The Five: Fringe Internet Entrepreneurs

This Week on the 5: Who is at the Edge of the Internet?

Everyone knows Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They changed everything. They put computers in every single home in America. But there are other people out there who were able to make names for themselves once the world became wired. On the outskirts of the internet, where only the brave, or the bored roam is where the following five entrepreneurs have thrived.

* * *

• Lowtax aka Richard Kyanka – SomethingAwful.com (1999 – Present).  Something Awful was a trailblazer in early internet content. Started by Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, SA was just a personal wesbite of his that turned into a huge internet presence. The site focused on comedy and their forums section, at their peak, was one of the most active in the entire world. Early internet meme’s like All Your Base Are Belong to Us came from the users of Something Awful’s forums along with their many Photoshop threads. Users were able to rig the voting for Entertainment Weekly’s 2001 Entertainer of the Year to get Kyanka to the top, but he was disqualified for cheating.
• moot aka Christopher Poole – www.4chan.org (2003 – Present). Christopher Poole was originally a poster on Something Awful before creating 4chan.org, originally a site to just talk about anime. Now it may be most famously associated with where internet activist group Anonymous first formed. 4chan’s been called a meme factory among other things, for its users are the ones who first create the inside jokes that spread across the internet. Rickrolling, Pedobear and lolcats are among some of their most well known memes. Due to his status as the man who started 4chan, moot was able to secure funding for a start up called Canvas, a social networking site revolving around photos. moot didn’t reveal his actual identity until 2008, in a piece with the Wall Street Journal. There is little doubt that moot and 4chan should be recognized for their contributions to the way content is created on the internet.
• Hunter Moore – www.IsAnyoneUp.com (2010 – 2012).  Hunter Moore is the king of revenge porn. He most likely is the reason there is a term called revenge porn in the first place. His site, Is Anyone Up?, specialized in one thing – posting naked pictures of people you’ve broken up with. Didn’t matter if you it was a dude or a chick, just so long as they were naked. The sites popularity escalated quickly. It was getting 30 million page views a month and bringing in $10 grand a month in ad revenue. Moore ended up getting stabbed by a women who ended up on Is Anyone Up?. By the end of his run he was changing addresses and phone numbers every month.  After multiple lawsuits, and pressure from anti-bullying advocates, Moore sold the site to Bullyville.com. He still makes cash DJing and throwing parties across the country. He was just hit with a defamation lawsuit by Bullyville and has to pay up $250,000 to them.
• Kevin Rose – Digg.com (2004 – Present).  Before there was Reddit, there was Digg. A social aggregator site that most powered by user content, comment sections and a voting section. By 2008, Digg was pulling in 236 million visitors annually, they were gigantic. They had an offer from Google to be bought out for $200 million but it fell through.  Unfortunately in 2010 the site had a massive overhaul which was met with huge criticism. That, combined with the most popular content submitters on the site manipulating what stories made the front page, spelled doom for Digg. The entire site unraveled between 2010 and 2012. The whole thing was sold off for $500,000 to venture capital company Betaworks who rebuilt the site from the ground up.
• The Dread Pirate Roberts aka Ross William Ulbricht – silkroadvb5piz3r.onion (2011 – 2013).  Currently the most famous of the men on this list, no one knew who the Dread Pirate was up until a few weeks ago. Ross Ulbricht was running the Silk Road, a sort of drug Ebay where one could buy any illegal narcotic they wanted, supposedly totally anonymously. Though that turned out to not be the case. The feds were on the Silk Road and Ulbricht almost as soon as the site gained prominence. Billions of dollars in drug sales moved through the Silk Road and Ulbricht is speculated to have banked $80 million dollars in bitcoins because of it. He’s currently in custody and facing extradition to New York from San Francisco where he was arrested and multiple felony counts.