HotorNot Sold for $20 Million
Posted on February 11, 2008
TechCrunch reports that investors connected to a company called Avid Life Media have acquired the 8-year-old HotorNot website for $20 million.
HotorNot began as a simple site that let users rate the hotness of photographs of people. It then expanded into a dating service.
San Francisco based HotOrNot, founded by James Hong and Jim Young in October 2000, has been acquired, we've heard from multiple sources.The website still looks pretty similar today. You can people by their age group now -- apparently people over the age of 40 are even using HotorNot. They also have a page showing the hottest people. The HotorNot site inspired a number of clones - you can see a few of them here in Yahoo's directory.The buyers are investors connected with Avid Life Media, and paid somewhere around $20 million for the site. Hong and and Young have been taking money out of the very profitable business all along the way - which we reported was another $20 million or in May 2007. HotOrNot never raised outside funding.
The investors are creating a new company, called HotOrNot Media (new site coming soon), and they may be acquiring more properties as well.
Here's a video about HotorNot and its impact on the Internet from Mashable:
- Character.ai Provides AI Characters to Chat With
- Photobucket's Huge Bucket of Images of Interest to AI Companies
- Opera Adds Experimental Support for 150 Local LLMs
- Read AI Raises $21 Million in Series A Financing
- You Can Now Use ChatGPT Without an Account