Ask HN: How would you monetize a dubious website (e.g. 4chan)?

This is not correct. It is very expensive to host, which chews up the profits.

Arguable, poor people make great targets because they're less likely to be able to defend themselves.

What I actually meant to ask is not how do they make money, if they make money, or even if it is their goal to make money but if you were in moot's shoes and you wanted to turn page views into money, what would you do?

SA is pretty brilliant in how they charge $5 for changing your avatar image, something which 99% of other popular forums let you do for free. For $10, you can change another user's title. If you get in a flame war with a guy with ten bucks to spare, he can buy you an embarrassing title/image. You have to either live with that or cough up the $5 to change it back.

That was partly in response to their inability in the late 1990s / early 2000s to monetize their main (at the time) content, which was staff-written longish-form comedy, so they ended up turning to their forum users (initially a small side thing) to provide an income stream. Admittedly, the banner-ad market of the time was also a quite different place, so it's possible that if AdSense had existed, they would've done fine. For example, Google wouldn't stiff you on payments they promised, or go bankrupt owing you tens of thousands.

Via Wikipedia, two articles from the time on SA's monetization woes pre-forum-fees:

http://lowendmac.com/musings/express.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20020202083639/http://www.theduke...