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Ask HN: How would you monetize a dubious website (e.g. 4chan)?

17 points by anemecek ↗ HN
Greetings to everyone. It is a fact that for infamous websites, such as 4chan or encyclopediadramatica, it is pretty hard to turn page views into money. So the question is, how would YOU personally go about doing that?

15 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 49.5 ms ] thread
mishmash
4chan likely makes much more money than is reported.. with moot putting forward this broke-kid image, I would think he becomes a much smaller target for the various entities, laws, and copyrights they trample on.

It's sort of like how the IFPI used the "profitable" motive in it's arguments against the Pirate Bay.

Poor people make poor lawsuit targets.

fragmede
Arguable, poor people make great targets because they're less likely to be able to defend themselves.
pinksoda
Those people are "judgment proof" because even if you get a judgment that says they owe you a billion dollars, you'll never collect a dime.
fragmede
That's step 1.

Step 2 is using the billion dollar judgement as a precedent when suing people with a little bit of money.

mishmash
Ah an RIAA rep, welcome to Hacker News. :)
joshu
This is not correct. It is very expensive to host, which chews up the profits.
matthewphiong
Ads. But sites like 4chan is more of a community-focus site and they don't really focus on making money. Here is a post about 4chan's revenue:

http://www.homethinking.com/brontemedia/2009/02/22/4chanorg-...

The revenue is enough to cover the hosting plus maybe a few hundreds extra. That's all.

anemecek
What I actually meant to ask is not how do they make money, if they make money, or even if it is their goal to make money but if you were in moot's shoes and you wanted to turn page views into money, what would you do?
mishmash
Invent http://icanhascheezburger.com/? ;)

But seriously, not being commercially driven is what gives the chans their credibility. Commercializing that crowd is a million dollar question. Now that moot has taken VC, it will be interesting to see how his new project will monetize.

tlholaday
SomethingAwful's solution: membership & service fees. Sell badges. Sell archive-power, e.g. for US$0.10, you can prevent this thread from being pruned for ten minutes.
_delirium
That was partly in response to their inability in the late 1990s / early 2000s to monetize their main (at the time) content, which was staff-written longish-form comedy, so they ended up turning to their forum users (initially a small side thing) to provide an income stream. Admittedly, the banner-ad market of the time was also a quite different place, so it's possible that if AdSense had existed, they would've done fine. For example, Google wouldn't stiff you on payments they promised, or go bankrupt owing you tens of thousands.

Via Wikipedia, two articles from the time on SA's monetization woes pre-forum-fees:

http://lowendmac.com/musings/express.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20020202083639/http://www.theduke...

ben1040
SA is pretty brilliant in how they charge $5 for changing your avatar image, something which 99% of other popular forums let you do for free. For $10, you can change another user's title. If you get in a flame war with a guy with ten bucks to spare, he can buy you an embarrassing title/image. You have to either live with that or cough up the $5 to change it back.
HNer
This idea is actually very clever. This is the basic concept to make money from free, 1st you solve a problem and generate plenty of traffic, 2nd you indirectly or directly create a secondary problem for your users. This is the part you monitise. According to the variables and the ticks you use to create the secondary pain, will adjust the revenues you make.