An MTV VJ registered mtv.com himself, then got sued for it
In 1993 Adam Curry, then a presenter on MTV, grabbed the unclaimed domain mtv.com to act as the channel's unofficial internet voice. His bosses approved at the time, but when he left to start his own web company, MTV sued him for the address. He later became known as the Podfather.
Born in Arlington, Virginia, in 1964, Curry grew up largely in Amstelveen in the Netherlands, living there from 1972 to 1987. In the early 1980s he worked on Dutch pirate radio under the alias John Holden before landing the pop show Countdown and other programmes for the broadcaster Veronica. MTV hired him as a VJ in 1987, and he hosted Headbangers Ball and the Top 20 Video Countdown, interviewing figures such as Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, while also working in New York radio.
His web design and hosting company, OnRamp, grew to 4,000 employees before being folded into Think New Ideas, which he co-founded and which floated on NASDAQ in 1996 during the dot-com boom, later reaching more than 7,400 staff in seven countries. Luck helped too. He told Howard Stern in 2010 that a forgotten $65,000 stake in AskJeeves.com had suddenly become $150 million when it went public. Not every venture worked: a Dutch internet incubator failed, a sports webshop went bankrupt, and a helicopter company collapsed in 2005, after which a Dutch court ordered him to repay about $3 million he had withdrawn.
Podcasting made his name a second time. In January 2005 he and Ron Bloom founded PodShow, a podcast promotion and advertising company later renamed Mevio, which claimed 9 million unique visitors in May 2008 and raised over $38 million. He hosted a podcast-themed show on Sirius Satellite Radio from 2005 to 2007, and since October 2007 has co-hosted the No Agenda Show with John C. Dvorak, picking apart mainstream news coverage. Wired's Annalee Newitz observed that every new medium needs a celebrity, and Curry was happy to be one.
In 2020 he launched Podcast Index, an open-source directory that listed over four million podcasts by 2024. Earlier, in 2006, he won a court ban on a Dutch tabloid reprinting his Flickr photos, one of the first legal tests of a Creative Commons licence.
Source: Adam Curry
