How 4chan started?

Christopher Poole , the founder of 4chan, was passionate about Anime and he used to spend his time browsing forums and connecting with anime fans.

Christopher was fond of a site called 2chan which was basically a site for sharing images related to anime. The site's code was written in Japanese.

Christopher decided to translate the site to English using Babelfish translator.

Because 3chan was already taken Christopher chose the name 4chan for his new anime based message bored. (See How to choose a domain name for your website?)

4chan was launched with one forum about Anime and random topics in October 2003.

only 6 days after the launch 4chan managed to get 1 million hits.

Christopher tried to raise money in various ways as he was having trouble paying for the hosting.

Christopher got an offer to sell 4chan for $15,000 dollars from a Japanese toys shop. When he refused the offer was increased to $50,000 dollars but he refused it as well.

It's believed that 4chan was one of the forces that made Memes popular as the site slowly turned into a ground for meme creation and discovery. (See Why are internet memes so popular?)

In 2009 Christopher had a dept of $20,000 dollars as 4chan was losing money because of its high hosting costs.

4chan became very popular and its Alexa rank hovered around 700.

According to Wikipedia on September 21 2015 Christopher announced that Hiroyuki Nishimura, the former administrator of 2channel, bought the site from him. The amount was undisclosed.