Advertising Irony and Internet Radio

2025-10-06

A few things that have happened: first, I decided to buy some ad space on 4chan's /lit/, /mu/, and /g/ boards so if you're coming from there, then hello. I've seen a few other people market their work through 4chan advertisements. I don't think it's an extremely good place to advertise considering that most people on 4chan are most likely privy to ad blockers, but according to Danbo (the advertising platform) I'm getting thousands of impressions. Despite the absolutely abysmal click-through-rate (0.01%), it still feels nice to put your name out there and feel recognized. Advertisements are something that necessitate an unfortunate reality—without marketing there would be no economy; and with no economy, there would be no world. Sad, truly.

I feel an immense irony with buying an ad because I use ad blockers myself, yet am promulgating the same system that makes me want to use ad blockers. I will say this though: 4chan's ad placements are very unobtrusive and don't put a ton of bloat on the site. They use a CDN for their ads, unfortunately, but other than that the ads are alright. I also actually enjoy a lot of the content people promote with the ads. The guy who wrote Mixtape Hyperborea is really cool. I bought his book and truly enjoyed reading it very much. Also Asher Dakota is great—I used to watch his Cumtown Animated clips back in the day and am glad to see him getting in his bag with video production and book-writing.

But yeah, 4chan ads are an interesting space. Since I bought ad space for the less popular boards (God forbid I advertise on /b/, /pol/, or /r9k/), my cash should stretch out pretty well. We'll see how it goes, anyway.

Another thing that's been in my head lately is the desire to start an internet radio station. I started one last year with some Discord friends and it was actually a really cool project, but it petered out in a very unsatisfactory way. I want to revive it because I am a huge fan of internet radio. I endlessly listen to Soma FM and Bad Radio and am a huge fan of internet radio myself. It feels so much better than listening to Spotify or YouTube Music playlists. I used to be super into YouTube streams like Lofi Girl and stuff, but YouTube sucks so bad now that I essentially refuse to use the platform. I used to watch hours of videos a day from YouTube, but now I watch barely anything at all. I need to get more into PeerTube because that's way better, but unfortunately good content is sparse because of YouTube's monopolistic reach. We'll see, maybe one day video sharing will become truly federated. Until then, I'll just have to contend with pirating books and listening to internet radio.

One day, friends, we will have true federation and freedom with our digital socialization. I mean, those underwater sea cables have to serve some kind of purpose, right?