[2] The site was founded in October 2000 by James Hong and Jim Young, two friends and Silicon Valley–based engineers.
Within a few months, the site was immediately behind CNET and NBCi on NetNielsen Rating's Top 25 advertising domains.
To keep up with rising costs Hong and Young added a matchmaking component to their website called "Meet Me at Hot or Not".
In the December 2006 issue of Time magazine, the founders of YouTube stated that they originally set out to make a version of Hot or Not with Video before developing their more inclusive site.
Hot or Not was sold for a rumored $20 million on February 8, 2008, to Avid Life Media, owners of Ashley Madison.
An average score based on hundreds or even thousands of individual ratings takes only a few days to emerge.
To make this hot-or-not palette of morphed images, photos from the site were sorted by rank and used SquirlzMorph to create multi-morph composites from them.