tried to keep 4chan as is," he wrote on the site's /qa/ board.
The anonymous, anything-goes message board for provocative trolls has struggled to stay afloat almost since its inception.īut on Sunday night, the site's current owner, Japanese web entrepreneur Hiroyuki Nishimura, seemed to imply that the situation was no longer tenable. As far as business prospects go, 4chan has never been a particularly good one.