Creating viral videos and concepts has become a keystone for many businesses marketing online.
Such Web phenomena are known by technophiles as "memes." Coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene," a meme is a unit of cultural information -- an idea, a practice, a phrase, or an online video --that's passed on virally. Although sometimes frivolous, every word-of-mouth marketer dreams of creating memorable memes that will catapult their product or client to fame.
Over the last few years, 4chan.org has become one of the most talked-about sites when it comes to launching new memes. After appearing on the site, "LOLcats," humorous images of cats with loud text beneath them in a fake language called "LOLspeak", stormed the Web last year. (For example, instead of saying "hello," the cats would say "oh hai.") Another phrase "So I herd u like mudkips," a reference to a sea creature from the popular animated show "Pokémon," spawned thousands of tribute videos on YouTube. 4chan.org began as a simple message board with pictures and text. It was started by Christopher Poole in his Long Island bedroom in 2003 when he was 15 years old. Since then it has grown to more than 3 million monthly users, according to Mr. Poole.
One of the site's most popular memes is an online bait-and-switch known as the "Rick Roll." Here's how it works: A friend sends an email suggesting you take a peek at an "amazing" online video and passes along the link. You follow the link, but instead of the video you expect, you've been sent to the music video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," a hit song from 1988. Over the past year, Rick Rolling has become an online sensation, pushing Mr. Astley's video past 16 million views on YouTube.
4chan is a quaint throwback to the earliest Web pages that have since been eclipsed in the newest iterations of the Web. While other Web sites focus on flashy-social networking features and eye-catching advertisements, 4chan's design is archaic and the color scheme is two-tone. Each page on 4chan features photos and text. One user will post an image of something to start a discussion on one of the more than 40 different subject areas spanning origami and automobiles. Other users follow up with responses or requests for more images.
"It's like Craigslist -- hugely simple and highly useful," says David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. 4chan's utility is its ability to gather millions of people in conversation in a single place and create a "meme-rich" environment, says Mr. Weinberger.
Last September, Ben Huh and a team of investors purchased "I Can Has Cheezburger," a site that aggregated the "LOLcats." Mr. Huh hopes to turn the 4chan-generated tradition into a meme empire with several other related sites in the works. The site now has more than 2.5 million unique visitors a month, according to Mr. Huh, and a book based on the site is coming this fall for Gotham Books.
Mr. Poole originally just wanted a place to share his fascination with Japanese comics and television shows. He was a fan of the popular Japanese image Web site 2chan and wanted to create a version for American audiences. With his mother's approval, he used her credit card to purchase server space and started 4chan.org.
oon, running 4chan became a full-time job. He hired a programmer (based on his skill playing online Tetris) and recruited a team of active community members to serve as moderators. "It was a struggle to get him to turn off his computer," says Tom Poole, Mr. Poole's father, who says his son built a computer with a water-cooling system as a teen. "He's a bit obsessive."
A large part of the site's success is its emphasis on anonymity. Users are not required to provide a working email address or any other personal information, a standard practice for other online communities like Facebook or MySpace. Mr. Poole uses the codename "moot" and says that he's never revealed his connection to the site until The Wall Street Journal inquired. "I have a firewall between my two lives," he says.
Mr. Poole says that anonymity encourages unfettered creativity. But it also removes individual accountability as some posts can veer into hurtful or profane territories. "Shock posts," or graphic images of violence or sex, occasionally mar the largest general interest board known as " /b/ ." Mr. Poole has a disclaimer that he wrote so that users "don't post anything that violates U.S. or international law." He says a lawyer reviewed the notice, but concedes, "I'm sure they don't have much legal clout behind them."
"They get rowdy -- it's like a bar without alcohol," says Willard Ling, a moderator and long-time user of the site. "It's like that psychological concept of deinvidualization -- when groups of people become less aware of their own responsibility." Mr. Poole and his team of moderators have handed out 70,000 bans over the last three years, but preventing long-term abuse can be difficult.
4chan's "Wild West" reputation has created a dilemma for Mr. Poole. While it's brought him Internet fame, albeit through his alter ego, and created enviable traffic, he has trouble selling ads to more cautious companies who don't want their ads appearing next to potentially graphic content. He's attempted to quarantine sexual material on a set of adult boards, but that doesn't stop pornography or other adult content from appearing elsewhere.
Max Goldberg, owner of You're The Man Now Dog, a similar community with about 230,000 registered users and a focus on animated videos, says dealing with mature content is a problem for any site that allows its users creative license. "On the Web, you either have clean content or you have pornography. People upload both, but they don't want to buy pornography, because they can get it for free," says Mr. Goldberg. Even a small percentage of racy or blue content can ruin a site's image with advertisers, he says.
4chan's growing pains are part of a larger issue: how to turn a wave of online traffic into a viable business. "That's been an uphill battle for me personally. My biggest time spent has been convincing companies in marketing potential in 4chan but no one sees eye to eye," says Mr. Poole.
