It was founded in October, 2000, by two Silicon-Valey based engineers named James Hong and Jim Young. The site was originally called Am I Hot or Not, and it became very popular. The site allowed people to sumbit their pictures, and vistors would rate them on a scale of one to ten: ten being hot, one being not.
Within a week of launching, the site had reached the level of serving almost 2 million page views per day. Within a few months, website even penetrated the Net Nielsen Rating[?]'s Top 25 advertising domains, falling right behind CNet[?] and NBCi[?].
In order to keep up with rising costs, Hong and Woung added a matchmaking component to their website called "Meet Me at Hot or Not".
Later the website's domain name was changed to hotornot.com, which was considered a poor marketing move by many given the enormous name recognition of amihotornot.com. Despite the change, the site remains very popular.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump