Dating Services

MeetMe 3D Face Verification

Can you ever know, with complete certainty, that a match you’ve only communicated with online is who they say they are? Although the number of real singles using dating apps continues to grow, so does the number of bots, scammers, catfishers and other imposters of the digital world. The Meet Group hopes to thwart these scourges in 2020 by introducing ways to enhance authenticity across its portfolio of dating apps, starting with 3D face verification.

The idea of using images to verify a user’s identity is nothing new. Current incarnations of this concept often rely on users submitting selfies in certain poses or holding up a piece of paper that displays a specific code. Once these photos are submitted, a human employee compares the selfie to the uploaded profile photo to confirm the owner’s identity. This method is time-consuming and labor-intensive (and, as The Meet Group CEO Geoff Cook noted in a blog post, “not exactly foolproof”). 

Image: eHarmony

Sex. Politics. Equality. Mental health. Climate change. Commitment. These are the things on couples’ minds in 2020, according to eHarmony’s third annual installment of "The Happiness Index: Love and Relationships in America."

Eight-two percent of American couples say they’re happy in their current romantic relationships (down just slightly from last year’s 83%). Although there’s no exact science to creating a satisfying partnership, surveys like these offer insight into what makes successful couples thrive. Two factors at the top of the list are sex and quality time.

Couples in 2020 are more likely to prioritize sex than couples in 2019. This year’s Happiness Index found that 86 percent of couples who have sex with their partner weekly are happy. The 78 percent of couples who have sex monthly and 66 percent who have sex a few times per year are less happy than their counterparts. But it’s not just sex that matters — couples who focus on both sex and quality time with each other are happier (87 percent) than couples who focus only on sex (69 percent) or quality time (82 percent).

Image: @wongmjane

Dating app Tinder is testing more new features, one of which was briefly disclosed in an earnings call earlier this year by Match Group.

The new features are described as “conversation starters” to help initiate messaging between users and to keep them more engaged. One of the features is a conversational prompt, which encourages users to respond to a question or finish a sentence so that their matches get a better idea of who they are. The second feature allows users to post photos, looping videos and other content that can only be seen by their existing matches, according to Tech Crunch. This is also intended to strike up conversations in a more personal, unique way.

After a tumultuous year that involved an FTC lawsuit, a split from parent company IAC and the departure of CEO Mandy Ginsberg, Match Group has published its fourth quarter and full year financial results for 2019. Total revenue for the company exceeded $2 billion for the first time.

For the third quarter 2019, Match Group shared the following highlights:

• Total Revenue grew 20 percent over the prior year quarter to $547 million
• Average Subscribers increased 19 percent to 9.8 million, up from 8.2 million in the prior year quarter, and ARPU increased 1 cent to $0.59
• Operating income was $180 million, an increase of 19 percent over the prior year quarter
• Adjusted EBITDA increased 22 percent over the prior year quarter to $215 million

Match Group reported annual earnings for 2019, and its star dating app Tinder came out on top with almost $1.2 billion in revenue for the year.

Tinder had on average 5.9 million subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2019, 36 percent more than the previous year according to The Verge. At the same time, Reuters reported in early February that Match Group missed its fourth quarter revenue estimates as subscriber growth on Tinder fell to its lowest since the fourth quarter of 2018, perhaps an early sign of market saturation. 

Grindr’s 2020 is off to a difficult start. In just a few short weeks, Grindr was accused of violating the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) data protection legislation by the Norwegian Consumer Council, found itself the subject of three complaints filed with the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, and was suspended from Twitter’s ad platform as a result. The popular gay dating app is also under investigation by the U.S. House Oversight and Reform subcommittee for doing an inadequate job of screening minors.

Adding to Grindr’s growing list of concerns is new research showing that the company’s Android application was exploited to defraud advertisers. According to a report from Pixalate, the Palo Alto-based fraud detection firm that discovered the scam, the app was used to facilitate a cross-device ad fraud scheme that tricked advertisers into thinking they were purchasing ads on Roku-connected devices. Pixalate named the scheme “DiCaprio” after discovering the A-list Hollywood name used in a file containing some of the malicious code.