By 2016, Nishimura announced that the costs of running 4chan were simply too high and suggested the site’s closure was imminent. In 2018, Nishimura attempted to cleave the site in two—leaving 4chan intact, with its obscene and pornographic boards, but creating a safe-for-work alternative, attractive to advertisers, on 4channel. The separate domains continue to this day, but both sites rely on the same self-serve advertising platform. The not-safe-for-work 4chan domain seems mostly to show ads for porn, while 4channel features ads for Steam games, cryptocoins, and NFTs.
Website analytics firm Similarweb estimates that both 4chan and 4channel are still within the 1,000 most popular websites in the world.
When the Select
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