Got to love how 4chan is financially struggling for years yet it seems that every year it grows in cost. I recently came to wonder "How?" and could not find any other reason but Christopher outright lying about the financial status of his business. A business, you ask? Yes, unknown to some, 4chan heavily relies on the freemium model (Pass) and self-served advertisements and some even think these income streams far outdo the cost of running the chans.
One day there might be played an open hand regarding financial matters, but for now you will have to live with the repetetive "I struggle to keep 4chan running and am making massive losses" public announcements, clearly published to gain apathy, now and then.
In 2008, 4chan was accessed by 30 million unique visitors, and served 2.4 billion pageviews.
In 2009, 4chan was accessed by 60 million unique visitors, and served 4.4 billion pageviews.
In 2010, 4chan was accessed by 130 million unique visitors, and served 7.5 billion pageviews.
In 2011, 4chan was accessed by 190 million unique visitors, and served 7 billion pageviews.
And I'll throw in 2012 and 2013 YTD for good measure:
In 2012, 4chan was accessed by 229 million unique visitors, and served 7.2 billion pageviews.
In 2013 YTD, 4chan has been accessed by 222 million unique visitors, and served 5.8 billion pageviews. (Note that pageviews have gone down considerably due to us migrating a lot of page refreshes over to our read-only JSON API.)
Despite growing considerably over the years, the site has historically only made money in two ways: donations and advertising. And it should be noted that we haven't accepted a single penny in donations since the fall of 2005. So basically just advertising. I've ranted about why I hate donations on 4chan in the past, but it boils down to my belief that ongoing donations (a la Wikipedia's fundraisers) are unsustainable for large websites, and their ambiguous goal of "keeping the site alive" creates an implicit and non-mutual understanding of what a user should expect in return for their donation. The last fundraiser we did (in 2005) had a very specific goal of raising funds to purchase servers, colocate them, and pay for one year of hosting -- and so I felt more comfortable with it. But make no mistake, I've always hated donations, which is why I've chosen not to accept them for the past 8 years.
4chan's ad inventory consists of three ad units per page. All three unit sizes are deprecated by IAB standards (728x90 and 468x60 have been phased out by most every major publisher, and are no longer recommended), and none appear in the content. They're at the top and bottom of the page, where users spend little time. Adding them inside of threads would probably increase click-thrus and thus command a higher price, but I don't like the idea of scrolling through ads while I browse.
Not only is 4chan's inventory not lucrative from a technical standpoint, but it's primarily not lucrative to 99% of advertisers due to the site being the epitome of "not brand safe." It's both all user-generated content, and has tons of adult content, which means we've always struggled to find companies willing to advertise (our longest running advertiser is a Japanese import toy company -- hardly a Unilever or Macy's). We can't use ad networks or exchanges, and what little direct inbound we get comes from small advertisers with low ad spend. Which is precisely why we introduced the self-serve advertisements you mentioned, but only back in July 2013. If you take a look at the CPMs we sell ads at, you'll find we charge well below market, and in fact most of the ads you see on the site were sold at a fraction of a cent CPM (or sometimes for free!). Not to mention the novelty factor wore off quickly and self-serve sales plummeted, but I digress...
You also mention 4chan "heavily relies on the freemium model," and reference our 4chan Passes. 4chan Passes were introduced in September 2012, a little more than a year ago. They've certainly helped right the ship, but haven't exactly sold like gangbusters. This is for a few reasons, but primarily because they do very little -- their sole purpose is to remove CAPTCHA. Why? Because as explained in their announcement (https://www.4chan.org/news?all#109) and subsequent posts, I have an intense distaste in the idea of fragmenting the community into "those who pay," and "those who don't" (a la Reddit Gold), and so 4chan Passes do one very specific thing, and nothing more. Which is reflected in their modest sales numbers.
Which leads us to what probably the main reason 4chan is a shitty business: because I choose for it to be one. If I'd decided to rape 4chan for all it was worth, as many would have, I'd probably be sitting on a pretty pile money from now, but as someone who has browsed the site daily for the past 10 years, the thought of seeing it littered with ads and other garbage makes my stomach sick. If that means scraping by for another 10 years, so be it.
I wrote this more for myself than you, but I appreciate your skepticism (and I find it extremely amusing).
> but it boils down to my belief that ongoing donations (a la Wikipedia's fundraisers) are unsustainable for large websites
But... they work. They're not unsustainable. If they were unsustainable, the very example you cite wouldn't exist. Hell, even really small websites make a killing purely by soliciting donations. Maria Popova of brainpickings does it and makes an unbelievable amount from it (though, she does it by misleading her users and doing ethically dubious things here and there). There's a balance to be reached here, but I don't think it's particularly difficult to pull off.
> I have an intense distaste in the idea of fragmenting the community into "those who pay," and "those who don't" (a la Reddit Gold)
That depends on the implementation. Reddit did an awesome job of rolling out Reddit Gold, it most definitely did not fragment the community.
> Which leads us to what probably the main reason 4chan is a shitty business: because I choose for it to be one. If I'd decided to rape 4chan for all it was worth, as many would have
I don't know moot. Who's to say 4chan would've gotten as big if you were more involved in getting money out of it? Seems to me, that considering the userbase of 4chan, another place like 4chan but without the ads would've been the go to place for them if 4chan wasn't very much like 4chan as it's been. User-experience matters in getting the users -- that's why Reddit won, that's why Imgur won, etc. etc.
