Skippy McGee

Washington Post article today about Chris Poole (moot).

washingtonpost.com

At age 21, he gets 5 million visitors a month (imagine the pageviews) but is living at home with his mom and is $20k in debt because he keeps putting his server bills on credit cards.

dogfighter

Sell ads to NAMBLA

jk, they have been trying to monetize, mostly with porn ads. Don't know how it's been going but I'd think he'd make more selling tshirts or Guy Fawkes masks.

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cliqz

You couldn't really advertise anything yourself except affiliate stuff. Mainstream CPM and CPC companies wouldn't touch that site.

But his obvious cash cow would be to sell ad space direct to buyers. People like us could pay him per click or he could sell CPM media branding packages.

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dschus

T-shirt sales. With all the memes and jokes, people would eat this shit up.

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amanda11

Flesh sticks, perhaps work at home ops for those basement dwellers

alexb

T-shirts relating to current memes. I don't think any affiliate offers would work, and nobody on that site would actually PAY for porn.

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amanda11

I'll donate moot $20 -- fucking kid needs a haircut.

Firelead

Great article...The article mentioned he goes to conferences...I wonder what conferences he goes to?

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zany zoroaster

Reading this article, I really appreciate how important it is that I went through and got a business degree, and that I participate in WF. All the ways to monetize/use 4chan seem pretty clear to me, as they probably do to just about everyone here.

majorbta

that was actually a pretty interesting article

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vinny lingo

T-shirts, all the way.

BTW, did anyone catch this?

loyolabenson

I agree with the Tshirts. So much potential. Icanhazcheesburger should pay some royalties too. I'm pretty sure 4chan came up with the concept of lol cats.

Nikko

clean up his formatting and sell adspace to clever marketing wonks such as the fine denizens of this board. 5 million eyeballs a month of the stupidly gullible variety, and this cheesehead can't figure out how to make money? He doesn't deserve that site. In fact, he should just stop breathing my air right now.

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nickycakes

i wouldn't exactly call 4chan readers the "stupidly gullible variety". they may act like retards, but you'd be lucky to get a couple dating signups out of them.

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JamesH

You think he wants your shitty acai berry ads and grant offers on his site? The dude has standards, which is why he isn't making any money right now.

Cut

Im pretty sure if he had ads everywhere. His members would revolt against his site.

JamesH

^ Which doesn't make sense to me. Look at Facebook. All of its users are bitching about ads, yet they're using a free fucking service. What the fuck do they expect? Dumb bitches expect to have their cake and eat it too. I guess we're the only people that will understand, since we know what the fucks up on the interwebs.

/end rant

Nikko

Is there a Hello Kitty Dating site? Bet they'd sign up for that!

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HarveyJ

You can't put the regular shit for desperate morons on 4chan.
Most chaners are fine with being single. They get their porn for free from torrents and LAN parties, and think that girlfriends that won't sit their watching anime and playing WoW with them instead of going out to a movie and maybe fucking in a park are a waste of time.
I say this from actual conversations I've had with people when I made the dumb mistake of going on a Scientology raid. The REALLY sad thing is that some of the chan girls are fucking hot.

Which leaves us with the question of what would work for channers, but also what would work for the outside world? (seriously, think outside the box with me on this one)

Internally, I'm thinking the best thing to do would just be to have 2 banners towards the top and the left, marketing things that chaners would probably get into.
So video gaming hardware, Japanese crap, maybe some game strategy guides, oh, and better ISP services for getting up to illegal shit.

For marketing to the outside world where people are tight arses? Most people have no fucking clue who Pedobear and Friends are.
A range of vinyl toys or plushies would probably sell quite well, just due to cuteness factor. From their, you go on a massive merch run ala Gloomy or HelloKitty, and from there you can launch the fashion line entirely on your own with the capital, instead of relying on CafePress or Zazzle.
Getting in on the porn angle, they need to get a paid site going, like Suicide Girls, but using hot chan girls as the models. "Support 4chan with your TITS or GTFO"... Chicks could donate self cam sets or some shit, and non channers could pay $10 a month or some shit.

