Then, we'll try tough ways. Markus "Notch" Persson - the creator of Minecraft - tweeted that he was interested in helping, before deleting the post. The former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli, has also said that he would be interested in helping run the site.
I don't know much about his personality, though. Any help is welcome. While most of 4chan's content stays within its walls, the site has repeatedly had influence on the wider world. Perhaps most notably, it is thought to be the birthplace of the Anonymous movement. The hacktivists are said to have taken on the name as a nod to the fact all posts to the site have been marked as being posted by "anonymous" rather than another username since The singer Rick Astley can thank 4chan for helping revitalise his career, due to a user creating the Rickrolling meme - in which one of his music videos is shared under false pretences.
And cat-lovers can be grateful for the Lolcats meme, in which oddly phrased text is superimposed over a photo of a feline. Supporters of Donald Trump can point to 4chan helping drive support for the presidential candidate among the unders. And pranksters would undoubtedly miss its ability to hijack online votes. Examples include:. Perhaps most critical of all is that 4chan provides a place for likeminded people to hang out online - and several other comment sites are already concerned what an influx of its former users would mean if it failed.
Pepe the Frog branded a 'hate symbol'. Google hires creator of notorious 4chan. Image source, 4chan. Several of 4chan's boards are marked as being "not safe for work". What do people do on 4chan? Image source, Reuters. Pepe the Frog is a popular meme on 4chan despite being branded a "hate symbol" by the Anti-Defamation League.
Image source, Getty Images. Naked photos of the actress Jennifer Lawrence were shared on 4chan. Why is 4chan in difficulties? Ad-blockers cause some 4chan users to avoid the adverts placed in its site.
Is there a way out? In emails to The Washington Post, Nishimura explained that 4chan's current operating expenses exceed the money it brings in from advertisements and sales of special memberships called "4chan passes. Infrastructure costs go up We tried other ways, but it was not enough. It's tempting to see 4chan's financial difficulties as a referendum on the site itself - certainly its image has grown only darker in recent months.
The message boards, never exactly havens of godliness, have become closely associated with the most racist and vitriolic extremes of the alt-right - even lending the movement their mascot, Pepe the Frog. But Nishimura insists that he has not had any problems finding advertisers and that the site's current difficulties do not spring from its content. Instead, he says, display advertising is no longer profitable for 4chan because so many of its users have installed ad-blocking extensions.
In many ways, this is business as usual for 4chan, which has - over its year history - only occasionally broke even. The site was famously founded, and run until September , by a thenyear-old kid named Christopher Poole, who considered it "a hobby and not a business. For its first few years, Poole kept 4chan's servers online largely by the graces of an online anime retailer called J-List, which sponsored a few ads on the site's more savory boards.
Still, 4chan survived. But Nishimura faces problems with 4chan that he never did with its older cousin. J-List, one of 4chan's longest and most loyal advertisers, recently declined to renew its contract because of falling click-through rates - a sure sign of ad-blockers. On top of that, 4chan is reviled by mainstream US society in a way that even 2chan was not. Dwango, once one of Japan's major internet media companies, was a loyal advertiser on the site; it's hard to imagine a similar campaign coming from, say, YouTube or Amazon.
But ultimately, Nishimura's biggest problem might be his users themselves: the 27 million toyear-old men who have made 4chan both a force and a terror. There are fail-proof ways he could cut down on bandwidth costs - closing some of the boards, for instance, or switching to slower, cheaper servers - but he fears they'd be rejected by the site's characteristically distrustful, disagreeable users. If they don't like his changes, after all, they have other options: 8chan, essentially a worse version of 4chan yes, that's possible , was basically created as a haven for disgruntled 4chan users.
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