VentureBeat

Iconic dating site HotOrNot has sold to a little-known media company called Avid Life Media, HotOrNot cofounder James Hong tells me.

HotOrNot was a standout success when it began in 2000, when many web entrepreneurs were nursing wounds from when the dot-com bubble burst. Its simplicity, subsequent viral growth to millions and ability to keep people returning inspired hits including YouTube as well as Facebook.

You saw a photo of a girl or guy, and you rated them as “hot” or “not.” The site has innovated from that basic theme but never departed from it.

While HotOrNot isn’t disclosing any details about the purchase price, TechCrunch hears that it sold for $20 million.

HotOrNot never took on investment but has made tens of millions over the years. The site started as a place where users could post photos of themselves and rank their fellow users’ photos on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being the hottest. It has since expanded to provide for-fee dating services.

More recently, the company experimented with making its service free, a move it then reversed several months later. It also launched a Facebook application last spring that itself is making hundreds of thousands and requires very little work, Hong tells me.

When I asked about future plans, Hong answered that people can expect to see him in cafes a lot more often. “All my life, my parents have called me lazy — and they’re right.” Many successful entrepreneurs are workaholics, and go from selling one company to starting another. Instead, Hong (who has started other companies) says his main goals now are to eat healthier and spend more time at the gym. “24 Hour Fitness, not The Sports Club/LA,” he’s quick to add, “this isn’t going to change who I am.

The purchaser, Toronto, Ontario-based Avid Life Media, will rename HotOrNot to HotOrNot Media, and among other things will try to extend the HotOrNot brand, Hong says, although he didn’t add more details.

Avid Life’s web site describes itself as “a network of targeted niche brands” One of those brands is Ashley Madison (more details here), an extramarital dating site with the tagline “when monogamy becomes monotony.”

Fittingly, Hong describes HotOrNot as “a long relationship — if it’s not right for you in the long run, you should move on.”

Crunchyroll, a sharing site primarily for anime, is attracting attention — not only for its content and fast-growing popularity, but also for its revenue model.

Rather than just putting up ads, Crunchyroll accepts “donations” in return for providing users with higher video quality. The site makes a respectable $75,000 a month in revenue, according to Techcrunch. But it’s also getting money for copyrighted anime content uploaded to the site (much of which apparently uploaded by the site owners) plainly violates the DMCA.

Pirated content isn’t all that makes the company notable. The site also makes its mark with niche content from foreign markets. While there’s plenty of noise about the global reach of the internet, language barriers still exist, keeping ideas and content from flowing as freely as they otherwise would. Crunchyroll gets around the problem by using fansubs, or foreign-language versions of anime subtitled by fans.

Many of the anime series on Crunchyroll, without the efforts of fans, would never have otherwise been dubbed and released in English-language markets. But the site’s growing popularity could be its downfall. The question is where anime distributors and licensors draw the line. Some anime that gets US distribution has already been removed from Crunchyroll. Cowboy Bebop, Gundam Wing and Dragon Ball Z, three of the most popular series, all bear removal notices stating that they are licensed by Bandai Entertainment and FUNimation Entertainment.

While other content remains, it seems unlikely that venture capitalists or buyers will be willing to touch Crunchyroll until companies and organizations based in Asia, like the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Performers, indicate whether they’ll take action against the company. Past experience indicates that they will — last October, Youtube removed almost 30,000 videos at the request of a group of Japanese businesses, and the JSRACP regularly criticizes YouTube for its slowness in removing Japanese-language content.

The site is reportedly run by employees at HotorNot. James Hong, HotorNot’s founder, did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Additionally, Crunchyroll risks action from foreign licensors. Singapore and the Philippines each account for more than 20 percent of the site’s million-plus monthly unique viewers, according to Alexa — countries where artist’s organizations have been active in stamping out illegal sharing. Crunchyroll, semi-anonymously run out of San Francisco by unnamed employees of Hot or Not, likely won’t find itself able to hide behind local courts, as the Russian music vendor AllofMP3 has so far.

As Crunchyroll waits to learn the fate of its videos, it may yet be building the foundations for its future success — a huge base of anime-obsessed users. Like YouTube, Crunchyroll has some user-created content, mainly in the form of anime music videos (AMVs), which combine cut-scenes from animes with music.

Even if the content that originally drew users eventually disappears, it may be possible for Crunchyroll to hold onto a portion of its users and become a social sharing site. And while the past experiences of US-based sharing sites with American content owners has made cutting deals seem like an impossibility, Crunchyroll could yet make arrangements with internet-savvy Asian companies whose content would never have otherwise reached outside markets.

Of course, Crunchyroll shares another similarity to YouTube: As the largest site of its kind, it is the first that licensors will go after. Meanwhile, smaller competitors like Animecrave.com , which has an inferior site design but keeps all its videos behind a pay wall, can continue to offer content no longer on Crunchyroll. And, as always, the more popular series are available through sites that make no bones about having links to illegal content, like tv-links.co.uk.

