Match Group

Tinderly’s tagline is: “Tired of swiping right all day?” Apparently, daters whose thumbs are getting tired of all that repeat motion are demanding an easier way to Tinder. Or at least, that’s what new unofficial Tinder apps like Tinderly are saying.

The new app aims to change the now-“cumbersome” Tinder app with something much more efficient: instead of swiping right one potential date at a time (who has the patience or time to look at each individual photo anyway?) – you can “like” an entire mass of singles near you in mere seconds.

That is, if you are into numbers games when it comes to dating. Men and women have both gravitated to Tinder because of its game-like interface, where they can swipe left if they aren’t interested in someone’s photo and swipe right if they are, and see who matches with them. But more recently, men have figured out a way to game the system, thanks to a few uber-successful Tinder users who have been giving away their secrets.

The more people you like, the more chances you have at getting a date, or getting laid, depending on your goals. So the faster you can “like,” the more competitive (and successful) you can be.

A slew of apps and even Google Chrome extensions have launched recently, all claiming to help in the high-speed Tinder chase, all claiming their technology helps you like users en masse, so you don’t waste all that time trying to get just one match from Tinder.

Tinderly is the latest, offering an interface to view photos of several matches at a time, and allowing you to like 50 matches per swipe.

So will an app like Tinderly take over for Tinder? With competition like Tinderoids, Botinder, and others, it’s hard to say. Other apps are cutting straight to the chase, too - allowing you to say “yes” to hundreds of matches in mere seconds. Marketing is going to be key for who remains competitive, but Tinder-compatible apps aren’t really differentiating themselves at the moment. They all seem to offer the same high-speed technology, which is geared more towards men, not women. