Founders James Hong and Jim Young sold HotorNot earlier this week, but so far, it's business as usual for the operation. Meaning, the site remains a very effective means of getting a date. Check out Daniya here. She's completely smitten with our secret correspondent and man of mystery, Tips. Sadly for Daniya, Tips prefers a different kind of "dating" site.
HotorNot.com, the online "dating service" that lets you rate pictures of the opposite sex based on hotness and then connect with the ones you like, has been bought for around $20 million according to TechCrunch. Valleywag alumna Megan McCarthy pours water on that figure, citing cofounder James Hong: there were "very few people on the deal and there's no reason for us to tell anyone" about the price. Founders James Hong and Jim Young will no longer be involved with the company after the sale. Hong said, "It's time to break up with this girlfriend."
HotorNot.com, the online dating and rating site run by Jim Young and James Hong, is abandoning its experiment in free, ad-supported user profiles and is reverting back to paid memberships. Is this a sign of failure? According to an email from Young and Hong to past and current members, no. Free profiles led to a flood of spammers that were overloading the website — an outcome that members had predicted at the time. Plausible. And yet plenty of other sites offer free profiles while keeping spammers at least somewhat in check. Could this actually be a tacit acknowledgement that all the assumptions that cofounder Hong made in a blog post announcing the move to make HotorNot free three months ago were, well, wrong? That online advertising is not, in fact, HotorNot's future? The full email after the jump.
