Match Group

Are you single and do you love to travel? Delta Airlines is hoping so, because it just launched a marketing campaign with Tinder to promote its worldwide destinations to adventure-loving singles.

Delta commissioned artist Andrew Rae and advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy New York to create photo murals of several enviable travel destinations for people to use as backdrops for taking selfies. Rae painted funny and hip illustrations alongside each exotic scene. (The airline commissioned this project specifically in New York.)

The vibrant and colorful backdrops are on a brick building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, so singles can take pictures with their phones, upload the pics to their Tinder profiles, and declare themselves jetsetters without actually traveling to the destinations. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek and offers daters a new way of promoting themselves over the dating app.

Online dating companies are thinking outside the box, thanks to the flooded app market and growing consumer base. Popular dating apps Tinder and Hinge are now offering wedding competitions to users who meet through each of their respective dating apps.

Tinder announced that it would offer to pay $100K towards the cost of an LGBTQ wedding for a couple who met through the app. The move was a nod in honor of Pride Month in June.

Tinder launched a new feature last year to include “transgender” as a gender choice, along with almost 40 other options with which users can choose to identify. The company saw an additional 250,000 new matches made as a result of the inclusion, and now, they want to encourage one lucky LGBTQ couple to tie the knot. Tinder also discovered via a recent study that these users are more likely to want a serious relationship, rather than a hook-up. According to an article in Elite Daily, the large majority of gay users (66.4 percent) and lesbian users (62.1 percent) agree that using Tinder will lead to a long-term relationship.

Online dating is one of the most popular ways to meet people, thanks to free apps and services like Plenty of Fish and Tinder. But many daters opt to be more particular in their search, and are willing to pay for a more curated experience, whether it’s online dating, matchmaking, or even “casual dating” services, like escorts.

According to a new study done by Statista for the Digital Market Outlook (DMO), the United States has the largest share of adults worldwide who are actively paying for a dating service. More than a quarter – 26 percent - of daters in the U.S. are paying for dating services, followed by the UK at almost 21 percent and Germany with 17 percent.

Daters in France, China and Saudi Arabia were the least likely to pay for a dating service according to the study, with 13%, 11% and 5% of daters respectively who were active paying customers at the time of the study.

Online dating skeptics have plenty of reasons for opting out of modern singles’ favorite way to date, but here’s one they probably hadn’t thought of yet: personal photos being stolen for use in AI experiments.

A user of Kaggle, a platform for machine learning and data science competitions which was recently acquired by Google, exploited Tinder’s API to scrape 40,000 profile photos from Bay Area users of the dating app. He used them to train artificial intelligence, and also organized the images into a downloadable facial data set called People of Tinder.

Stuart Colianni, the creator of the data set, described it as a “simple script to scrape Tinder profile photos for the purpose of creating a facial dataset.” He also described Tinder as offering “near unlimited access to create a facial data set” and said his scraping the app offers “an extremely efficient way to collect such data.”

See how Bucket List works

We’re headed into summer, and online dating company Match conducted a survey to assess how many singles feel more adventurous this time of year. The results are in – 85% said that a potential date’s sense of adventure was an attractive quality, and 76% said they’d like to try something new in the coming months.

In fact, the results were overwhelmingly clear – singles crave a sense of adventure. Seventy-three percent said they would actually be more attracted to someone if they had a bucket list item in common, and 66% of singles said they would likely check off one of their bucket list items on a date.

Because of this, Match decided to create a new feature on their dating app called ‘Bucket List’ to highlight potential dates’ sense of adventure.

IRL - In Real Life

Why won’t my dating app connections respond to my messages? Is my job turning off potential partners? Is it honest to photoshop your dating app pics? Should I Google the people I meet on dating apps before going out with them? Is meeting in real life over?

These are some of the questions Hinge is tackling in its latest venture, a digital magazine called IRL. Launched last month, IRL is updated daily with advice drawn from the heaps of data Hinge has collected on users over the years.

Justin McLeod, Hinge's founder & CEO, told Mashable, “Our Member Experience team constantly receives emails from members asking for a wide-range of dating app advice.” He said it was clear that “singles wanted a safe space to ask dating app related questions and receive reliable, data-backed advice.”