Hot or Not

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Hot or Not is a website that allows users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted voluntarily by others. Photos are approved by volunteer moderators, who strive to keep the site "fun, clean, and real."

Founded in October 2000 by two Silicon Valley-based engineers, James Hong and Jim Young, the site was originally called Am I Hot or Not, and quickly became very popular. The site allowed people to submit their pictures, and visitors would rate them on a scale of one (not) to ten (hot).

Within a week of launching, the site had reached the level of serving almost two million page views per day. Within a few months, the site had penetrated the NetNielsen Rating's Top 25 advertising domains, placed immediately behind CNET and NBCi.

In order to keep up with rising costs, Hong and Young added a matchmaking component to their website called "Meet Me at Hot or Not", i.e. a system of range voting.{fact}

1 Imitators
2 Rating distribution
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Imitators

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Rate-me site. (Discuss)

Hot or Not was originally preceded by the popular RateMyFace.com and RateMyBody.com which were launched a year earlier in the summer of 1999, although Hot or Not would eventually become a more popular website.

Since then, Hot or Not has spawned many imitators. The concept always remains the same, but the subject matter varies greatly. Imitators include clones like (WhosHotOrNot), rating pets (petsinclothes.com, 'MeorMyPet.com'), characters in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games or MMORPGs (Sexy Sprite or Fugly Fright?!), Network Diagrams (RateMyNetworkDiagram.com), the female breast (GetYourBoobsOut.com), the male genitalia (RateMyCock.com), MySpace profiles (MySpaceRater.com), douchebags (douchebagalert.com), cars (RespectMyRide.com), and unsigned bands (RateMyBand.co.uk).

Other variations on the Hot or Not concept include voting via the Condorcet method, such as (BabeVsBabe.com), where a candidate is compared with other candidates in a series of pairwise comparisons in order to gauge their popularity.

[edit] Rating distribution

A comparison of the original hotornot.com and others, such as the German hotornot.de, revealed a large difference in average ratings between the sites. The most likely cause of this difference is that the algorithm used to keep track of scores on hotornot.com contains a bias term to adjust ratings to a 10 point scale, with most pictures rated 7 or above. The site FAQ mentions that statistically people tend to rate from 1 to 5 and the rate algorithm adjusts the results to scale to 10. It appears the other sites do not use such a 'normalization' method on their ratings and thus most rarely get over 7.