Part of 4chan's problem is counting how many users are on the site. Many advertisers look at third-party Web-measurement companies like comScore to determine a site's overall traffic and demographic information. Currently, comScore says 4chan only has around about 796,000 unique visitors a month globally, a more than threefold difference from 4chan's claims. ComScore says that it uses a Nielsen-like system to track Web traffic.
Mr. Poole says that comScore's demographic data is correct, but disagrees with their traffic data, arguing that panel-based data is flawed. "It's a generalization," he says of comScore's figures, "Our users are hard to pinpoint."
In contrast to other startups that have amassed millions of dollars in seed money from investors, 4chan is a modest operation. Mr. Poole makes money from advertising and the occasional donation drive. He says the site breaks even, but won't release the site's revenue figures. His only paid staff member is his programmer. "He makes more money than I do," says Mr. Poole.
It's like Craigslist -- hugely simple and highly useful
4chan is representative of the internet guys. When people think of what we do, they assume it's all lolcats and 9000.When really it's spam threads and quote chains.
When really it's spam threads and quote chains.dude, fucking stop it and grow up.
They're giving usp a bad name long live CS long live cheese!!!!!
I cant imagine myself being like 10 or 13 years old and visiting sites like that. I have such a hard time grasping the fact that some kids who are less than 12 years old might have heard of TWO GIRLS ONE CUP and GOATSE and FURRIES and other weird internet shit. I don't even think I knew how SEX BASICALLY WORKED when I was at that age.
dude, fucking stop it and grow up.It's not my fault you can't take jokey half fun-making of the crapshack dudette
It's not my fault you can't take jokey half fun-making of the crapshack dudetteyou've worn it out long ago.
tweakin the crap shack's nose.. GROW UP AND EAT SOME CHEEEEEEEEESE :fogetpout:
you've worn it out long ago.Not rly dude cause I still get a kick out of it~ :fogetshh:
it's all pretty tempting i guess but i feel like if you're really that tempted by THE INTERNET as a kid and wouldn't rather be outside than playing a fucking chrono trigger rom and posting on 4chan, you'd probably just be playing playstation or something if that wasn't there, not going out and riding bikes or something. i don't think all this shit really has a particularly big impact on what kids spend their time doing.
you're the only one. But fair enough.no i do too sorry
I hate that this shit is considered by some people to be an important part of internet culture.
I have never been to 4chan.
but it IS an important part of internet culture. as much as we all hate it and find it annoying and stuff, it's impossibly to deny how much of an impact it has had.
Just like 9/11 is an important part of our history.
...are you trying to deny that 9/11 isn't??
I hate that this shit is considered by some people to be an important part of internet culture. If GW were a group of reasonable, intelligent people politely conversing at a dinner party, 4chan would be the blind paraplegic retard kid choking on his own tongue in the corner.Actually, it would be a group of retarded kids roughly 2000 times as large in between everybody trying to talk. You really can't take a small portion of the internet like GW, where rules are enforced and civility encouraged, and act like it is representative of any decent portion of internet users.
I hate that this shit is considered by some people to be an important part of internet culture. If GW were a group of reasonable, intelligent people politely conversing at a dinner party, 4chan would be the blind paraplegic retard kid choking on his own tongue in the corner.
You only say that because you've been going to 4chan for years!
[and because this and the faggy bandwagoning thing GW seems to have going is actually pretty disgusting]
Seriously though... do they not have anything better to report on? Or was this written from some jit college grad that was just hired and somehow convinced his editor this was a good idea.
Actually, it would be a group of retarded kids roughly 2000 times as large in between everybody trying to talk. You really can't take a small portion of the internet like GW, where rules are enforced and civility encouraged, and act like it is representative of any decent portion of internet users.
Sometimes, the high-regard in which some of the members hold this community sickens me.
I've always felt that we're more of a SA community than a 4Chan one, but the line is blurred beyond distinction.
4chan is horrible and they should be ashamed for even acknowledging it's existance. I couldn't imagine anything less relevant than some shitty internet subculture that exists only in image macros and rick rolls.hmm yes a forum out of which almost all internet memes spring from and which has caused a huge amount of drama both on the internet and in real life is irrelevant good call
a lot of the shit that came from 4chan is still better than the kind of tired "oh so witty" puns and jokes that were funny when i was 13 that come from most of gwnah youre just dumb
You'd probably like it quite a lot aten.
TIME Magazine has an article in this week's issue about moot, the founder of 4chan. If you ask me, it's a lot more realistic in terms of WHAT IS 4CHAN than this WSJ one.yeah that is much better. you can't really summarize 4chan as a POPULAR MESSAGE BOARD without emphasizing how disgusting a lot of it is.The Master of Memes (Click to reveal)
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1821435,00.html
Wednesday, Jul. 09, 2008
The Master Of Memes
By Lev Grossman
moot doesn't give out much in the way of personal info. I don't even know his real name. He's 20 years old and skinny; he could pass for 16. He grew up in New York City and is currently in college somewhere. He is pleasant and very serious. "When people meet me and I'm generally pretty sociable and I meet some definition of normal, they're almost surprised," he says. "And simultaneously disappointed." We talk in a coffee shop in downtown Manhattan. He orders a lemonade.
moot is the founder of an online community called 4chan, located at 4chan.org. You may not realize it, but 4chan has probably touched your life. Possibly inappropriately. 4chan is unusual in several ways. It's extremely large and active; it gets 8.5 million page views a day and 3.3 million visitors a month. Since moot started it in 2003, those visitors have put up 145 million posts. By some metrics, 4chan is the fourth largest bulletin board on the Net.