What I find odd here is that 4chaners aren't all that stupid. Yeah, there are a lot, but there are also people like ****** and ****************** on there that do the marketing shtick, and could easily give moot advice on how to start making some money off of it.
Hell, moot himself could just explain the massive costs of keeping it running and ask people to buy stuff through his links by having a page of "Support 4chan: Buy shit here" or something.

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g1c9

I figure he'd break even just asking for donations..

didn't RTFA. will now.

TeeBird

I would do donations and then drive community building tshirts.

Since this moot is such a cult like character, why not have a where's moot tshirt. Have a basic shirt and a more expensive autographed shirt.

Then start closing part of the site and add a membership fee. If it was a small amount, like 20 bucks a year, it would drive some dollars and create some exclusivity. With 5 mm uniques he does not need a large percentage to bring in a nice income.

And then I would market it as an advertising free site, something that would appeal to his demographic.

AdHustler

Two Letters: IQ

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xentech

He already is.

I agree, clothing with memes on would sell for sure.

I'm willing to bet the demographic for 4chan is generally pretty computer literate and would be able to identify that as a scam. With that said, it is becoming a lot more popular and mainstream so I'd say he'd easily convert enough to pay server bills atleast!

johu

Maybe take a page from SomethingAwful and charge to "register" (as Anonymous, of course) in order to post. SA implemented the model somewhat successfully.

tcmike

If you were to make anonymous pay for 4chan they would literally rip the internet a new asshole. A bunch of them are excellent hackers with a mean streak a mile wide.

glowleaf

I have a related question. How can you monetize a site like 4chan in general without getting your monetization strings cut? I read an article, that someone got moot's paypal donation account locked. It wasn't much, like 500$, but it was a month's hosting costs at least.
So, how could such a site be made, that would be immune to private and government intervention? Which servers would you need to get to avoid all the CP/lawsuit drama, how should you register domains to avoid getting tracked, and how would you get paid without risking getting cut off?

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xentech

What do you mean by that?

tcmike

/b/ as a whole quietly wields a lot of power on the internet. If you read that article, they started most of the viral stuff that has made its way to millions of computers in the last couple of years. Also, many of them are adept at hacking. They frequently use these skills and their sheer number to shut down interactive websites. The last one I saw happen live was the book series Twilight's message board, which they shut down in about five minutes just because a thread starter felt like it. If you were to make them pay for 4chan, which many of them have been using for a few years now, they would be pretty enraged. So then you'd have over a million pissed off and capable technological anarchists on your hands. Not a good situation.

xentech

So because they can't access 4chan for free they would go on a hacking rampage all over the internet? Surely they would just hack into/attack 4chan? Seems more logical to me.

LogicFlux

Logical? Anonymous is Hannibal Lechter in that little cell with a broadband connection.

bigmoneyrob

spoofcards, fleshlights, cam sites

HarveyJ

Glowleaf: Good quality collectible merchandise would be legit. I was speaking to a couple of my friends about this and one even emailed the bizdev email address on 4chan with the idea of the vinyl toys.
The more I think about it, the more I think collectibles would actually do rather well, considering how many anonymous are OCD packrats for action figures & toys.
Provided you stayed away from the shit that was just outright illegal, and did things like an O Rly? Owl series, or Pedobear & friends, you'd be ok.

You're an idiot. We've made this eminently clear a number of times. You're not going to get these people paying for porn. Same with spofcards. They'll just get that for free. The only thing you might be able to push is the fleshlights, and even then, they'll just make one from a Pringles tube.

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xmcp123

Last time I can remember 4chan getting DDOSed out of existance for a bit, the userbase just expanded from there moving to other *chans and creating turmoil at digg and whatnot.
You want them contained in /b/.

