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Not sure if you guys have heard, but according to the current admin, Hiroyuki, 4chan is in financial trouble, these last days new ads have been added to the site with some of them being potentially malicious, along with the infamous /vip/ board which is exclusive for pass users and the ability to be able to donate to the site directly; but even with all of these new measures the situation apparently hasn't improved

Now here's the other side of the coin, a lot of 2ch users said this guy was shady as hell, pretending to be dumb and avoiding questions by shitposting (Which he basically did when questioned in the thread where I took that screencap from) not only that, apparently he had a lot of legal issues in his country and was caught selling data from the users, some time before he sold 2ch he kept saying the site was having financial issues and tried to get users to buy passes as well

Possible solutions to this issue, according to Hiroyuki, include things such as removing the archive (Or making it available only for pass users) removing a couple boards and/or disabling images/gif/webm uploading for a while

Thoughts?

scam to get people to buy more passes

I'm really skeptical that the site is in that much trouble tbh. The Japanese themselves have talked on 2ch about how 4chan wasn't forewarned or aware of his tactics. They do not seem to like the guy at all.

It really does sound like bullshit. 4chan's Global Rank has actually grown by a considerable amount since April of this past year, so undoubtedly the guy is cashing out.

Is it any surprise the head of 4chan is a shady fuck?

Can someone explain to me how making archives elusive to pass users is going to save money?

@Ryumaru

Is it any surprise the head of 4chan is a shady fuck?

Thing is, while Hiro is, moot wasn't. The ads were relatively safe and non-stalker-ish, as the image shows. He never tried to force the idea of premium membership either and was focused on what 4chan should be for its users rather than just for him.

And of course the guy's now an employee at Google but their shadiness is a different discussion entirely

In fact our own entry on moot says:

Poole has become a respected Internet entrepreneur, and has spoken at conferences at the Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and South by Southwest. In 2008, he was referred to as “the most influential web entrepreneur you’ve never heard of” in an article in The Observer.

/dicc succ

I have a feeling that if this guy continues on the current track, a lot more people are going to be leaving 4chan for any other myriad of *chan websites out there.

Act like a shit hole, attract people who spawn shit holes. It's a relatively simple formula. If they wanted a better person interested in 4chan, they should have acted better themselves.

TIL Serial killers only murder really bad people, hackers only hack shady organizations and robbers only hit corrupt banks

wew lad stop posting anytime

Your logic doesn't make any sense.

Oh its much more simple then you think, childish hyperbole aside of course. 4chan is a site that nobody wants to associate with, and as such has no ability to generate revenue without relying on its userbase and only its userbase. The reason it is such an unprofitable website is because of how its user have acted, and the reputation it has earned via those actions.

So what you end up with are people who are running sites like this out of some form of principal, formerly moot, and individuals like the one who made 8chan I guess. Or, you get people who look to take these types of non-profitable entities and spin them to make a profit, such as the new owner of the site is.

Comparing this to a serial killer or hacker is a ridiculous attempt to hide the fact that if 4chan wasn't a cesspool of anonymous shitposting and hyper-critical bs, they'd be able to attract more advertisements to the site and be able to create a financially sustainable server. Or you know, changed anything at all with the way the websites layout works, because as it stands now, its propping up an aging, archaic website whose coding is probably close to collapsing itself into an error screen at any moment.

I'm very suspicious about an hiro. For one, it blows me away that "there's too many users, we need people to stop using the site!" is the supposed solution to this issue. It goes against every single facet of online revenue making. He also aparently disabled all ads on 4chan for several days because "server costs were too high." I've never heard of someone disabling their primary revenue stream because it costs too much money to run. It's insane.

He's shown no desire whatsoever to sell, despite receiving multiple multi-million dollar offers (including from billionaire Notch). For someone who's site is supposedly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and is this close to shutting down, it's baffling you wouldn't want to take the money, cut any loses you've incurred, and get out while you can.

I think it's either the greatest troll ever, or a legitimate scam.

Black Graphic T said:

4chan is a site that nobody wants to associate with, and as such has no ability to generate revenue

4chan's never been a cash cow (hence why moot never became a millionaire off of it), but in recent years has done well enough, financially, to steadily maintain things. Not everyone needs Adsense to make money.

4chan wasn’t a cesspool of anonymous shitposting and hyper-critical bs, they’d be able to attract more advertisements to the site and be able to create a financially sustainable server.

4chan's no worse then the KYM Forums--and I don't just mean Riff Raff. All you have to do is throw in some extra curse words and slurs. They talk about tv shows, anime, games, pony, sports--all of that. The site's reputation precedes it quite a bit and I doubt you've spent very much time, if any, there.

