Hotornot gets publicity

Hotornot  is getting a lot more attention these days.    They are doing great and innovative things.

http://james.hotornot.com/2007/07/reinventing-hotornot-part-ii.html#links

http://www.talkcrunch.com/2007/07/09/a-talk-with-james-hong-co-founder-of-hotornot/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/09/get-a-little-bling-at-hotornot/

Hotornot is trying to tie brands to users and then get marketers to pay more money to reach users.   I think its a good idea given the context of the site.     Hotornot has now come out with hotlists and playing around with a lot of stuff on facebook.  I don’t think i’ve ever seen hotornot make a mistake on the product side,  but i still think they shouldn’t have given developers so much equity in the company.

When I started out I looked at hotornot and saw validation that I could create a huge company and run it with next to no staff.    A few years ago hotornot looked at my site and thought they could also run a free site and make money off ads.   Now I find myself looking at hotornot and seeing if they come up with anything interesting that I could adopt in a way that makes sense given the context in which users are using my site.

Since going free hotornot  has exploded on facebook from nothing to millions of pageviews and traffic to the main site is also way up.     Plentyoffish in that time has also greatly increased,  when the WSJ article came out  Plentyoffish was the 96th busiest site in the US,   this week we broke the top 60  less than 5 weeks later basically becoming the largest dating site in the US and the world.