HOT or Not, the picture rating social network has decided to open up a celebrity blog, hosted by celebrity blogger Zack Taylor.  The blog will focus on celebrity and fashion news.  Within the blog, users will also be asked to fill out polls.

“We are very excited to be working with Zack to bring our valuable audience the content that they crave; both to read and rate,” stated Glenn Graff, the CEO of HOT or NOT, Inc. “With the addition of this content, we are extending our popular interactive rate feature, which has been used to count more than 12 billion votes since the site’s inception.  This addition is another example of how HOT or NOT is evolving by adding new and exciting features that our users can interact with on a daily basis.”

hotornotgossip.com is hosted on TypePad.  HotOrNotGossip.com used to be called isthishappening.com.  Zack Taylor (real name Zack Teperman) was a radio personality that turned into a full-time celebrity blogger.  HotOrNotGossip competes with TMZ, Defamer, PerezHilton, etc.

When I was a Senior at Huron High School in Ann Arbor around 2000-2001, one of the most talked about web sites in my Computer Science AP class was Hot Or Not. You upload a picture of yourself and people will rate whether you’re decent-looking cat or need to take a better angled picture. The site was so successful that other knock-offs started appearing like RateMyMullet, RateMyPoo, Goth Or Not, etc.

Hot Or Not was started by James Hong and Jim Young. The buyers of the company are Avid Life Media and have supposedly paid $20 million for it.  Around May 2007, Hot Or Not was averaging $600,000 per month in revenue made by premium accounts.  Both founders made about $20 million in the years that they were running Hot Or Not.  The founders started averaging 2-3 emails per day saying that they met their spouses on the site.

Hot Or Not was making around $5 million in revenue per year and $2 million in profit.  The site receives roughly 6-7 million unique users per month and 200 million page views.

[Information Source: TechCrunch]