[clockstrikesten]

The site owner recently revealed he pushes 3500000 GB per month. My lowball estimate puts that at roughly $77,000 per month, just under a million dollars per year to keep the site running. There are no ads on /b/, which is the main board, representing I'd guess 95% of the entire site's traffic.

That, combined with the plausibility of the following, leads me to believe he receives massive government subsidies:

http://i.imgur.com/Dyo66.jpg

[fragmede]

According to http://content.4chan.org/tmp/extensions.html they did 1.65 only petabytes for the month of June 2012, so where are you getting your 3.5 PB number from?

Additionally, https://www.cloudflare.com/plans seem to suggest the bulk of that costs an unbelievably low $3k/month.

[charliesome]

I think $77k might be overshooting the mark a bit.

I once ran a site that pushed about 40TB a month (about 1% of 4chan) and it cost me $100/month to run. If you extrapolate that figure out (ignoring the fact that bandwidth gets cheaper the more you use), 4chan could cost as little as $10k a month to run.

[ovi256]

If the allegations in the screenshot you posted are true (tl;dr: since 2008, the /b/ board is run by law enforcement as a sting operation), several prosecutions would have already run their course in the four years since the alleged start of the sting operation. Court decisions being open and including the details of the sting, we would have heard about it, wouldn't we? I think the press would have had a field day with that.