Relationships

Popular online dating company Zoosk announced this week the launch of Dating Insights, a new feature on its site that allows members to see a holistic view of their dating activity and preferences culled from Zoosk’s original “behavior-based” matching technology.

Zoosk has long marketed the benefits of its technology, which tracks how users behave on its site and matches them accordingly. For instance, if Zoosk notices that you mostly reach out to bookish guys, then it will start matching you with more literary types. It works for both daters and Zoosk, because the more you use the service, the better (and more curated) your matches will be.

The new feature Dating Insights will offer members information about their own individual dating preferences, and will also aggregate information about members who have shown some interest. The idea is to help you understand your patterns and preferences so you can have a better overall dating experience.

Dating Insights is divided into three sections:

Who Likes You – this feature provides demographics of matches who have shown the most interest in the user, like those of a particular age, body type, education, ethnicity, religion, and whether or not they smoke.

Who You Like – Zoosk sums up your preferences, not based on your profile, but on your behavior. For instance, Zoosk will let you know that “you put more importance on a man’s level of education than most” or “The Lord of the Rings is the book liked most by the men you’re interested in.”

Your Dating Style – this shows how often (and how well) you are using the dating site, and provides tips on how to improve your experience.

It only makes sense that the online dating company would harness its own technology to offer daters insight into how they are dating, since they use it to match daters anyway. But they aren't the first.

OkCupid has used information gathered from its own users as well to shed light on how people date online. Co-founder Christian Rudder analyzed the extensive data the company collected to understand online dating trends and to provide its members with more services they want (for a fee) – such as the ability to rate dates and filtering out people who don’t physically match your ideal. eHarmony also provides insight to daters as part of its package of services, though it is more personalized. eHarmony offers a “profile book” once you have finished with its extensive questionnaire, where you can find out what your strengths and weaknesses are as a dater and in a relationship.

Helping daters understand the online dating experience and what they want isn’t new, but hopefully the more opportunities daters have to see this kind of information, the better their experiences will be.

For more about this service you can read our Zoosk review.

Bravo’s latest reality TV project veered away from the sensational (unlike VH1’s “Naked Dating” which garnered a lot of unwarranted attention). Instead, The Singles Project – dubbed as a “real-time docuseries” on dating - followed eight singles in their search for love, while viewers informed them of what they were doing right and wrong.

Participants had to be willing to be critiqued, so I give them a lot of credit for their courage in putting their love lives and themselves out there on public display. There seemed to be a common goal among them: they wanted to find love, and were more than willing to try something different, to see what they could change to make their dating lives better.

The Singles Project is definitely not the well-choreographed stuff of hit dating shows like The Bachelor. There were no roses, no eliminations, no over-the-top romantic gestures. It was more real-life dating than most of the shows out there.

In a recent interview, the stars of the show talked about their experiences, what they learned, and how dating in front of a camera changed how they viewed themselves and also how they date. Some found love, some walked away still single, but according to Bravo, they say they “consider their efforts to be successful rather than shameful.”

“I learned that I’m a pretty particular person and that I have a tendency to drive people away at times,” said Brian when Bravo asked what he’d gained from the experience. “But on top of that I’ve learned that it’s probably caused by my desire to not settle. My desire to find The One and my desire to find The One that I deem to be my equal and the person that I want to grow old with and love forever and be happy with.”

For Tabasum, the show taught him to open up. “The thing that I learned about myself the most is that I have become so much better at communicating and telling the person that I am dating exactly how I feel—and that was kind of a struggle for me before.”

The cast members who ended up together learned a few things about themselves too. Ericka, who ended up falling for cast mate Lee, admitted: “I learned that I’m a bigger control freak that I thought I was originally.” While it’s too early in their relationship to tell, her awareness of her controlling nature might help her have a different kind of relationship than the ones she’s experiences in the past.

The big takeaway is that we all have things to learn when it comes to relationships. We can all improve our communication. The key is to never stop trying, to never give up.

Online dating sites like OkCupid and Plenty of Fish have had a free model for a long time, which has managed to expand their membership databases and make them tough contenders with paid sites such as Match.com and eHarmony. But now that free dating apps like Tinder have entered the picture and taken the dating world by storm, the paid dating sites have seen not only a decline in membership, but also in revenues.

Is online dating on its way out?

According to a recent article in The Economist, paid online dating sites have reason to worry. In the article, The Economist points out Cupid, who runs subscription-based dating websites such as Cupid.com, UniformDating.com, and LoveBeginsAt.com, announced a $4.9 million loss in the first 6 months of 2014, up 20% from last year. The number of members has dropped, too. At the end of 2012, Cupid’s sites had 113,000 paying members, but by June 2014, they had just 48,000.

