Online image board and forum 4chan has announced that it’s in financial trouble. And out of everyone, who do you think offered to help? The guy who bumped up the price of life-saving AIDS pills by several thousand percent. Martin Shkreli.
In a 4chan post over the weekend, the site’s owner, Hiroyuki Nishimura, announced that he “failed” and that 4chan’s financials weren’t looking good. “Some notice there are no more middle ads and bottom ads on 4chan,” Nishimura wrote.
“Ads don’t work well. So we reduced advertisement servers cost. 4chan can’t afford infrastructure costs, network fee, servers cost, CDN and etc, now.”
It’s not hard to imagine why ads might not work out too well for 4chan. The site has given plenty to the internet over the years — lolcats, Cards Against Humanity, Rickrolling and Chocolate Rain — but it’s also regularly come afoul for frequent doxxings, questionable material, and other dodgy behaviour including gun threats.
Needless to say, it’s a real mixed bag. So it’s not really hugely surprising that Nonetheless, it was enough to catch supervillian Shrekli’s attention. So when Nishimura reached out, Shkreli responded.
I have replied your DM. Thank you for supporting 4chan @MartinShkreli https://t.co/keA7a632Dh
— Hiroyuki Nisimura (@hiroyuki_ni) October 2, 2016
Shrekli even conducted an impromptu Periscope outlining some of his plans, saying that “there’s free speech and there’s hate speech” but it “wasn’t [his] job to regulate speech on the internet”.
“It’s very edgy, very deviant, it’s what people enjoy about the website. Why would you eliminate it’s biggest strength,” Shrekli responded to viewers, adding that he would “post dick pics on 4chan” if he was able to buy the website.
LIVE on #Periscope: 4chan https://t.co/ORbcZSyxk7
— Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) October 3, 2016
Comments
14 responses to “4chan Is Almost Broke And Supervillain Shkreli Wants To Help”
You seem to have left out the time 4chan was the marshalling area and rally point for the worst elements of Gamergate.
Shkreli isn’t someone who I’ve got any real opinion of, one way or another, but this just goes to show exactly what being ‘on the internet’ entails these days.
Yeah but you also neglect to mention it was the birthing pool for Anonymous, who came together (at least originally) to fight against tyrants of all stripes. So swings n roundabouts, really. I do have an opinion on that Shkreli weasle tho- a burning car tyre around his head would be a too humane way for him to go.
I thought Anonymous was the Internet Hate Machine? Then again, I also thought a meme was something that spread organically on the Internet, and not just a crappy picture with “when you’re something is something” text on it.
except it was 8chan that was the congregation of gamergate (and i believe still is one of the biggest ones). most of 4chan stayed well out of gamergate, as they didn’t want to get dragged into shit. especially in /v/.
even now 4chan still talks major shit about gamergate and how stupid people were.
a lot of the internet treats all of 4chan like it’s only /b/ or /pol/
Congregation moved to 8chan from 4chan. You’re both correct.
Every pic of shkreli is a dick pic.
*snaps fingers* My man!
how come this guy is back in the news? i thought his 15 mins of fame was up
Hence, this move. He’s clearly someone who enjoys the spotlight and doesn’t give a damn whether the light is positive or negative. This is a massive grab for public attention.
This is just phase one of his plan, soon all the boards on 4Chan will be merged into one and ads placed in between every post. That, would be the greatest cesspool ever made.
I wonder how many of 4chan’s users ran an ad blocker? This should be proof that:
1. ad-blocking DOES hurt website owners
2. people DO expect to be served content and contribute nothing in return, and
3. people DON’T take the paid ad-free option where it’s available (And 4chan did have a paid-for ad-free + captcha-free option)
Granted, ad space on 4chan would have been a tough sell anyway. But when your target audience is the biggest user of ad blockers (probably, I have no numbers for this), ad revenue was probably a bad business plan to begin with.
It’s more likely that the average 4chan user (guilty) isn’t there for the ads and has been desensitized to them to the point where they don’t even notice them anymore. Personally, I didn’t even know that any were missing till this article. Hence, the paid-for-ad-free option offers very little when the other advantage is lowering the wait time between posts from 15 seconds to 0, which isn’t much when you consider that, say on a mobile device, 15 seconds is about how long it takes to post only an image-only reply with a captcha. Yes, the paid option removes the captcha, but it’s a small price to pay to post content and is generally just accepted.
But browsers don’t zoom in that far?
Huh, and here I thought helping a failing site would be against that psychotic “win or die” free-market garbage he spouted to try justifying medicinal price hikes.