OkCupid

Is OkCupid the latest dating platform to fall victim to hackers? That depends on who you ask.

A news story from TechCrunch reports that an OkCupid user reached out to the tech news site after a hacker broke into his OkCupid account, reset his password and changed the email address on file. OkCupid instantly accepted the address change, he said, without sending an email asking for confirmation that the change was correct. When he contacted OkCupid’s customer service about the issue, he was told the company was “not able to provide any details about accounts not connected to your email address.”

The user is now locked out of his account with no way to reset his password and regain access. Making matters worse, the hacker began harassing him with “strange text messages” from his phone number that was taken from one of his private messages.

Match Group announced that it has fully acquired dating app Hinge, owning 100 percent of the company along with other high-profile brands like Tinder and OkCupid. This news comes on the heels of Match Group’s announcement that it exceeded revenue expectations in the last quarter of 2018, causing its stock to rise.

Previously, Match Group stock had been downgraded from hold to buy by Deutsch Bank analysts. But with the earnings report, its stock climbed more than 5 percent.

Part of the appeal of Match Group to investors is that it has acquired a host of popular dating apps, including Hinge. The app has been through a rebrand over the last year, focusing on attracting more serious daters.

Recipient of Gold
Tinder

Recipient of Silver
POF

Recipient of Bronze
OkCupid

The 2019 Dating Sites Reviews Single's Choice Award poll was launched in the afternoon of October 1^st, 2018. It ran for 3 months and then closed for voting on December 31^st, 2018. 437 people cast their votes in the poll. The poll asks the following question:

Which dating app or site would you recommend for the Dating Sites Reviews Single's Choice Award?

Voters could choose 1 dating service from a selection of 10 of the top dating services in 2018 as selected by the Editors. For this award the top voted dating service for the above question receives the Gold, second place gets Silver, and for third, Bronze.

In previous years for this award we had split the poll into 2 questions asking which free and then which paid dating service the voter would recommend. This year we decided on one question which the selection includes both free and paid services. We feel this better reflects the current online dating industry. This year also marked a fairly big change in the results. The top 3 results differed by only 5% in votes. The Gold recipient only differed by less than 10% with the service which came in last place (10^th). In previous polls the difference is around 30%. The race for the most recommended dating service was very tight this year.

The recipient of the 2019 Single's Choice Gold Award is Tinder. Tinder received almost 17% of the vote which works out to 73 votes. Last year Tinder came in second of the free services, so this is a step up for them.

The recipient of the 2019 Single's Choice Silver Award is POF (Plenty of Fish). Another free dating service in the top 3. POF drops to second place this year with almost 13% of the vote (56 votes). This is just 4% less than the Gold recipient.

The recipient of the 2019 Single's Choice Bronze Award is OkCupid. It was a tight race between Silver and Bronze this year with only a 1.5% difference in votes. OkCupid got 11.5% of the votes which works out to 50 votes exactly.

OkCupid announced that it has rolled out a new feature to allow users to prominently display their pronoun preferences in their profiles. This is an important step for the industry as a whole in acknowledging and including people who identify outside of traditional binary male/ female gender roles.

OkCupid users have had the option to include pronoun preference information in their bio (or “self summaries” section), so potential dates know how they identify. This wasn’t optimal for many daters, since not every potential match takes the time to read through a profile. Making it a feature and giving it a dedicated space allows users who identify outside of traditional gender norms more inclusivity in the online dating experience.

I have just been reviewing the different statistics for the popular dating services and I found that OkCupid still does list a few live statistics on their About page. I was originally going to write this post in July but I just got too it now. One surprising thing I notice was in July they had listed 57 employees but now only 54 are listed. All the other statistics have stayed pretty much the same. They still list 1 million plus OkCupid apps installed per week and 7.3 million messages sent a day (I assume this is the website and apps combined). These 2 stats are the same since the last time I checked in 2016.

OkCupid also list in real-time the number of people online using their service at any given time. This number changes constantly and is lower in the early morning and higher in the evening. It is also higher on the weekends when compared to during the week. The average number after taking several samples is about 100,000 people online.

For More information on this dating service you can read our OkCupid review and check out our complete OkCupid statistics page.

Match Group, the parent company of popular dating apps such as Tinder, OkCupid, and PlentyofFish, reported second quarter earnings of $421 million, exceeding industry analyst expectations.

The rise in profits was thanks to its star app Tinder, which gained an additional 300,000 subscribers in Q2 alone, and has seen a record 3.8 million subscribers to date. Match Group expects to earn $1.72 billion this year, with Tinder expected to exceed $800 million in revenue, according to Fortune Magazine. Match Group’s subscribers for all apps total about 7.7 million.

“Retention and conversion were a bit stronger than we thought they would be,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg told website MarketWatch.