

Ask HN: How would you monetize a dubious website (e.g. 4chan)? - anemecek

Greetings to everyone. It is a fact that for infamous websites, such as 4chan or encyclopediadramatica, it is pretty hard to turn page views into money. So the question is, how would YOU personally go about doing that?
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mishmash
4chan likely makes much more money than is reported.. with moot putting
forward this broke-kid image, I would think he becomes a much smaller target
for the various entities, laws, and copyrights they trample on.

It's sort of like how the IFPI used the "profitable" motive in it's arguments
against the Pirate Bay.

Poor people make poor lawsuit targets.

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fragmede
Arguable, poor people make _great_ targets because they're less likely to be
able to defend themselves.

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pinksoda
Those people are "judgment proof" because even if you get a judgment that says
they owe you a billion dollars, you'll never collect a dime.

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fragmede
That's step 1.

Step 2 is using the billion dollar judgement as a precedent when suing people
with a little bit of money.

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matthewphiong
Ads. But sites like 4chan is more of a community-focus site and they don't
really focus on making money. Here is a post about 4chan's revenue:

[http://www.homethinking.com/brontemedia/2009/02/22/4chanorg-...](http://www.homethinking.com/brontemedia/2009/02/22/4chanorg-300m-page-
viewsmo-about-6k-in-revenue/)

The revenue is enough to cover the hosting plus maybe a few hundreds extra.
That's all.

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anemecek
What I actually meant to ask is not how do they make money, if they make
money, or even if it is their goal to make money but if you were in moot's
shoes and you wanted to turn page views into money, what would you do?

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mishmash
Invent <http://icanhascheezburger.com/>? ;)

But seriously, not being commercially driven is what gives the chans their
credibility. Commercializing that crowd is a million dollar question. Now that
moot has taken VC, it will be interesting to see how his new project will
monetize.

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tlholaday
SomethingAwful's solution: membership & service fees. Sell badges. Sell
archive-power, e.g. for US$0.10, you can prevent this thread from being pruned
for ten minutes.

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ben1040
SA is pretty brilliant in how they charge $5 for changing your avatar image,
something which 99% of other popular forums let you do for free. For $10, you
can change _another_ user's title. If you get in a flame war with a guy with
ten bucks to spare, he can buy you an embarrassing title/image. You have to
either live with that or cough up the $5 to change it back.

~~~
HNer
This idea is actually very clever. This is the basic concept to make money
from free, 1st you solve a problem and generate plenty of traffic, 2nd you
indirectly or directly create a secondary problem for your users. This is the
part you monitise. According to the variables and the ticks you use to create
the secondary pain, will adjust the revenues you make.

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AlexMuir
Mega Upload built their own advertising platform - <http://www.megaclick.com>

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lovskogen
Sell them what they want.

