A Virtual Unknown (moot of 4chan) | Hacker News Reader

A Virtual Unknown (moot of 4chan)

washingtonpost.com

63 pointsnickb25 comments

I have tried to buy ads on 4chan many times. I have emailed them at least once every two months over the last year. I have NEVER received a reply.

My product is a browser based game that is very popular with the 4chan crowd. We already advertise on ED. It's as close to a perfect fit for their audience as anything I can think of.

On their previous ad network (I just learned about the new one), things were self serve, but every time I bought ads I was told there was a conflict and to try again.

They seem completely uninterested in doing business with us, or anyone. Maybe that's why the whole thing is failing from a financial perspective?

update: I spoke too soon. Following this article I was able to get in contact with them and our ads should run soon!

You should be aware that moot has a long habit of being somewhat less than perfectly truthful with the media.

ED is profoundly not safe for anything: http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Christopher_Poole

I thought I disclaimed it well enough but just in case: THE PREVIOUS LINK IS NSFW, REALLY REALLY NSFW. IN FACT THE ENTIRE SITE IT'S HOSTED ON IS NSFW.

"profoundly not safe for anything" sounds like you're saying it exposes liars (i.e. is not safe for them) but is itself not always trustworthy (i.e. not safe to believe 100%), especially within the context of your earlier comments about untruth.

That you were trying to warn that it's NSFW was not at all clear.

Fair enough. Context fail on my part, the phrase "not safe for $foo" is given to include NSFW regardless of the value of $foo elsewhere it's hardly a guaranteed assumption.

If pg or someone wants to include an explicit NSFW in that comment I'd be much obliged.

Maybe if you'd written it Not Safe For Anything, that would make the brain click correctly. I too misread your original.

might want to mention that there is gay porn there...you know for those people who are at work

I met him at ROFLCON in Boston and spent a while chatting with him about career stuff. Sadly, I suspect that the thing they mentioned about Boston might have been some people I put him in touch with. I never followed up on what happened there. :/

He is a bright guy and he can/will do great things once he figures out the right way (for him) to extract a good professional presentation of his skills and experience from the quagmire that 4chan can be.

My personal opinion is that he needs to find some start-up that is trying to do something edgy in the social scene and hook up with them to be a coordinator/moderator/facilitator. He knows a damn lot about how a large social group like 4chan can ebb, flow, and eddy.

If he didn't care so much about what kind of advertising 4chan users have to look at, he probably wouldn't be worried about money right now.

If this article is an accurate portrayal, it is surprising yet sad someone with such a site (sole owner, >5M visitors, sustained growth+traffic over years, source of numerous profitable spin-offs, etc.) is in debt and unprofitable.

Surely it is better to run ads that are not optimal but make you money (a balanced comprise), than be unhappy, in debt, and looking for a job?

I don't think he would be happy in most day jobs either (as such people rarely are) and with an income stream he could pursue other ideas that interest him.

There is something very strange about 4chan. You know how people believe in open source, that software should be free? Or how they believe in democracy, or in human rights, or in free speech? I sometimes get the feeling 4chan is way beyond any of that. It's... well, the word sainthood comes to mind.

I know, I know, it's ridiculous. But I simply cannot imagine 4chan, the collective, being racist. It just doesn't fit. Oh, it makes a lot of noise, yes, but to actually discriminate, no. Or any of the principles above, they're so organically _in_.

Well, anyways, about income sources. Amongst the things they could do would be accepting donations. But they don't: http://www.4chan.org/faq#donations The FAQ is an interesting read in itself.

I think the sort of ads that 4chan would have to settle for would be far less than optimal. Most brands, I think, would pay to not be seen on /b/.

Suddenly, blackmail is a legitimate business strategy.

I would pay for advertisement on 4chan. It would be perfect for recruitment, especially on the more arty boards like photography. But it would take at least:

- the possibility to buy small packages, partly because the companies who are big enough to buy the big package are the ones who care most about reputation

- the possibility to define your audience, at least by: board, keywords, country/city of origin

None of which are possible now: http://www.4chan.org/advertise/

> A baby seal walked into a club.

- The favorite joke of the creator of 4chan.

I wouldn't trust this guy too much. It seems strange that he can't monetize such a hugely popular site. Kind of fishy actually. If he has problems with big flashy ads something like google adsense would work out just fine.

Are you familiar with "smart pricing"? Basically, if your traffic isn't worth anything, you get CPMs to match. This is for the understandable reason that advertisers will go freaking berserk if they run a Placement Report and see they're paying large CPMs for no-conversion traffic from a site of very low perceived quality. (And if you're, oh, advertising manager for a bank, your level of perceived quality of /b/ is probably lower than you can construct a number to represent.)

See also: Facebook and Myspace, which have the same monetization issues minus the whole content toxicity problem.

See also: Facebook and Myspace

How many millions a year do they spend? 4chan is a lean one person operation, probably costing less than 100K a year to run. Given the traffic he's getting, he could be getting miniscule CPMs and still be doing ok.

In the article he claims it costs $68k/year to run.

He cannot make money of the site and he cannot get a job? That is the saddest thing I have read for a while. Not because he cannot get a job but because it confuses one's mind on what success really means. In a way he is extremely successful, but in a way he is $20,000 in debt. Irony!

The top post (ED entry for moot) says he's made $3 million - which is probably closer to the truth IMHO. The site serves ads. I have a hard time believing he's making no money and is still doing it.

One page print version:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02...

Did the article really end with a sentence about his being a failure on paper? Ending with the word "failure"? That's harsh.

Every time Chris Poole talks to media it's to fuck with them.

Yes... I think this article is almost entirely not factual. I think it very likely that moot is making a very decent living and does not live with his mother.

So who was the woman they interviewed? An elderly 4chan user?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com