4chan is also very profane. A phrase from Star Wars comes to mind: It's a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Spammers don't even bother to spam 4chan; Google started searching it only six months ago. But it is the wellspring from which a lot of Internet culture, and hence popular culture, bubbles. In his way, moot is one of the most powerful people on the Web.
moot founded 4chan when he was 15 as a space where he and his friends could talk about manga and anime; it's based on a popular Japanese site called 2channel. Like 2channel, 4chan is an imageboard: you're supposed to post pictures—snapshots, found images, original artwork, altered or defaced photos—rather than words. 4chan is divided into 43 different boards, ranging from video games to origami to food to "random." The most popular board on 4chan, by far, is random.
There are few rules on 4chan. Child pornography is off limits, but not much else is. Unlike most boards, 4chan doesn't require posters to register, which means they can post anonymously, which leads to a lot of uninhibited behavior. If you're looking for obscenity, blasphemy, homophobia, misogyny and racial insults, you don't have to dig too deep. Shortly after midnight on Sept. 11, 2007, a teenager in Pflugerville, Texas, posted a photo of some pipe bombs and announced that he was going to shoot up his school in the morning. A reader in Arizona called the Pflugerville police, who arrested the teenager. (So that's another thing that's against the rules.)
You can see why moot keeps his real name to himself. "My personal private life is very separate from my Internet life," he says. "There's a firewall in between."
Like a lot of unsanitary places, 4chan is gloriously fertile. What grows there is memes—ideas and jokes and fads that spread across the Net. Here's an example: there used to be a tradition on 4chan that every Saturday people would post pictures of cats. It was called Caturday. People added captions representing what the cat would say if cats could talk. One day somebody posted a shot of a fat gray cat looking at the camera and saying, "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?"
Somehow that picture escaped 4chan onto the wider Web. Without knowing where it came from, somebody saw it and liked it enough to start a blog about it: icanhascheezburger.com. Soon other people were making their own Caturday-style pictures and calling them "lolcats." Now you can buy lolcat T shirts and lolcat buttons and lolcat fridge magnets. Last September investors bought icanhascheezburger.com for about $2 million.
Coarse as it is, 4chan has no rival as a hothouse for memes; they're bred and refined, and then they can escape and run amuck through the culture at large. For better or for worse, this is what the counterculture looks like today: raw, sarcastic, bare of any social or political agenda but frequently funny as hell.
moot doesn't see any of that sweet lolcat money, by the way. Not that he's bitter. He has met the owners of icanhascheezburger.com. "They seem like nice people," he says. "You can't blame them for taking something and capitalizing on it. I don't." But he's barely covering costs. moot runs ads on 4chan, but the site needs massive amounts of bandwidth, and corporations are leery of associating their products with 4chan's content. "It's been a pretty uphill battle getting advertisers to take us seriously and appreciate the community and the power it wields," he says.
But if 4chan's memes can cross into the mainstream, maybe moot can too. This year he spoke at conferences at Yale and MIT. He's even ready to reveal his real name: it's Christopher Poole, he tells me. He wouldn't be above cashing out for the right price, which is $580 million, which is what Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. paid for MySpace in 2005. "I try to work Murdoch into any interview I give," he says. "Rupert Murdoch? [email protected]."
There are few rules on 4chan. Child pornography is off limits, but not much else is.ahaha man this is so horrible, how bad can a place be. ok guys, were gonna have to put a limit somewhere...,,PLEASE no child pornography anymore, everythign else is cool tho please don't leave we need to collect as much scum as we can get
There are few rules on 4chan. Child pornography is off limits, but not much else is.
i'm...i'm gonna do it. i'm gonna visit www.4chan.org.
edit:
this is just a million otomons. they even say "mang".
I'm curious to know how almost everybody knows about 4chan. Months ago when I posted about project chanology I never even heard of 4chan and it sounded like a cool idea. Only after reading up on it and actually visiting the damn site, did I realise why people were hating on me. I guess I can kind of see how some people could be tricked into doing that stuff.Everyone knows about 4chan because it's like the worst place on the internet. Bad things travel faster than good things.
I don't think I have heard about SA though. What is it?
nah youre just dumbshopp da whoop xD
that is to say most of the shit on gw people think is funny isn't funny at all, but 4chan is way way worse unless you have an awful sense of humor and find shit like weeaboo and shoop da whoop funny. please say you do dom PLEASE SAY YOU DO.
Someone told me that /v/ wasn't as bad as /b/. Kind of like saying a shoplifter isn't as bad as a mass murderer
marcus if you love 4chan so much