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If the Internet is the Wild West, you could call 4chan “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

4chan, an anonymous message board founded by Christopher Poole in 2003, has been home to a veritable smorgasbord of everything the web has to offer. With posts on the site lasting only a matter of days or even hours before they are deleted, the message board has been described as the collective id of the Internet, home to hardcore pornography, hardcore cooking tips and everything in between.

Now Mr. Poole is letting go of 4chan after more than a decade at its helm. Mr. Poole announced on Monday that he has sold 4chan to Hiroyuki Nishimura, a pioneer of Japanese web culture and founder of 2Channel, an early anonymous online message board.

It was a move that Mr. Poole, who expanded 4chan to more than 20 million monthly visitors with no assistance from venture capital or full-time employees, described as coming full circle. Mr. Poole said that 2channel, with a strong focus on anime and Japanese culture, was the website that inspired him to create 4chan.

“Hiroyuki is literally the only person in the world with as much if not more experience than myself in running an anonymous, large destination community that serves tens of millions of people,” Mr. Poole said in an interview. “He’s the great-grandfather of all of this.”

Mr. Poole declined to disclose the terms of the acquisition, and said he did not expect to serve an active role in 4chan’s future development. He stepped down from daily maintenance of the site in January, handing over the reins to a handful of part-time deputies who moderate and manage it.

The sale of 4chan comes as tens of millions of dollars in venture capital are pouring into sites like Reddit and Imgur, two independent web forums that regularly have hundreds of millions of monthly anonymous visitors. Along with 4chan, those sites have become breeding grounds for modern web culture and viral imagery, the fodder that new media sites like BuzzFeed have used to grow enormously in a short amount of time.

By comparison, 4chan is a fraction of the size of some competitors. Though the site has grown steadily over the years, Mr. Poole, 27, has treated the message board more as a hobby than a business. It hosts a modest amount of advertising, and has at times been profitable.

“A hobby doesn’t really scale or survive,” said Mr. Poole, who in the months before his departure trained others to take over the site. “I can treat it more like a business by bringing people on, giving them responsibility and training them.”

The question for 4chan, Reddit and other sites is whether they can scale into booming, profitable businesses that live up to the potential many see in them. While sites like these draw enormous traffic, many do not track their users to serve targeted advertising, an approach that marketers have gravitated toward since the rise of Facebook and Google.

Moreover, marketers can be wary of their ads running alongside the graphic, often offensive content the sites frequently host. Advertisers may also bristle at the history of sites like 4chan and Reddit contributing to online harassment. Anonymous groups have used 4chan and Reddit to meet and organize systematic attacks on people on Twitter, in email and across the web.

Mr. Poole, however, pointed to monetization methods like 4chan Pass, a paid form of user support that offers some site perks in exchange for a $20 annual fee.

“What remains to be seen is if display advertising is the future of business on the web, or if it is generally creating value with a product that people are willing to pay for,” he said.

He did not say what direction 4chan’s new owner had in mind for the site, and Mr. Nishimura did not make himself available for an interview.

“I’m proud to be taking Mr. Poole’s place as the owner of 4chan,” Mr. Nishimura said in a statement. “I’ve long admired 4chan’s place on the web as a producer of anonymous and Internet culture, and look forward to continuing to grow and develop the site and support the community.”

Mr. Nishimura sold 2Channel in 2009, and is no longer involved in day-to-day operations of the site. Last week, he was announced editor in chief of Variety Japan.

But 4chan and 2Channel have much in common: Roughly 20 percent of 4chan is dedicated to Japanese culture and anime graphic content, Mr. Poole said, which is also much of the most popular content found on 2Channel.

“With the right resources, there’s a lot of opportunity there that I’ve just never explored,” Mr. Poole said.