Dating Services

Recipient
Plenty of Fish

This years Editor's Top Pick - Free award recipient is once again Plenty of Fish (POF). This dating service continues to be one of the top destinations for singles looking to date. POF is most popular with single adults aged 30 and up, including Millennials, Gen-X, Boomers and seniors (over 4 million active users every day).

For a dating service to be considered for this award they must offer the features for free needed to successfully find and communicate with other members. A member has to be able to use the dating service at no cost and be able to successfully arrange dates. All of the popular free dating services offer a paid subscription option, what makes POF different is the amount of features they allow free members to use. When you compare this along with just how popular the service is, then you understand why they are the winner of this award.

Say Allo, a smart dating app that debuted in the United States in 2018, is making its way into the Canadian market. The “relationship discovery” platform harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and a continuous learning algorithm to help singles foster meaningful connections for long-term relationships. The app is now available in Montreal.

Say Allo relies on proprietary SmartSwipe™ technology. By combining AI and face-mapping technologies, SmartSwipe™ learns about your behaviors, interests, preferences. The more time you spend on the app, the more useful knowledge it gleans. SmartSwipe™ is so advanced it can even detect the facial features you prefer in a partner.

Recipient
Christian Dating For Free

The 2020 Top Pick - Christian Award recipient is Christian Dating For Free (CDFF). This dating service has been in business since 2007 and has become the largest dating service for Christians where it is free to view matches and communicate with other members all the time. This Christian dating service supports almost 30 different denominations and the member profiles include information about the members faith and how important their faith is to them. This information is also searchable allowing you to find the right match with very little trouble.

Popular dating apps including Tinder, OkCupid, Happn, and Grindr have come under fire from consumer rights groups and privacy coalitions for sharing personal data of their users with third parties, specifically advertisers.

A study was published this month from the Norwegian Consumer Council that showed 10 apps were collecting sensitive information including a user’s exact location from GPS tracking, sexual orientation, religious and political beliefs, drug use and other information and sharing it with at least 135 different third party companies, according to several reports. Some of those businesses included household names like Google and Facebook, but also lesser-known adtech companies such as OpenX, MoPub, and AppNexus. The study only looked at apps on Android phones, according to NPR.

This type of data collection and sharing violates the European Union’s rules to protect user data online under the General Data Protection Regulation.

Image: Pipsay

Four months after Facebook Dating’s launch, consumer insights platform Piplsay has released a report on the long-awaited feature. Piplsay polled 21,242 Americans to find out how successful Facebook’s foray into online dating has been so far. The short answer: it’s complicated.

Dating was introduced at Facebook’s annual F8 developers’ conference in 2018. After initially launching in a handful of countries abroad, the service finally made its US debut in September 2019. News outlets and dating industry competitors were quick to comment on the launch in exhaustive detail, but it appears that Facebook’s clout and the media’s seemingly-infinite coverage have not been enough to catapult Dating into the industry’s upper echelon.

Dating app Hinge is looking to capitalize on the popularity of its new mascot Hingie. The company just launched an online store selling Hingie-related products, according to AdWeek.

Hinge launched a new marketing campaign in 2019 saying that the dating app was “designed to be deleted” to promote its focus on long-term relationships. The company created TV and web spots featuring a cuddly-looking square named Hingie that proceeds towards its own demise as a couple who meet over Hinge get closer, until they finally delete the app – and Hingie along with it.