While this is a disturbing trend for online dating sites like Cupid – which haven’t really taken off like other paid sites Match.com and eHarmony – it could weed out many contenders in the online dating market over the next couple of years. However in contrast to Cupid's earnings, eHarmony recently reported incredible subscriber growth and better earnings than they have seen in years, due to focusing on long-term relationships and technology that they market as extremely valuable for finding the “right” match.

But what about popular free dating apps and websites like Tinder and old-timer OkCupid? They have attracted users because of their easy set-up and accessibility. They have made online dating less intimidating, (although a little more sketchy according to some users). Are they responsible for the decline in companies like Cupid? 

Not necessarily. Even free apps and websites aren’t so free anymore.

There has been a shift for the free dating apps and online sites to offer “freemium” services – that is, additional features to the basic service but for a price. In the current online dating market, revenue growth needs to happen for investors to remain interested, and that means charging for services once the user base is built. Tinder recently announced that it will launch a premium paid service in early November, while the basic features of the app will still be free. OkCupid started with a freemium model a while ago, charging users who want to filter profiles according to user preferences, or to be able to review and see reviews of other members.

Still others like eHarmony are adding more personalized matchmaking services at a very high price – thousands per year – for those who want a relationship but would like someone else to do the heavy lifting. eHarmony has not reported numbers to see the success of this particular service.

So what does the future look like for online dating? One thing is for sure: free models likely won’t last forever.

I've written before about how much I love Halloween, especially the horror movies that inevitably fill my Netflix queue each fall.

I've heard a fair deal of horror film criticism over the years, from “It just gives crazy people ideas” to “There must be something wrong with anyone who actually likes watching this stuff.” I always take it in stride, but this year, finally, I have a rebuttal: horror films are dating advice in disguise.

Really? Yes, really.

Confession: Despite being the ripe, not-that-old age of 26, I'm still a sucker for Halloween. There's something I just can't help loving about a holiday that encourages dressing up and eating candy. And then there's my very favorite part of the Halloween season: the scares.

From the horror movies to the haunted houses, something in me demands to be scared and loves every second of it. But there are a few times terror is not on my to-do list, and online dating is definitely one of them. Fright on a first date? No thanks.

It seems obvious, but humanity is a strange and wonderful thing and...well...it turns out not everyone feels the same way I do. There are those who want their romance to come with a side of scares, and there are dating sites that cater to their special need for fear.

Steve Harvey has been dishing out dating advice to women quite successfully over the years, because he knows what it was like to be a man playing around without really wanting to commit. His book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, was a best-seller among the hundreds of dating advice books to hit the market. Now, he’s teamed up with Match.com to create a dating site called “Delightful” that competes directly with marriage-minded sites like eHarmony.

"Women want to date with the goal that it turns into a relationship," Harvey told The Chicago Tribune in a recent article. "It kind of breaks my heart when I have women on my show who've been on 50, 100 dates. Something's not right if you have to go out with 100 people."

This comment made me wonder - has Steve Harvey actually tried online dating? Tinder? Most of us have been on at least 50 dates, if not more. I don’t think there’s something wrong with people dating in those numbers, because there are so many opportunities now to meet people.

But I do agree that most daters don’t really invest in getting to know the person sitting in front of them on any given date. There are too many options to be that committal, so they typically move fast. Steve Harvey’s comment rings true when we consider how much time we invest with such little return. I write about this in my book Date Expectations.

Website Delightful aims to change those statistics, with a little help from Harvey. Sam Yagan, CEO of the Match Group, said in a statement, "To take [Steve’s] power and his outlook on relationships and his views on love and combine that with the technology and algorithms that we know to work creates a powerful new category." In other words, the celebrity factor is key in the marketing of the new site.

Others have tried this before. Take the host of The Bachelor Chris Harrison, who last year launched a video-based dating app called At First Sight, hoping to capitalize on his celebrity. It hasn’t quite taken off like Tinder, despite its appealing premise of seeing a short video of potential dates, rather than just viewing photos.

Harvey and Match expect their approach to be different. After all, Harvey is a dating advice coach with his own TV show, and has helped many women find lasting relationships. He is an expert, not just a celebrity.

"We're going to help women get themselves out of the hunting game," Harvey said. "And we're going to make a concerted effort to get men on here who are looking more seriously for a relationship instead of just dating a lot of people."

As for how they will compete with successful marriage-minded sites like eHarmony, Yagan is a little unclear. Instead, he compares Delightful to OkCupid and Tinder, which are known more for their hook-up appeal, saying that at the end of the day when people want relationships, they will look to Delightful instead.