Hot or Not
From Free net encyclopedia
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.
Imitators
Hot or Not was originally preceded by the popular RateMyFace.com, which was 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. Imitators have even taken the concept as far as rating characters in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games or MMORPGs (Sexy Sprite or Fugly Fright?!), Network Diagrams (RateMyNetworkDiagram.com), the female breast (GetYourBoobsOut.com), MySpace profiles(MySpaceRater.com),and ambiguously pornographic images (PornOrNot.net). The concept always remains the same, but the subject matter varies greatly.
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. One possible cause of this difference is that the algorithm used to keep track of scores on hotornot.com contains a bias term to effectively 'overrate' all participants, with most pictures rated 7 or above. However, the more likely reason is that hotornot.com only show pictures of people who continue to check their scores, suggesting that those who have higher ratings return to the site more frequently than those with low scores.
The latest craze to hot or not style websites is in pet picture rating sites. A lot of the sites are the same and offer you the choice to post up pictures of your pets for others to rate. There are however a few more tailored websites like petsinclothes.com, which is aimed at the pet fashion category. petsinclothes.com allows the user to upload pictures of their well dressed pets for others to rate in the standard 1 - 10 scale.