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Comment on A Virtual Unknown (moot of 4chan)

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> 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.

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