This article was published on June 14, 2013

Nearly ten years old, notorious imageboard 4Chan now commands 25M monthly unique visitors


Nearly ten years old, notorious imageboard 4Chan now commands 25M monthly unique visitors

Today Chris Poole, also known as Moot, announced that 4Chan sees more than 25 million monthly unique visitors. The popular website has tripled in size over the past three years.

4Chan, as you likely know, is the image-based message board famous for birthing memes such as lolcats and Rickrolling. It has served as a breeding ground for everything from Anonymous activists to child pornography. The site will celebrate its first decade of life this October.

Poole announced the news at the Northside Festival in New York. Most recently, 4chan participated in the Mozilla-backed Stop Watching Us initiative to fight NSA surveillance.

4Chan’s controversial reputation comes from some of its anonymous forums that are often rather uncouth, and can contain what would be considered objectionable content either morally or legally. This certainly isn’t to say that all of 4Chan is as such, but the image sharing and commenting service is controversial for a reason.

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However, as its new traffic milestone indicates, that sheen of contention isn’t proving too hard an obstacle to growth, and in fact might be a sort of accelerant.

Top Image Credit: TechCrunch

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