HotorNot Sold for $20 Million
TechCrunch reports (via Techmeme) 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.
Posted on February 11, 2008
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Web 2.0 Dating Sites
TechCrunch has a post about online dating sites using Web 2.0 methods and there are a lot of them.Online dating is big business, drawing about 4 million U.S. Internet users daily in June 2006 (and 25 million monthly), and they spend a daily average of nearly 17 minutes each on these sites. That adds up to a lot of page views - almost 4.5 billion per month (source: Comscore). And that doesn't take into account the billion-a-day Myspace page views, which many people argue is basically a very large dating site. All told, at least 15% of U.S. Internet users visit an online dating site each month.Here is a quick list:
Plety of Fish may be one of the most interesting of the new sites with over 600,000 listings. It is also free.
Posted on August 4, 2006
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Tickle Launches Ringo Photo-Sharing Tool
Tickle Inc. has announced the launch of Ringo, which helps friends and family connect online. The utility offers secure address book and photo-sharing features that regularly updates friends, family and co-workers when an addition is made to their contact information or photos. Tickle Inc. also offers Tickle.com, a matchmaking and social networking service.Posted on April 11, 2005
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