Chris Poole Is The Creator Of One Of The World's Biggest And Most Powerful Web Sites, And It Is Very Strange That He Is Not Insanely Rich

By Nicholas Carlson

2013-07-10T13:27:00.000Z

Chris Poole created a site called 4chan.org back when he was 15 years old.

4chan is now a huge website.

According to SimilarWeb, it is the 154th largest in the US and the 360th largest in the world. It's just a little smaller than NYT.com.

4chan is also incredibly influential.

"Memes" like Lolcats and Rick Rolling started there. The hacking group Anonymous, and the group behind protests like Occupy Wall Street, first organized themselves there.

You'd think, having created such a big and powerful Website in his teens, Poole would be very wealthy.

He's not.

It's weird.

Poole came by the office the other day, and we asked him about it.

Watch below.

Edited by Justin Gmoser

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Nicholas Carlson was Business Insider's global editor-in-chief from 2017 to 2024, overseeing its emergence as a National Magazine Award, Emmy, SABEW, and Pulitzer Prize-winning global news organization with more than 500 journalists reaching 200 million readers and viewers each month.Before that, he was Business Insider's chief correspondent.Carlson is also the author of "Marissa Mayer and the Fight To Save Yahoo!"He was an Executive Producer of "Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV," which, during its debut week, was the most-watched television show on any streamer and the most-watched show in Max history.His investigative reporting rewrote the histories of Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon. He also wrote the award-winning features "The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography" and "THE COST OF WINNING: Tim Armstrong, Patch, And The Struggle To Save AOL."Longform.org named "THE COST OF WINNING" the best long-form business story of 2013.Carlson's coverage of Yahoo won Digiday's award for Best Editorial Achievement of the year in 2014.In 2015 Carlson wrote a New York Times Magazine cover story, "What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs." It was a finalist for a Mirror Award for best in-depth/enterprise reporting.Carlson began his journalism career at InternetNews.com and then Gawker Media's Valleywag. He went to Davidson College. Disclosure: Nicholas is an investor in private and public companies and adheres to Insider Inc's Conflict of Interest policy, which you can read here.