Hot or Not

Last updated
Hot or Not
OwnerHot Or Not Limited
URL https://www.hotornot.com
LaunchedOctober 2000;24 years ago (2000-10)

Hot or Not was a rating site that allowed users to submit photos of themselves to be rated by other users on a scale of 1 to 10, with the average becoming the photo's score. The site also offered a matchmaking engine called 'Meet Me' and an extended profile feature called "Hotlists". The domain hotornot.com is currently owned by Hot Or Not Limited, [1] and was previously owned by Avid Life Media. 'Hot or Not' was a significant influence on the people who went on to create social media sites like YouTube. [2]

Contents

History

The site was founded in October 2000 by James Hong and Jim Young, two friends and Silicon Valley–based engineers. Both graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in electrical engineering, with Young pursuing a Ph.D. at the time. It was inspired by some other developers' ideas.

The site was a technical solution to a disagreement the founders had one day over a passing woman's attractiveness. The site was originally called "Am I Hot or Not". Within a week of launching, it had reached almost two million page views per day. Within a few months, the site was immediately behind CNET and NBCi on NetNielsen Rating's Top 25 advertising domains. To keep up with rising costs Hong and Young added a matchmaking component to their website called "Meet Me at Hot or Not". The matchmaking service has been especially successful and the site continues to generate most of its revenue through subscriptions. In the December 2006 issue of Time magazine, the founders of YouTube stated that they originally set out to make a version of Hot or Not with Video before developing their more inclusive site.

Hot or Not was sold for a rumored $20 million on February 8, 2008, to Avid Life Media, owners of Ashley Madison. [3] Annual revenue reached $7.5 million, with net profits of $5.5 million. They initially started off $60,000 in debt due to tuition fees James paid for his MBA. [4] On July 31, 2008, Hot or Not launched Hot or Not Gossip and a Baresi rate box (a "hot meter") – a subdivision to expand their market, run by former radio DJ turned celebrity blogger Zack Taylor.

In 2012, Hot or Not was purchased by Badoo, which is owned by Bumble Inc. [5] The app is currently rebranded as Chat & Date which uses a similar user interface to Badoo and shares user accounts between both sites.

Predecessors and spin-offs

Hot or Not was preceded by other rating sites, like RateMyFace, which was registered a year earlier in the summer of 1999, and AmIHot.com, which was registered in January 2000 by MIT freshman Daniel Roy. Regardless, despite any head starts of its predecessors, Hot or Not quickly became the most popular. Since AmIHotOrNot.com's launch, the concept has spawned many imitators. The concept always remained the same, but the subject matter varied greatly. The concept has also been integrated with a wide variety of dating and matchmaking systems. In 2007 BecauseImHot.com launched and deleted anyone with a rating below seven after a voting audit or the first 50 votes (whichever is first).

The binary concept has been used in a variety of dating apps where users can swipe right or left on a user, to decide whether to match or ignore them (respectively), a similar mechanism to deciding whether a user is "hot".

Research

In 2005, as an example of using image morphing methods to study the effects of averageness, imaging researcher Pierre Tourigny created a composite of about 30 faces to find out the current standard of good looks on the Internet. On the Hot or Not web site, people rate others' attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. An average score based on hundreds or even thousands of individual ratings takes only a few days to emerge. To make this hot-or-not palette of morphed images, photos from the site were sorted by rank and used SquirlzMorph to create multi-morph composites from them. Unlike projects like Face of Tomorrow, [6] where the subjects are posed for the purpose, the portraits are blurry because the source images are of low resolution with differences in variables such as posture, hair styles and glasses, so that in this instance images could use only 36 control points for the morphs. [7] A similar study was done with Miss Universe contestants, as shown in the averageness article, as well as one for age, as shown in youthfulness article.

A 2006 "hot or not"-style study, involving 264 women and 18 men, at the Washington University School of Medicine, as published online in the journal Brain Research, indicates that a person's brain determines whether an image is erotically appealing long before the viewer is even aware they are seeing the picture. Moreover, according to these researchers, one of the basic functions of the brain is to classify images into a hot-or-not type categorization. The study's researchers also discovered that sexy shots induce a uniquely powerful reaction in the brain, equal in effect for both men and women, and that erotic images produced a strong reaction in the hypothalamus. [8] [9]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "Hot or Not Privacy Policy". Hot Or Not. Retrieved 6 April 2015.
  2. ↑ "Rich, Thriving, Busy: Where Hot Or Not's Co-Founders Are Today". US: ABC News. 2014-06-03. Retrieved 2015-10-01.
  3. ↑ HotOrNot Apparently Very Hot: Acquired For $20 Million TechCrunch
  4. ↑ "HotOrNot: From Nothing to $20M in 7 years!". YouTube. 2007-06-15. Archived from the original on 2021-12-11. Retrieved 2011-07-27.
  5. ↑ "Hot or Not gets creepier: It's now a dating app".
  6. ↑ "faceoftomorrow.com". Archived from the original on 1 August 2015.
  7. ↑ Manitou (2006). Hot or Not – Attractiveness Face Scale (composite images), Flicker, May 4.
  8. ↑ Wittlin, Maggie, "Hot or Not – Women’s brains respond to erotic images as quickly and strongly as men’s". Seed Magazine – Brain & Behavior, July, 13.
  9. ↑ Anokhin, A.P.; et al. (2006). "Rapid discrimination of visual scene content in the human brain". Brain Research. 1093 (1): 167–177. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2006.03.108. PMC   2174912 . PMID   16712815.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Online dating</span> Internet service providing potential relationship contacts

Online dating, also known as internet dating, virtual dating, or mobile app dating, is a method used by people with a goal of searching for and interacting with potential romantic or sexual partners, via the internet. An online dating service is a company that promotes and provides specific mechanisms for the practice of online dating, generally in the form of dedicated websites or software applications accessible on personal computers or mobile devices connected to the internet. A wide variety of unmoderated matchmaking services, most of which are profile-based with various communication functionalities, is offered by such companies.

RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is a review site founded in May 1999 by John Swapceinski, a software engineer from Menlo Park, California, which allows anyone to assign ratings to professors and campuses of American, Canadian, and United Kingdom institutions. The site was originally launched as TeacherRatings.com and converted to RateMyProfessors in 2001. RMP was acquired in 2005 by Patrick Nagle and William DeSantis. Nagle and DeSantis later resold RMP in 2007 to Viacom's MTVU, MTV's College channel. Viacom owned and operated RateMyProfessors.com for a decade. Cheddar announced its acquisition of RMP from Viacom in 2018. Cheddar was acquired by internet service provider Altice USA in 2019. Cheddar was then sold to media company Archetype in December 2023. RMP is the largest online destination for professor ratings. The site includes 8,000+ schools, 1.7 million professors, and over 19 million ratings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OkCupid</span> American online dating service

OkCupid is a U.S.-based, internationally operating online dating, friendship, and formerly also a social networking website and application. It features multiple-choice questions to match members. Registration is free. OkCupid is owned by Match Group, which also owns Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, and many other popular dating apps and sites.

Mobile dating services, also known as cell dating, cellular dating, or cell phone dating, allow individuals to chat, flirt, meet, and possibly become romantically involved by means of text messaging, mobile chatting, and the mobile web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Avid Elastic Reality</span>

Elastic Reality was a warping and morphing software application available on Windows, Macintosh, and Silicon Graphics workstations and was discontinued in 1999.

A review site is a website on which reviews can be posted about people, businesses, products, or services. These sites may use Web 2.0 techniques to gather reviews from site users or may employ professional writers to author reviews on the topic of concern for the site.

Badoo is a dating-focused social network founded by Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev in 2006. It is headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus and London, United Kingdom, with offices in Malta, Russia and the United States. It operates in 190 countries and is available in 47 languages, making it the world's most widely used dating network. The app is available on iOS, Android, and the web. Badoo operates on a freemium model, whereby the core services can be used without payment.

This is a partial, non-exhaustive list of notable online dating websites and mobile apps.

Andrey Andreev is a multinational tech entrepreneur. He is known for founding the dating and social networking apps Bumble and Badoo, amongst others. In 2019, Andreev sold the apps' holding company, MagicLab, to Blackstone at a $3 billion valuation. In 2020, he founded social audio app Stereo. His previous ventures include SpyLog, Begun, and Mamba.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SingleMuslim.com</span>

SingleMuslim.com is a matrimonial website designed for and marketed to Muslims. The website was launched on 1 August 2000, and its headquarters is in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lulu (app)</span>

Lulu is a mobile app formerly available for iOS and Android that allowed female users to make positive and negative evaluations of male users on the basis of their romantic, personal, and sexual appeal. The app allowed only female users to access the evaluation system, and evaluations made through the app are attached publicly and anonymously.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Whitney Wolfe Herd</span> Founder and former CEO of Bumble (born 1989)

Whitney Wolfe Herd is an American entrepreneur. She is the founder, executive chair, and former CEO of publicly traded Bumble, an online dating platform, launched in 2014. She is a co-founder of Tinder and was previously its Vice President of Marketing.

Bumble is an online dating and networking application launched in 2014. Profiles of potential matches are displayed to users, who can "swipe left" to reject a candidate or "swipe right" to indicate interest. The app is a product of Bumble Inc., founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd shortly after she left Tinder. Wolfe Herd has described Bumble as a "feminist dating app".

This timeline of online dating also includes broader events related to technology-assisted dating. Where there are similar services, only major ones or the first of its kind are listed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexandra Chong</span> Jamaican entrepreneur

Alexandra Chong is a Jamaican entrepreneur. She is the founder and CEO of Jacana, a global cannabis company. Jacana cultivates, develops and distributes medical cannabis internationally and in a historic move, it was the first company to export Jamaican medical cannabis flower internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Huggle (app)</span> Location-based social application

Huggle was a location-based social application which connected users based on commonality of places they frequent. The app was developed through a partnership with entrepreneur Andrey Andreev. Following a soft launch in 2015, it was officially launched in July 2016. It was acquired by Badoo in 2018. In 2020 Bumble decided it would no longer maintain the platform.

An online dating application, commonly known as a dating app, is an online dating service presented through a mobile phone application. These apps often take advantage of a smartphone's GPS location capabilities, always on-hand presence, and access to mobile wallets. These apps aim to speed up the online dating process of sifting through potential dating partners, chatting, flirting, and potentially meeting or becoming romantically involved.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FaceApp</span> Photo manipulation application

FaceApp is a photo and video editing application for iOS and Android developed by FaceApp Technology Limited, a company based in Cyprus. The app generates highly realistic transformations of human faces in photographs by using neural networks based on artificial intelligence. The app can transform a face to make it smile, look younger, look older, or change gender.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hily</span> Online dating application

Hily is an online dating application that employs machine learning to match prospective partners. Named as an acronym for "Hey, I Like You", the app is designed to recommend potential matches by analyzing users' backgrounds, interests, and app activity. The app's registration options for gender include male, female, and non-binary.

"The Old Man and the Seat" is the second episode of the fourth season of the Adult Swim animated television series Rick and Morty. Written by Michael Waldron and directed by Jacob Hair, loosely adapting The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, the episode aired in the United States on November 17, 2019.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.