Some days ago I saw an ad for DuckDuckGo on 4chan and found it pretty funny. A squirrel was searching for "traps", "clop clop", etc. and the duck anonymized the search.<p>If the add was really made by the DDG guys they earned some respect from me for having a sense of humor.
4chan has been struggling to break even for years, mostly because no one wants to advertise there. So I think these "self-serve" ads are a great idea because they engage the community. After all, 4chan's biggest strength has always been its users.<p>Now that I think of it, this play was probably inspired by the recent 4chan banner/ad contests that drew thousands of submissions, many of them quite high quality.<p>I'm excited to see what people do with this. Good work moot.
I like how we Hacker News users are brave enough to admit under very public profiles that we have, in fact, been to 4chan.<p>EDIT: This post was not sarcastic or ironic. Though I do think /pol/ is a hive of neo-Nazi scum /flameproof-suit.
>or just for fun/to get a message in front of the 4chan community ("MODS=FAGS", promoting a board or thread/contest, etc)<p>I'll buy one for sure
The obvious solution for 4chan would seem to be retargeting because no-one wants to expose themselves to the 4chan audience, but retargeting would mean only targeting those members of 4chan who would be seeing their adverts elsewhere anyway.<p>It'd also mean that all 4chan users would get different adverts so there would be no momentum around a particular advert in the community.
The biggest problem with buying 4chan traffic is that it's not easily targeted towards any specific type of person. The anonymous nature of the site will forever hold its ad revenues back in the past as other social sites (Facebook, Twitter, PoF.com, reddit, etc) further advance their targeting abilities.