Despicable me: Q&A with Is Anyone Up?’s Hunter Moore

By Andrea Domanick

Friday, Jan. 20, 2012 | noon

The 2012 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo kicked off at the Hard Rock Hotel this week, bringing with it a slew of parties and events. One of them was the IsAnyoneUp.com AVN Launch party at Mandalay Bay’s Foundation Room, hosted by site founder Hunter Moore.

In an industry that’s made a bedfellow of controversy, the 25-year-old Moore should feel right at home: Is Anyone Up? is a website devoted to the nude photographs submitted anonymously to Moore by their subjects’ jilted lovers. The photos are often posted along with stills of the subject’s social networking profile and other personal information. It’s no surprise, then, that this “revenge porn,” as it’s been dubbed, has made Moore something of a public enemy; since founding the site in late 2010, his confrontations with the site’s unhappy subjects have ranged from an appearance on Anderson Cooper’s daytime talk show to a stabbing in his own driveway (not to mention myriad lawsuits). Nonetheless, the site generates an average of 175,000 unique hits per day and earns Moore around $27,000 a month (though, he says, much of that goes to overhead and his Las Vegas-based attorney Reza Sina). The website has also been embraced as something of a marketing tool by emo and metalcore bands, who are all too happy for the publicity from groupie-submitted photos. Now, Moore brings his debaucherous Is Anyone Up? parties to the Strip. We spoke to him from his home in San Francisco to talk about porn poaching and lessons learned … or not.

How did you and the site get involved with AVN?

Actually, I don’t think they even want me there. I’ve gotten a few emails from companies in the adult industry who told me not to come—like, from their corporate offices. I’ve had some porn stars threaten me. I’ve gotten emails from pay-sites telling me to bring bodyguards. There’s people out there who don’t like me I guess, but there’s a million others who do.

Why don’t they want you here?

Well, it’s weird because the whole industry poaches girls from my site. I don’t want to make porn, so I’ve been a little more proactive about stopping that. I’ve had Penthouse and Brazzers and Burning Angel reach out to girls on the site, but now I just black out a lot of info so they can’t actually contact the girls. There was a ton of negative feedback [from the porn industry], so I think that’s why I’m getting all the hate now.

Why did you decide to put a stop to that?

Because I mean, dude, you gotta work for your sh*t! Nobody helped me. Instead of them having to going out and find [performers], they’re cutting their cost tenfold by finding girls willing to do that on my site, and they make 10 grand off of it. You know, I’m not an ATM. I’m not gonna help them out, they never helped me out.

I’ve had offers from BurningAngel and people affiliated with other big companies to actually do “IsAnyoneUp porn,” and as soon as I turn them down they turn into enemies and pull their ads down from the site.

So you want nothing to do with porn, and yet you’re hosting an AVN party ...

I don’t consider my site a porn site, as stupid as that sounds. … I get a million submissions of people having sex every day. But the site isn’t about that; you can go watch porn anytime somewhere else. The site is about seeing each other naked, and I don’t consider just the naked body to be porn.

Have you gotten any positive feedback from the porn industry? What do you think appeals to them about the site?

Definitely. As far as what appeals to them, I’m not sure to be honest, because these people see and do the gnarliest stuff every day. I assume it’s like with everybody else—you kind of get a glimpse into somebody’s life, that extra little bit by seeing them naked. It’s like taking Facebook just a little bit further. Everybody likes to creep on everybody, regardless of if you do porn.

What kind of opportunities do you see from coming from the party and attending at AVN?

My goal is to network as much as possible and focus on getting an investor for the site, or for the IsAnyoneUp app. We’re submitting it on Friday to the Apple store. I’ve poured my heart and soul and every single penny into it, and now I’m really broke. It’s looking at naked pictures, but it’s also to help those people hook up. I want to bring social networking to sex and rock ‘n’ roll—I think that’s where the money is right now.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since starting the site?

I don’t think I’ve even learned any real lessons. I think I’ve become a worse human being by running the site. But the whole thing has been a learning process. I don’t do some things I used to —like don’t get on the Internet while really, really drunk. Just because it’s so easy to get hit with a defamation case. I’ve talked so much sh*t on the Internet. But you know, if people were smart enough, I’d be really, really poor right now. If anything, I’ve learned that I should do it 10 times worse than I’m doing it now, everyday. Because people are evil.