China

It’s been a wild month for Sina Weibo. On Friday April 13, the Chinese social media network unveiled plans to delete all posts relating to gay culture as part of a three-month “cleanup” effort. A mere three days later, the company announced it would reverse the ban following an outpouring of anger from users.

Sina Weibo initially described the campaign as a removal of images, videos, text, and cartoons related to pornography, violence, and homosexuality. "This is to further ensure a clear and harmonious society and environment," the network said in its statement, as well as to comply with stricter cybersecurity laws enacted by President Xi Jinping.

But to many users, the announcement had sinister underpinnings. Tens of thousands took to the social network to express outrage at the campaign’s discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in China, an issue that persists more than two decades after the country decriminalized homosexuality.

After purchasing a majority stake in Grindr last year, ​​​​​​a Chinese gaming company has acquired the rest of the popular dating app for gay men. The acquisition means a major payday for the company, but China experts and former intelligence officials fear it could spell privacy problems for users.

Kunlun Group purchased 60 percent of Grindr in January 2016 for $93 million. The Chinese firm has now acquired the remaining stake for $152 million, according to stock filings, which some believe puts the Chinese government in a position to demand sensitive data on the app’s users, including those who are not Chinese citizens.

Kunlun Group initially indicated that Grindr founder Joel Simkhai would stay on as CEO, but following the completion of the deal, Simkhai has left the company with no explanation for his departure.

Dating apps run by 21 firms in China have been shut down amid allegations of fraud affecting hundreds of thousands of customers.

According to the Modern Express newspaper, police have arrested more than 600 suspects operating across 13 provinces after it was revealed that some of their messages purporting to be from female users were in fact being automatically generated by computer programs.

The investigation began in August 2017, after one app was suspected of fraudulently charging customers to view pornographic videos that did not exist. When users complained, customer service representatives were instructed to invent excuses such as a malfunctioning mobile version or poor internet speed. Users would then be charged again each time they tried to view the imaginary content.

On September 7, Su Xiangmao, the 37-year-old multi-millionaire entrepreneur behind a Skype-like app called WePhone, jumped to his death from the 15th floor of his Beijing apartment building. He left digital suicide notes on Google Plus and Sina Weibo, as well as a disturbing welcoming message on WePhone: "Company owner is forced to death by his evil wife Zhai Xinxin, and the app will stop working." The message included Zhai's phone number and her national ID information.

Su’s notes told a tragic tale of marriage gone wrong. He met his 29-year-old ex-wife in March on Jiayuan.com, China’s largest online dating website, where both were VIP members with "verified" personal profiles. In the months that followed, Su spent 13 million yuan ($1.96 million) on Zhai, showering her with gifts like a Tesla Model X and a seaside apartment in South China's Hainan Province. They married in June.

One month later, they divorced. Su agreed to pay Zhai 10 million yuan as part of their settlement. If he failed to do so, he wrote, Zhai threatened to report his business, which operated in a legal grey area, and his tax evasion to police.

Dating app Momo, China’s answer to Tinder, has been a popular dating app among the country’s singles with a record 75 million users. But in recent weeks, Momo seems to be expanding out of the dating business and into something more lucrative.

For its latest update, Momo executives decided to supplement the app's location-based dating service that matches people through swiping and messaging. Now, the app offers a live-streaming function, catering to music lovers and even musicians themselves. The update allows users to watch their favorite musicians perform live, as well as giving them the ability to interact with the musicians.

To coincide with LGBT Pride Month in the United States, China’s most popular gay social networking app announced last month a major milestone. Blued, founded in 2012, has completed its latest rounds of investor financing and now has a value of $300 million.

Blued claimed more than 27 million registered users globally as a February 2016, with overseas users accounting for more than 20 percent of the total. Not only does that make it China’s biggest gay dating app and bigger than Grindr, it also makes Blued one of the top social networking apps on the App Store.

Geng Le, CEO of Blued, said the company has seen significant revenue growth, particularly in the first half of 2016 when it started to make a profit. The app primarily makes money from advertising and live streaming, where audiences can tune into live-streaming video broadcasts and send virtual gifts to the broadcasters.

"With the funding, we plan to speed up our international expansion, and localize our products overseas,” Geng said. “We will promote the marketing and branding, and set up more offices overseas. We also plan to hire more competitive staff, and we will pay them a considerable salary."

Blued currently operates offices abroad in the United States and Thailand. The app has been translated into nine languages and its users hail from more than 190 countries and regions.

What has made Blued so explosively popular? As one of the earliest Chinese-language, geo-dating apps for gay singles in the region, Blued got an early foothold in the market. And given that China’s population is 1.3 billion - 1.7 million of which are estimated to fall on the LGBT spectrum - that market is potentially enormous.

“The gay business is a piece of virgin territory in China, and we hope to become a leader of this lucrative market,” Geng Le told China Daily this week. “The substantial spending ability of gays and the funding support we got indicate the strong power of the so-called pink economy.”

For comparison, consider Grindr. As the world’s other best-known gay dating app, Grindr was valued at $155 million earlier this year when it sought its most recent investment in China. Grindr has more than two million daily active users, according to a factsheet from June 2015. Blued has over three million.

The numbers bode well for Blued, which is preparing to shift its strategy in light of the good news. Last November, Geng Le said that Blued was aiming for a stock market flotation within five years. China Daily reports that the company now hopes to achieve it within the next one to two years, though the location of the listing is not yet known.