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4chan now offers self-serve advertising starting at $20
- xkcdfanboy 13y agoI don't think any serious business would advertise on 4chan. The audience is too illicit and ill-mannered.
- vacipr 13y agoGreat.Another way to troll random 4chan users. Expecting "install gentoo","remove kebab" and worse.
- frozenport 13y agoSounds like a grass roots community!
- angersock 13y agoSomethingAwful has footer ads that are very community-flavored. It's actually kind of fun.
- induscreep 13y agokebab pls
- nemo1618 13y ago4chan has been struggling to break even for years, mostly because no one wants to advertise there. So I think these "self-serve" ads are a great idea because they engage the community. After all, 4chan's biggest strength has always been its users. Now that I think of it, this play was probably inspired by the recent 4chan banner/ad contests that drew thousands of submissions, many of them quite high quality. I'm excited to see what people do with this. Good work moot.
- zombio 13y agoIt will be interesting to see how many ads will be put up purely for the sake of trolling.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoI like how we Hacker News users are brave enough to admit under very public profiles that we have, in fact, been to 4chan. EDIT: This post was not sarcastic or ironic. Though I do think /pol/ is a hive of neo-Nazi scum /flameproof-suit.
- 1337biz 13y agoAlways been there, always will be. One of the last beacon of a censor-free internet.
- anonymous 13y agothat and the (sort of) anonymous account on hackernews.
- derleth 13y agoWell, that and Usenet. And TOR. And I2P. And Freenet. And GNUnet. And eDonkey. And so on...
- mehrzad 13y ago4chan is bigger than all or most of those, not that I don't like these protocols.
- krapp 13y ago4chan is by no means censorship free. Their bars for entry and conduct are just lower than, say, here.
- kybernetyk 13y agoI'm an /int/ regular. Nothing bad about that. You just have to have a well oiled BS filter :)
- kintamanimatt 13y agoI don't understand your comment. What would be the problem with someone admitting publicly that they've been to 4chan?
- jmarbach 13y agoThe biggest problem with buying 4chan traffic is that it's not easily targeted towards any specific type of person. The anonymous nature of the site will forever hold its ad revenues back in the past as other social sites (Facebook, Twitter, PoF.com, reddit, etc) further advance their targeting abilities.
- pyre 13y agoTotally. 4chan really needs to start collecting user data so that they an cozy up to the NSA. It's really hard to get on good terms with them without any data for offer. </sarcasm>
- Kuiper 13y agoThe biggest problem with buying 4chan traffic is that it's not easily targeted towards any specific type of person. I see plenty of opportunities for targeted advertising on 4chan. Obviously, it's hard to have targeted advertising on the larger boards for subjects like "random" and "video games," but you can make pretty safe assumptions about the demographics for other smaller hobby-centric boards; the cosplay & EGL board is mostly populated with young women who are into dressing up and going to conventions, the "traditional gaming" board is mostly (young) adult males who are into tabletop games like D&D and Warhammer 40k or trading card games like Magic: The Gathering. I mention these two boards specifically because I think that they represent valuable demographics. The cosplay & EGL board of 4chan is where people go to talk about the dress that they just spent $300 on (and that's on the low end--for some of those girls, $300 is what they'll spend on cosmetics seasonally). By the same token, tabletop games and trading card games can be big cash sinks, and there are plenty examples of people who spend hundreds of dollars per month on these hobbies.
- ig1 13y agoThe obvious solution for 4chan would seem to be retargeting because no-one wants to expose themselves to the 4chan audience, but retargeting would mean only targeting those members of 4chan who would be seeing their adverts elsewhere anyway. It'd also mean that all 4chan users would get different adverts so there would be no momentum around a particular advert in the community.
- aggronn 13y agothis remains problematic because the reason they have trouble attracting advertisers is that the brands don't want to be associated with 4chan. So retargeting would be okay, until some submits a screenshot to the Consumerist showing a BMW ad 40 px away from a picture of a decapitated cat. Doesn't matter that the person who submitted it had just googled 'San Francisco BMW dealership'
- ig1 13y agoIf consumerist would publish an article on such a thing because someone on 4chan sent them a screenshot then 4chan is going to take them for a ride in any case...
- kybernetyk 13y agoSome days ago I saw an ad for DuckDuckGo on 4chan and found it pretty funny. A squirrel was searching for "traps", "clop clop", etc. and the duck anonymized the search. If the add was really made by the DDG guys they earned some respect from me for having a sense of humor.
- moot 13y agoThey provided a boilerplate version of the ad and I gave them the 4chan-appropriate keywords to use with it. They've always been great to work with re: advertising.
- dreadheart 13y agoWow, Moot reads Hacker News. Not surprising, but pleases me greatly. Thank you for your contributions to the great shared halucination that is the internet.
- babuskov 13y agoOr maybe someone just tipped him off. Trivia: I just opened his HN profile to see when was his account created, and by some strange coincidence we have exactly the same karma (443). Either that or it's bug in HN :)
- georgemcbay 13y ago443 is the default port of https. This must all be some NSA conspiracy.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wheaties 13y ago+1 to you sir. You should have 1k's of karma for providing us 4chan wherein memes are made.
- logn 13y ago
- mtct 13y ago>or just for fun/to get a message in front of the 4chan community ("MODS=FAGS", promoting a board or thread/contest, etc) I'll buy one for sure
- beaumartinez 13y agoOr, absolute trolling. Especially since you can target specific boards. I remember when someone spammed the ending to LA Noire on /v/ for a whole day.
- mikeash 13y agoMonetized trolling sounds like a great way to become unbelievably rich.
- zalzane 13y agoWhat would really make me wet my pants would be full page takeover-ads. I'd pay serious money to do a full page targeted troll-ad on any number of boards. I can't even imagine the scale of the butthurt that would ensue if someone bought a full page ad for something like my little pony figures and targeted one of the more masochistic boards like /v/.
- jmduke 13y agoThis is a move the folks at Something Awful did a while back and it appears to be performing pretty well for them.
- timdorr 13y agoThe same with Reddit.
- moot 13y agoGood thing you're not on 4chan -- using the 'R' word there is a death wish.
- asperous 13y agoHmm... http://www.reddit.com/user/moot http://www.reddit.com/user/moot
- moot 13y agoCaught me!
- skeletonjelly 13y agoSo funny that this exists, they're almost self aware, but it's hard to tell http://reddit.com/r/4chan http://reddit.com/r/4chan
- cathustler 13y agoLeddit pls go
- lcasela 13y agoitaots
- asfasfafwF 13y ago/mu/ go home
- andyzweb 13y agostain my mountaintops
- lquist 13y agoCan someone explain what makes these different from "normal" ads?
- zalzane 13y agoBefore it was pretty difficult to get any kind of advertising on 4chan. I was looking to advertise a product there a few years or so ago, and you pretty much couldn't get ahold of the admin through the advertisement email address.
- lquist 13y agoAnd people wonder why it was hard for 4chan to break even? (I'm not being sarcastic)
- Zircom 13y agoThis should be fun. Might take one out asking Yellow if he wants to smash...