4Chan Is Going Broke Because of Ad Blockers
4Chan, the imageboard whose name has since become synonymous with internet villainy, celebrated its 13th year online this past Saturday. A day later, the sites owner, Hiroyuki Nishimura, posted a thread titled, Winter is coming. The message was simple: were broke.The options as he sees them are to inundate users with aggressive ads, sell more 4Chan Passes (a premium feature similar to Reddit Gold), or to cut down on file size limits and begin shutting down whole sections of the site.4Chan could keep running because of many courtesies, users, volunteers, service providers giving us low rate, and advertisers. These are a kind of wheel. 4Chan stops without one of them, Nishimura told Gizmodo over email. Banner ads, it seems, were the spoke that has apparently broken.Ads dont work well on [the] internet in [the] US. Actually, in Japan it still does. [The] Japanese dont use ad block [as] much as here, he wrote. Backtracking on part of his proposed plan he added, I dont think pop up and/or malicious ads work.