Photo: desi.italy at Flickr. Some rights reserved.
I was at a union meeting last night (talking about citizen journalism - evidently the conversation has not moved on...) where one speaker talked about the Ruff or Buff feature on the Orange website. An exec had told him that this was the most popular feature on the site by some way - a rather underwhelming take-off of Hot or Not - and isn't it a sad state of affairs that Rough or Buff has more traffic than the news section.
Well no, not really - because I don't think most web users or Orange customers, for that matter, really want to get their news from Orange. They want established news brands. So no surprises there.
So it was more than a little timely to come in this morning and find out that Hot or Not is selling for $20m.
Let's not confuse Hot or Not with journalism, citizen or otherwise, but this is a site that makes a very respectable $2m profit a year from ads, virtual gifts and a premium service. It's not the most highbrow site in the world but the original site was a great idea, simple and well executed.
The news industry might not want to stoop to the lows of Hot or Not, but perhaps a little flexibility and creativity when it comes to new formats might just come up with some equally compelling - an underpin all that expensive journalism. It's only updating that dating vertical, after all.
Source: TechCrunch
