The embattled image board 4chan may have found an unlikely savior from its financial woes in Martin Shkreli. Like the notorious Big Pharma bigwig, 4chan also has a less-than-stellar reputation; it’s widely regarded as the “cesspool of the internet.”
4chan has suffered from money troubles for a number of years now, with its original founder Christopher Poole selling the site in January 2015.
“We had tried to keep 4chan as is. But I failed. I am sincerely sorry,” Nishimura, who purchased the site from Poole, wrote. “Some notice there are no more middle ads and bottom ads on 4chan. Ads don’t work well. So we reduced advertisement servers cost. 4chan can’t afford infrastructure costs, network fee, servers cost, CDN and etc.”
He noted options to save the unmoderated site including trying to introduce pop-up, pop-under and “malicious” ads; closing boards; limiting upload sizes; using slower servers; selling subscriptions and introducing new features. None of the options seemed particularly popular with the site’s users.
Some suggested selling 4chan on and letting someone else deal with its financial troubles. That someone could be former pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli, who last year was widely criticised for raising the consumer price of antiparisitic drug Daraprim from US$13.50 to US$750 per tablet.
Markus “Notch” Persson, the billionaire creator of Minecraft, also expressed an interest in buying 4chan, but the Tweet, still viewable as a cache, has since been deleted.