Changing 4chan's culture or UI I think would doom it. It's carved it's niche and to try and convert it into something else means you not only lose most of the users who enjoy that niche, but then have to start competing with entrenched competitors (Reddit, Twitter, forums, etc.).

"4chan can't afford" my right foot, it's ranked 581 in alexa for god's sake!

Check out this post from the 4chan blog. It shows a graph of data usage by 4chan, and a datum saying that the site used 3 PB in the last month.

The post then estimates the costs of that data usage, for some reason using the prices from Amazon Web Services, which it admits 4chan doesn't use. That's pretty strange on its own. AWS prices aren't the lowest around, so why are they a good use for this estimate?

The graph of data usage is presented to mislead people. Here's what you see on the blog.

There was a claim by 8chan that this was from CloudFlare, which we know 4chan uses. I set up a server to use CloudFlare so I could check for myself. Here's what my graph looks like.

4chan's image is hiding some critical sections and information. The yellow line on the graph represents the amount of data handled by CloudFlare's cache, meaning that 4chan's servers never actually handle those data. Their server hosting bill won't include costs of communication that the servers don't perform.

Hiroyuki claims that 4chan costs $90,000 per month, when their own data show that the real cost should be a third of that. It could be higher, but nobody has presented any evidence that it is.

"4chan’s no worse then the KYM Forums"
pfffttttttttt /b/ is a part of 4chan, you know that right?

look kids it's a rat

4chan's simplistic UI guarantees it would never have a heavy cost to maintain (dispite what hiroshima claims which was already proven wrong). Yes it is archaic, but its made that way to appeal to users who look for something incredibly simplistic and at the same time is not hard to maintain dispite having a gigantic userbase that just increases with time.

and at the end of the day, reddit has gathered an equally worse reputation within mainstream media, yet that doesn't stop them from making ad money, because as you have realized even if you are stormfront hosting the worse of the internet, there will still be ad money to be made.

Honestly just the fact gookman is lying makes everything you said invalid.

So everybody knows at this point that Hiroyuki is lying, right? What I'm curious about is how Moot thought that he, of all people, would be the best application for owning a site like 4chan. Sure, the dude founded 2chan, but doesn't it seem weird that Moot sold 4chan to him despite all the lawsuits and shady stuff Hiro supposedly has a history of carrying and evading? Did he just not do a background check or anything?

Also, has anybody heard about how Notch/Markus Perrson offered to buy 4chan, but then backed out when he was making weird demands and people threatened to doxx him because he 'wasted' their time waiting for an answer? Apparently it was threatening enough to make him nuke all his tweets from the last five months, but if the information OP's image provided was true, then maybe Notch, or literally anyone else genuinely would be a better owner than Hiro, since he supposedly knows his way around the site well enough and obviously has the money to actually do it.

What I’m curious about is how Moot thought that he, of all people, would be the best application for owning a site like 4chan.

Think about it, this could be Moot's ultimate revenge, maybe he already knew about Hiro's reputation as a conman, why not sell him the site that fucked you up constantly over the years so they suffer as well. He stood up for it several times and only got called cuck and other miscellaneous insults as thanks, got his nudes leaked, and on top of that he had multiple legal issues due to the site's actions. Seems like a pretty good plan to me, meanwhile he's just watching things burn from afar.

How does this imply that 4chan is making a lot of money? you know the more users there are, the higher the costs, right?

Under standard business theory, it should be making more money with more users, even after counting elevated costs (in bandwidth and server and stuff). More users/higher website rank = more people that that can be exposed to ads (even after assuming the use of adblockers) = more entities that would be interested in putting ads in the site. If no normal business is interested in buying ad space, they can change ordinary people for ads, i know that 8chan did so a year ago, 1 ad showing in 1 board for 24 hs at 5 bucks, in all boards for 20 (i don't know if they still do so). With 4chan's massive userbase, it'd be fair to ask for more money. It's not that different from the television business model. See also: the motivation behind the clickbait website model.

Heck, there's no need to take a high school-tier economy class to know this concept, if Hiro isn't lying and the site isn't making more money with the growth of users, well, that doesn't speak very favorably of him.

until recently, 4chan didn't even have ads besides the occasional jlist, duckduckgo, or self served ad, so idk how you think they were making much money off ads. You are saying what they could do to make money through ads, but they weren't doing that.
You seem to think i said "4chan can't make money". I did not. I said, currently, 4chan doesn't make much money.