Keeping 8chan online continued to be a struggle as it exceeded bandwidth limits and was kicked off by hosts for offensive content. A lifeline came in the form of an email from a stranger named Ronald Watkins. The son of current 8chan owner Jim Watkins, Ronald, who did not respond to requests for comment, told Brennan that he’d seen the Al Jazeera documentary. In short order, Brennan agreed to let Watkin’s company, N.T. Technology, host 8chan, while Brennan maintained the domain and continued as the public face of the site.
Under the agreement, N.T. Technology ge 8chan space in its data center and agreed it would not shut down the site over abuse reports unless they were not quickly acted upon. N.T. did not charge for its services, agreeing instead to receive 60 percent of any profits 8chan made while it was 8chan’s hosting company, according 8chan’s own site history.
Brennan says he did not even know how to spell Philippines, but as part of the deal, he moved in October 2014 to Manila, where Watkins is a longtime resident. Brennan set about running 8chan much in the same manner he’d operated the site from New York, but now in a different time zone and from cushier accommodation, a large condominium in Manila provided by Watkins, according to Brennan.
In January 2015, after the site, then hosted on a .co domain was kicked offline, Brennan decided to “make the marriage to Jim permanent,” transferring the site to its current domain maintained by Watkins. Jim Watkins now owned the servers and the domain.
Daniel StolleJim Watkins, 55, has built his second career and family business exploiting and monetizing the loopholes of the internet. He’s currently petitioning to become a naturalized citizen of the Philippines with a hearing scheduled for October. A notification of his petition published in the English-language Manila Times newspaper in February says Watkins was born in Dayton, Washington, a town with a population of just over 2,500 in the state’s southwest.
In a video entitled “Meet 8chan,” filmed after the Christchurch attacks—during which Watkins answers questions from a Filipina host such as “Are you a Jew?” and “How do you feel about Muslims?”—he says he grew up next to a Boeing airlines factory. The factory was surveyed by his father, he says. His mother later worked there, he says. Watkins served in the US Army for 16 years, where he got his introduction to computers, he said in a 2016 interview with the news site Splinter. He left the service, he told the publication, in 1998.