AmIAnnoying.com (AIA) is a website that allows users to vote on celebrities based on their annoyance factors. It has more than 20,000 profiles of public figures and is the largest on-going celebrity polling site on the Internet.
It was launched by New York State natives Bruce Goldman, Marc Cutler, and Keith Furman in December 2000 as AmIAnnoyingorNot.com. It was created as a twist of the "Hot or Not" craze. Instead of voting for "regular people", visitors have the opportunity to vote for public figures and their irritability. It is also different from "Hot or Not" in that instead of rating the people on a numerical scale, it simply asks whether the celebrity is "annoying" or "not annoying". The user can also vote "don't care" if they are unfamiliar with or have no opinion of the celebrity. For each celebrity, there is a picture along with background information and reasons why this famous person might be annoying or not annoying. These profiles are authored by Team Annoy (the nickname for the three AIA creators) and a devoted following of site users. Some of the things that have been considered annoying are Scientology, breast implants, smoking, tattoos, depression, divorce, and vegetarianism/veganism. Because two of the three founders of the site are left-handed, left-handed celebrities are not considered annoying.
While most of the entries on the site consist of individuals, groups such as bands, sports teams, and television series have their own entries on the site. Even AmIAnnoying.com has its own profile, where in its early years it got mostly annoying votes.
AIA keeps track of the votes cast and produces two on-going lists of the 100 celebrities who have the highest and lowest annoying percentages. Each week, AIA takes the top 25 in both lists and use them to compile the year-end "most annoying of the year" and "least annoying of the year" lists. Though in years past the voting totals were not reset until the end of the year, they started to reset the polls each week in 2006. AIA has been used by several media outlets to measure the public perception of the celebrity in their articles. The poll is not scientific, and there have been instances of ballot stuffing despite the five-vote-per-visit rule given by AIA.
Lawyers representing the Church of Scientology threatened legal action for the usage of a picture of its founder L. Ron Hubbard, forcing AIA to alter the picture. Due to a family request, AIA also removed a profile of Matthew Shepard, and it no longer accepts profiles of those famous only because they were murdered.
At the end of 2004, the tabloid Star Magazine had an issue devoted to the "Most Annoying People of 2004", with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton at the top of the list. It had no affiliation with AmIAnnoying.com, and it is not known if Star lifted that idea from the site or it was merely coincidental. AIA used the slogan "The Original and Interactive Annoying Celebrity Poll" after the Star issue came out.
AmIAnnoying.com was featured in the trailer for the 2007 Jamie Kennedy documentary, Heckler.
It was announced on April 24, 2010 that co-founder Bruce Goldman had died earlier that week.[1]
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