Mike Arrington is reporting at TechCrunch that the dating site Hot or Not has been acquired for $20-million (apparently in cash) by a Toronto-based company called Avid Life Media. Since I had never heard of Avid Life Media before, I found this kind of interesting, so I looked around a bit to see what I could find out about it. There’s not a lot of history about the company, but it bought another dating site — Ashley Madison — last fall for an undisclosed sum. Ashley Madison (friends tell me) is a site that specializes in catering to married people who want to find partners other than their spouses.
My impression — and it’s only an impression — is that Avid Life Media somehow emerged from AshleyMadison.com, since Avid’s current president, Noel Biderman, has also been the chief operating officer of AshleyMadison since February of 2007 (according to his LinkedIn profile). Before that he was a vice-president at JumpTV.com for about three months, and before that it says he worked for an Internet company called Move. Avid also bought a Toronto-based green network called FiveLimes last summer for an undisclosed sum.