Slide, Rockyou and HotorNot, three companies with the largest number of users on Facebook, are showing continued traffic growth on their own sites.

The finding, reported by Quantcast, a service that tracks traffic trends for Web sites, suggests that sites failing to embrace Facebook may be missing out on potential growth.

For some, this is also encouraging evidence that Facebook’s platform, launched in May, isn’t necessarily weening users entirely off their own Web sites. While Facebook allows third-party sites to advertise on their applications on Facebook, many sites prefer to maintain control over their users’ experience, and are hesitant to trust Facebook’s promise that it will remain hands-off. Despite the pledge by Facebook’s executives that sites are free to make money on their apps within Facebook, its terms of service says Facebook can change its policy at any time.

Slide, Rockyou and HotorNot have their own Web sites, and have also launched multiple Facebook applications. Some boast millions of users, foremost among them Slide’s Top Friends, which is the most popular Facebook application, nearing ten million users on Facebook. Top Friends lets you display your favorite Facebook friends in a box on your Facebook profile.

These graphs show the rate of growth that each company experienced to its .com site since . We’ve been hearing the same thing from developers of other successful Facebook applications who also have freestanding sites. Example: a Facebook application for anonymous gossip, Socialmoth has been driving traffic to its previously launched Socialmoth.com.

However, Slide also tells us that they’ve been seeing double-digit growth to Slide.com for months — that site whent from 117 million unique viewers in April to 129 million in May; Facebook’s platform didn’t launch until late May. Also, HotorNot.com has been undergoing some major changes over the past couple of months.

Each of these companies make money by running ads on their freestanding sites. They are also already experimenting with new ways to monetize both in and out of Facebook.

RockYou, for example, has been running ads in Facebook, within its casual gaming application “Games.” Slide, meanwhile is working on big plans to use the data it collects about what its users like in order to develop better tools for predicting other things they will like.

Then again, some sites don’t seem to care. iLike is another company with both leading Facebook apps and a quality, free-standing site. Its chief executive, Ali Partovi, says he doesn’t seek to drive traffic to iLike.com from Facebook. That’s because ads in Facebook may in fact be more targeted and thus more lucrative. Facebook pages include basic personal information on people, such as age, location, gender. To this end, iLike has made changes to its free-standing site that it knows will slow growth in order to boost growth on Facebook.

This data also justifies these companies’ land-grab approach to Facebook. Each has been launching as many apps as possible, cross-selling their users internally between their own applications to drive up overall growth, and buying other applications or hiring those applications’ developers into their companies.

It also may add more fuel to the fire driving many developers to build applications within Facebook. (For a more heart-on-sleeve explanation of how it makes developers feel, see this post.)

So what’s happening on other sites that these companies are pulling in users from, such as Myspace? RockYou’s traffic throughout all other social networks has been holding steady “in comparison to Facebook where it has been exploding,” company chief executive Lance Tokuda told us.

Where does this leave Facebook? Are these companies driving additional traffic to Facebook through their sites and their apps? Facebook tells us this is may be one of many factors. It is now at 32 million active users, and still doubling every six months — it attributes its recent growth not only to the platform launch, but becoming more of a hit with international audiences (London recently overtook Toronto as the city with the most Facebook users). It has also been introducing ways to more easily import contacts from other sites. For example, its AOL contact list importer, which was introduced only earlier this month.

updated

LinkedIn, the Mountain View Calif. business social networking site, has created a new feature that lets you see who is viewing your profile.

The feature was frequently requested by LinkedIn’s users. The company has tried to balance transparency with privacy concerns, with the result that the feature is limited in its usefulness.

For instance, I’ve had twenty people view my profile over the last month (see screen-shot below), and the list includes people from the “Porter Novelli” public relations firm and “Draper Fisher Jurvetson,” a VC firm. It shows that the person from Porter Novelli is an “account supervisor,” narrow enough to provide a smidgeon of relevance for me, but at the same time not enough to identify the individual. If there aren’t at least five people with that title at the company, LinkedIn shows me just the name of the company they’re from. And if there aren’t at least five people at the company, Linked In will just tell me that someone from the “public relations industry” has viewed my profile.

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Ultimately, the “view my profile” feature is best left to dating sites. Dating site HOTorNOT now has a feature where a woman being viewed can see the profile of the guy doing the peeping, and get in touch for a date. See image below left for example, for how HOTorNOt is pushing this feature.

The LinkedIn feature can be found on the right hand side of your home profile page. The feature is not offered, however, if no one has viewed your profile over the last month. If you don’t want anyone to be able to see that you’ve viewed their page, you can change privacy settings here.

Update: Some are asking how to find the LinkedIn feature. See screenshot below of my homepage (with names of my contacts whited out to protect privacy):
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