Hot or Not
Upload your photo, get rated 1 to 10 by strangers, then rate a few hundred strangers yourself. Hot or Not was the web's first great time-waster of the 2000s — almost two million page views a day within a week of launch — and the founders of YouTube have said their site started out as an attempt to do the same thing with video.
Hot or Not was a technical solution to an argument. In October 2000 James Hong and Jim Young, friends and Berkeley-trained electrical engineers working in Silicon Valley, disagreed about a passing woman's attractiveness and built a site — originally called "Am I Hot or Not" — where anyone could submit a photo and be scored by everyone else on a scale of 1 to 10, the average becoming the photo's rating. Within a week it was pulling almost two million page views a day. Within a few months it sat just behind CNET and NBCi on Nielsen's Top 25 advertising domains. It wasn't the first rating site — RateMyFace had registered its domain in the summer of 1999, and an MIT freshman had registered AmIHot.com in January 2000 — but it quickly became the most popular, and it spawned imitators for every subject you could put a number on.
To keep up with rising costs, Hong and Young added a matchmaking feature, "Meet Me at Hot or Not," and subscriptions became most of the revenue. The site's influence ran through the decade that followed. The Harvard Crimson's headline on Mark Zuckerberg's Facemash, the dorm-room site he finished the morning of Halloween 2003 that asked students to pick the "hotter" of two classmates' photos, was simply "Hot or Not? Website Briefly Judges Looks." And in a December 2006 issue of Time, YouTube's founders said they had originally set out to make a version of Hot or Not with video; early versions of YouTube's homepage still asked your gender and the gender and age range you were "seeking."
On February 8, 2008, Hong and Young sold the site to Avid Life Media, the owners of Ashley Madison, for a rumored $20 million; by then it was reporting $7.5 million in annual revenue and $5.5 million in profit. Badoo bought it in 2012 and eventually folded it into a dating app now branded Chat & Date. The original site is gone, but the reflex it trained — swipe, score, next — is everywhere.
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