4chan now serves 575 million pageviews a month. 25 million monthly uniques. Wow.

To pay their bills, they just launched self-serve ads to stay lean and let users pay to troll each other:

4chan, one of the wildest corners of the web, is growing up without losing its edge. The image board just opened a self-serve ads tool for scrappy businesses and trolls willing to pay for lulz. Founder Moot tells me “We’re already seeing users using it to troll one another, advertise specific threads or their favorite boards, etc. I think there’s a lot of potential for people to use the self-serve ads in a creative manner.”

4chan users paying to troll each other?! Brilliant!!

To give people a taste of what they can buy with 4chan ads, here are some of the ridiculous ones the site is running itself:

Read more at http://4chan.org/advertise

About 4chan:

Known IRL as Christopher Poole, Moot tells me “I’ve always operated 4chan more as a hobby than a business.” The site lets anyone post pictures and comments to any of its 60+ themed image boards. They range from Safe-For-Work topics like Pokémon and Paranormal to decidedly adult stuff like “Sexy Beautiful Women” and “Hentai/Alternative” (I’m not linking to it, and you’ve been warned). 4chan is most famous for /b/, its totally anonymous board where freedom of expression spawns both offensive filth and brilliant memes.

That makes sense.. no one who cares about money would ever operate 4chan... lol

Harvard Business School case study in the making....

Heh. I think Moot just wants to stop paying 4chan's server bills himself.

It's not free to serve half a billion pageviews a month.

I bet the ads for /b/ are filthy and brilliant.

"If you porn it they will come"  

4chan users do love trolling each other.