Match Group

Plenty of Fish is keeping things fresh with an updated look for its iOS and Android apps, and a brand new feature designed to help singles get the conversation started.

PoF is all about the chat right now. After releasing Conversation Nation, the largest study of singles and conversation ever conducted, the dating service is putting communication front and center.

Data from the study found that 74 percent of single Americans believe small talk is worthwhile because it helps break the ice and provides basic information about a potential date. The majority of singles also believe a great conversation is the top indicator of a successful date. However, 61 percent of singles believe the rise in technology usage has impacted our ability to have meaningful, face-to-face conversations, and 65 percent say conversation is a lost art.

Video is in. After the explosive success of Snapchat, competitor social networks scrambled to launch Stories features of their own. Instagram’s copycat proved so popular that Instagram Stories usage surpassed all Snapchat activity in April 2017.

Yet despite the success stories, online dating remains mysteriously absent from that race to innovate. On the surface, the search for love seems like an ideal candidate for video - if a picture on a profile is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth several times that - but few dating services have dared incorporate video into their features.

Hinge and Lively hope to be at the forefront of the eventual, seemingly inevitable, push to make video a regular part of the digital dating experience. Lively, a video-based social app, recently announced the release of augmented live video chat, while Hinge debuted a feature to add video clips to profiles.

The new features of Tinder Gold!

Tinder introduced swiping to the dating app world and online dating has never been the same. Now, the company is striving to evolve beyond its image as a hookup app and deliver more value to its customers through its premium services and new features.

The latest offering is Tinder Gold – a premium service (as is Tinder Plus) that allows members to see who has swiped right on their profiles in advance. This allows users to eliminate the guesswork involved in whether or not their matches already “liked” them before they make a decision to “like” them back.

According to Tinder, it will also speed up the process of finding a match, because you aren’t waiting around to see if someone you’re interested in swipes right on you, which can be a big time suck in online dating.

It’s been a whirlwind week in the online dating world.

First, Badoo launched a feature to help singles hook up with their celebrity crushes… well, almost. A new search feature uses facial recognition technology to match users with dates who look like their favourite celebs. Among the most searched-for famous faces so far are Kim Kardashian West, Justin Bieber, and Robert Pattinson.

“People are looking for quick, fast, easy ways to start connections,” said Badoo's Miles Norris to the BBC, “and if the way someone looks is a good onboarding to that, then we want to make it easy for them.”

Match is one of the oldest names in the online dating industry, but its strongest asset is a much younger name in the biz: Tinder.

As the stigma around online dating fades, the industry is experiencing rapid growth, particularly in the Millennial segment. Pew Research estimates that use of online dating sites among young adults (ages 18-24) nearly tripled from 2013 to 2016, rising from 10 percent to 27 percent, and opening a major opportunity for Match Group to expand its market share.

Match owns Tinder, the leading dating app for Millennial singles. By placing the majority of its focus on growing Tinder, Match Group hopes to secure its position as the digital match-maker of future generations.

How Match Stories Works

One of the oldest players in the online dating industry is betting on the next big thing since swiping. Match plans to launch a new video feature for its dating app this summer.

Match is still a brand name, and it retains a large database of users (though its demographic skews a little older – the company captures a large portion of daters thirty-five and older, many of them divorced and getting back into dating). But Match is looking to broaden its horizons, and the dating game along with it, by focusing on video for product development, according to a report by Mashable.

The video feature, dubbed Match Stories, varies a bit from the old-school video dating services and other video dating apps that haven’t quite taken off. Instead of stilted introductions from users who aren't used to being in front of a camera, Match Stories allows its customers to be a bit more creative. They can incorporate video and images into a 60-second “story,” and use the voiceover tool to explain to potential dates what they are seeing.