General News

Match Group, parent company of popular dating app Tinder, confirmed to Tech Crunch that the new premium service Tinder Platinum will be launching in Q4 of this year.

Tinder already offers two VIP tiers of service: Plus and Gold. There has been speculation for weeks about Platinum after a UK-based user said an offer popped up for the exclusive service as he was logged in over the web, but he wasn’t able to upgrade.

Tinder CEO Jim Lanzone

Popular dating app Tinder announced that Jim Lanzone, the former head of CBS Interactive, has been named the company’s new CEO.

Lanzone worked at CBS for nine years, including as president and CEO of CBS Interactive. He left CBS last year to join venture-capital firm Benchmark Capital, according to Variety. He replaces Elie Seidman, who headed up OkCupid before taking over Tinder in early 2018.

Dating apps are particularly vulnerable to hackers because of both security flaws and the valuable personal information they store. OkCupid recently confirmed that it had been notified of the potential security risks of its platform and has worked to address the issue.

Luckily, the popular dating app was able to fix the security flaw in about 48 hours, and no user data was compromised. But the nature of the problem was not unique to OkCupid and could potentially put other dating apps at risk too.

According to Engadget, security research firm Checkpoint Research, announced that it had discovered several vulnerabilities in OkCupid’s mobile app and website. The company said that these flaws could have allowed hackers access to private messages and personal addresses in addition to full profile details. In fact, hackers could even send messages from those compromised users’ accounts.

Just a quick note, it looks like Mate1 Social Enterprises Inc. sometime in June has rebranded their flagship dating service Mate1, and renamed it to "eDate". There also looks to be a few design changes and feature updates as well.

All Mate1 members are now eDate members and all Mate1 links redirect to the eDate dating website.

eDate claims 46.5 million members which is up about 16 million members from 6 years ago (when it was Mate1). Mate1 launched back in 2003 and became popular fairly soon afterwards. Unfortunately though in the last 10 years with the rise of dating apps things have not turned in Mate1's favor. This is part of the reason I suspect was for the name change.

As always when a dating service closes (or has a name change) we have left our old Mate1 review up for those who wish to read it. In the future we may plan to do a review of eDate but for now we will hold off and see how it does.

Bumble's Whitney Wolfe Herd

Female-forward dating app Bumble announced a major rebrand for the company as it also celebrated its milestone of reaching 100 million users worldwide. Parent company Magic Labs, which also owns popular dating app Badoo as well as Lumen and Chappy, will now be called Bumble under the direction of CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd.

Together, the Bumble and Badoo apps have a total of 600 million users around the world. Bumble’s app hit its milestone number in July and will look to Badoo for help in expanding its global reach. 

Wolfe Herd took over a year ago as CEO of Magic Labs when former CEO Andre Andreev left in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct at Badoo, the app company he founded, which employees said contributed to a hostile work environment. Herd’s vision is to be more diverse and inclusive when building dating apps and her companies, and to put social justice and gender equality front and center. Wolfe Herd oversees over 750 employees in Austin, London, and Moscow.

Dating app eHarmony announced it has seen an 85% increase in registrations on its UK platform since the coronavirus lockdowns began earlier this year. The increase accounted for new registrations from January – June of this year, compared with the same time period last year.

April and May were especially active, up 50 percent and 48 percent respectively compared to 2019. Interestingly, at the beginning of lockdown in March, there was an 11 percent drop in registration which quickly bounced back. 

As lockdowns have eased in the past couple of months, new registrations for eHarmony have continued to increase. In June, the company saw a 77% year-on-year increase.