By 2016, Nishimura announced that the cost of running 4chan was simply too high and that the site was about to close. In 2018, Nishimura tried to split the site in two — keeping 4chan, with its porn and obscene panels, but creating a work-safe alternative, appealing to advertisers, on 4channel . The separate domains continue to this day, but both sites are based on the same self-service advertising platform. The unsafe 4chan domain for work appears to mainly show ads for pornography, while 4channel has ads for Steam, crypto and NFT games.
Web analytics company Similarweb estimates that both 4chan and 4channel are still among the 1,000 most popular websites in the world.
When choosing Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol sent a letter to 4chan last August, asking it to preserve documents that might shed light on the uprising, the committee sent it to 4chan LLC and sent it to Nishimura. Congressional investigators want to know what role 4chan played in the Capitol attack.
When asked if 4chan had even responded to the request, or if Nishimura might be called to testify, the committee declined to comment.
4chan LLC was incorporated in Delaware but registered in New York, Virginia, and Ohio. 4chan Community Support LLC, which is listed as an owner on the 4chan website, is similarly incorporated in Delaware. According to documents filed with the state of New York and the US Patent and Trademark Office, 4chan’s US headquarters is listed as Los Angeles. Both limited liability companies reported their address as a post office box in downtown Los Angeles.
Nishimura said that he lives in Paris, although in 2019 he was thinking about News about BuzzFeed about applying for a Latvian visa.
4chan does not appear to have an independent physical office in the United States, nor does it have any employees. But there is another Japanese company, with an office in Los Angeles, that can explain a lot about the ownership and clandestine operation of the image board.
Good Smile Company is a hugely popular hobby and toy company — their brand of plastic toys, called Nendoroids, has garnered licensing deals from Disney, Marvel, Warner Bros. and a host of other American and Japanese companies. (Neither Disney, Marvel, nor Warner Bros. responded to WIRED’s request for comment.)
In 2018, Good Smile released a Nendoroid of Yotsuba Koiwai, a popular anime character who is also 4chan’s unofficial mascot. On Instagram, fans recognize the “representative 4chan!” connection! one person wrote. “Congratulations 4chan!” wrote otherwise.
Many of Good Smile’s toys, some of which are marketed with sexually suggestive language despite depicting underage girls, are popular on 4chan, where erotic anime series are extremely popular.
Sources with knowledge of Good Smile say the company owns at least a portion of 4chan, and Good Smile is more involved than it allows publicly. WIRED did not name those sources, who feared reprisal for speaking publicly about Good Smile.
Internal Good Smile documents obtained by WIRED refer to a “confidentiality agreement” in April 2015 — just months after Poole announced he was leaving 4chan, but about five months before Nishimura was announced as a person. buying. A document named Dwango, Future Search Brazil and Hiroyuki Nishimura as parties to “considering M&A [mergers and acquisitions] regarding 4CHAN, LLC. The moderator responsible for the 5-year agreement is listed as “安 藝” —Good Smile CEO Takanori Aki.