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LotsOfZeros

It appears they found a way

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xmcp123

lol. I saw the carnage. It's pretty bad. Like I saw a user picture that is now a vagina painted like homer simpson with a cigarette in the "mouth".

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dschus

Imagine having so many visitors, but no sure fire way to monetize them. I browsed through some of the stuff you guys posted. Those /b/ tards literally will fuck anyone who messes with them up. The bit about the people getting moot's paypal locked up is pretty scary. I mean FFS, these users are using his site and his money for their own benefit. The least they could do is not fuck up his paypal account.

I am sure any sort of ad model he introduces will envoke panic and chaos on the site. In all reality though, merchadise sales would be the best way to go.

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LotsOfZeros

Just went there, didn't see any vag pics but you got to see some of these folks, I think I just found the nexus of avatar heaven.

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addy mcadd

Not a bad article. Just a factual error there: Anonymous, the 4chan userbase, and the Scientology raiders are three different groups (which nonetheless interwine). (Scientology related posts on 4chan were actually forbidden by moot and removed during the protests.)

The key sentence of the article is: "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.". Moot seems rather phlegmatic. At times he wasn't running ads at all. And his handling of them is amateurish. Look at the incident with the "ads [that] blasted users with unwanted sounds". He even informed the userbase on the top of the site (usually reserved for rare important notices) about this and said he would look for alternative banners.
What i wanna say is: He could just put anything upand get money, as the 4chan demographic is so wide and vast. Currently the ads are "hookup" services, porn sites, electronic gadges sale sites, fun sites. Remember this in the artice?: "But "I don't want to run ads with nudity above the fold," he says. It's just tacky."


Now, concerning the clueless crowd of this forum who thinks it has the game plan for the internet including 4chan and marketing in general: you have no idea.

Ads to porn sites are a way to go because people undoubtedly do pay for them. /b/-tards are no exception. 2chan is running on them.

Moot is not capable of running a t-shirt business himself. Tshirts and toys would not sell to /b/-tards anyway cause it is frowned upon to take memes to the real world. The memes exclusively work in the context of the internet. And tshirts with "current memes" is the least thing a person who enjoys these particular current meme wants, cause it's the exact opposite of how a meme works. It's on the internet, in your own mind, exluded from real society. I'm talking bout "true" /b/tards, the "oldfags". The shirts would look ridiculous too so no "newfag" or kiddie would buy them. Moot would so be hated because he would go against /b/'s "priniciples" (if there are any). Remember /b/tards are basement dwellers that go to 4chan to escape from the real world.
Also there is no original content on /b/! Almost every meme is ripping on copyrighted pop media/culture stuff!
And moot would never sell Guy Fawkes masks. See my first paragraph.

What are you talking about? There is no copyright.
"All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective parties. Images uploaded are the responsibility of the Poster. Comments are owned by the Poster."

What do you mean? The approved definitive Futuba design?

The more you visit the minefield /b/, the less gullible you get. By and by you realise that everyone is a troll who f*cks with you for fun.

Yes.

Delusional.

You don't know the camwhore dynamic. Those underage girls do this spontaneously for the thrill in the exclusive setting of the chans' threads. They are amateurs, not commercial. Moot and his mods delete all camwhores on sight anyway. He wouldn't do that.

Chris is clearly not that type of extroverted person.

That didn't happen with SomethingAwful and they have basically the same (type of) skilled "hackers" and attacking foes amongst them, and they both are still running. They would just switch to another chan if 4chan was with a fee.

You're overestimating them. I'm often on /b/. Most of the "raids" are nothing but short-lived fun-actions by a few people who use the most primitive methods that hardly have any effect on the attacked websites.

Membership fees would destroy the concept of 4chan.

Any sort?? What about the ones that existed? They would never panic and chaos is a defining element of /b/ already.


You can't understand /b/ unless you've been there for over many months.