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The Japanese Internet Mogul Who Just Bought 4chan

Hiroyuki Nishimura might be the perfect person to run a wildly offensive anonymous message board, because he's done it before.
Image: Flickr/Danny Choo

In the decade that 4Chan, the internet's most offensive message board, has been online, it's given us memes of the rarest variety and trolls of the absolutely worst kind. But what it hasn't done yet is make serious money for its 26-year-old founder, Chris Poole.

Things could change, however, now that Poole has sold 4Chan for an undisclosed amount to Hiroyuki Nishimura, the founder of 2channel, the Japanese message board that inspired 4Chan in the first place.

Nishimura founded 2channel in 1999, and made his bones with a brash disregard for anybody's feelings or expensive lawsuits before selling the site in 2009. Since then, Nishimura has been at the centre of several controversies, including being hit with penalties for tax evasion in 2013 and having an American apparently take control of his site's US servers last year.

Even so, NIshimura might indeed be the person for the job of successfully running an anonymous message board. While 4Chan has struggled financially for years, even shutting down at times as Poole couldn't pay to keep the servers running, 2channel was raking in a modest $1 million USD a year under Nishimura's leadership.

Nishimura's revenue came from attracting advertisers, something that 4Chan has always struggled with, likely due to the wildly offensive nature of many of the discussions that take place on the site. 4Chan has so far survived on donations, selling user perks, and some advertising.

Nishimura's plans for 4Chan are unclear, although in a New York Times report on the sale, Poole waxes philosophic about whether display ads are the way forward for monetizing the web.