> But... they work. They're not unsustainable. If they were, the very example you cite wouldn't exist.
I disagree. Wikipedia is one of the best examples of sustenance-by-ongoing-donations, but it's an extreme edge case. They rely on their non-profit status and support from companies in the form of free hardware/bandwidth/etc, in addition to donations from end users. There are few examples of large websites successfully sustaining themselves long-term via donations, whereas the web is littered with plenty of dead websites that attempted the same (or transitioned away from relying on donations).
Perhaps I should have specified donations as your "primary/sole funding model" as unsustainable.
> That depends on the implementation. Reddit did an awesome job of rolling out Reddit Gold, it most definitely did not fragment the community.
I would agree Reddit has done a good job with Gold, but wanted to emphasize the contrast between the two. Gold offers tons of great features, whereas 4chan's Pass only offers one, because its more in line with the ethos of the site (that everyone shares an equal voice, etc).
> I don't know moot. Who's to say 4chan would've gotten as big if you were more involved in getting money out of it? Seems to me, that considering the userbase of 4chan, another place like 4chan but without the ads would've been the go to place for them. User-experience matters in getting the users -- that's why Reddit won, that's why Imgur won, etc. etc.
I can't tell if you misinterpreted my response, or if I'm misinterpreting yours, but I didn't intend to take credit for 4chan's success, but think it's important to point out (in the context of OP's comment) that I've deliberately forgone the opportunity to monetize 4chan to its full potential throughout its existence. At almost every fork of "making a quick buck" and "staying the course," I've chosen the latter. It's only when we've been in truly dire straits that I've chosen the former.
please continue to stay the course, moot. For better or worse, I love the site and its community. 4chan has been arguably more influential and relevant to the internet as a whole than many other similarly sized communities. It's managed to weather the influx of new users very well, which is something that has greatly degraded the quality other sites like reddit and tumblr.
4chan is an incredibly influential online community, to a greater extent than most people realize. And it's the perfect case study of the advantages and disadvantages of online anonymity, in which the former wins by a large margin.
This wouldn't be the case if you tried to whore out your users to advertizers. Kudos for doing a great job :)
Sorry if I implied that you pre-wrote it; I meant that more along the line of "I've answered this question multiple times already, so I know more or less what to say".
No worries. I don't normally respond with as comprehensive a rebuttal, but was in a write-y mood today (and as someone who hates writing, this is not something to pass up).
Ah, I didn't notice. But now I want to write an "HN Alerts" service that notifies you whenever someone writes a comment with a certain keyword. In moot's case, that would be "4chan," but I'd imagine lots of people would find it useful.
There's actually a useful Zapier script that already does this [0]. I remember reading about it on Mike Knoop's (Zapier cofounder) blog [1]. I haven't tried it out but you should be able to hook it up to any of the alert services that Zapier integrates with. (Which is a lot!)
Ok. Would you email me (sillysaurus2 at gmail) so that I can have you beta test it? It's pretty straightforward, but I'd feel better if you look at it before I publicly launch it.
(I know how busy you are, so I'll always be brief.)
One of the features of reddit gold is that it allows you to turn of their ads. Honestly I would be kinda pissed if I had brought some membership to a community and it didn't turn of the ads (or at least allowed me to). It feels like double dipping.
The point is that it's known as cancerous on 4chan because it distracts from normal activity on it (chatting / img sharing) but is popular and easily profitable elsewhere. Like many general sites with large disparate communities 4chan is good at some simple things but doesn't serve specific niches in a thorough and interesting way.
It's probably cancerous on 4chan because it's plainly obvious you're profiteering rather than trying to build a community. After the cheezburger/meme monetization age, I'd expect everyone on that site to be extremely wary of anyone trying to make money off of them.
>4chan is good at some simple things but doesn't serve specific niches in a thorough and interesting way.
Have you been to 4chan? Are the papercraft/origami and "general" thread boards not good enough for you? Not to mention awhile ago poole did a post about how thoughtlessly adding boards dilutes the community and just ends up causing mayhem.
We do not advertise on 4chan and do not engage the 4chan community in any way. Yet 4channers constitute a large part of our community for some reason.
I think I worded my pitch incorrectly but the "cancerous" part is not our site, but the activity itself. Our site is the cure to the cancer.
Just going off of the previous airbnb example, if 4chan had a travel board where people are spamming their rentals that activity might be considered cancerous. If 4chan told people to go to a site where they're invested in that would both solve the problem and be a win win for both communities.
>Have you been to 4chan? Are the papercraft/origami and "general" thread boards not good enough for you? Not to mention awhile ago poole did a post about how thoughtlessly adding boards dilutes the community and just ends up causing mayhem.
There are people attempting to do things on 4chan which are as complicated as the previous example of rentals. It is obvious that airbnb is a much superior rental platform than 4chan. The activity I'm referring to is much like rentals, a cancerous annoyance on a discussion site, but important and useful economic activity. 4chan should seek to join us and help it get rid of the cancer.
> and could not find any other reason but Christopher outright lying about the financial status of his business.
None? I would think the growing number of users would translate into increased costs. Bandwidth, hardware, lawyers, etc? Do any sites show decreasing costs with increasing popularity?
> some even think these income streams far outdo the cost of running the chans.
Some? Do you have some links to share on the matter?
One day there might be played an open hand regarding financial matters, but for now you will have to live with the repetetive "I struggle to keep 4chan running and am making massive losses" public announcements, clearly published to gain apathy, now and then.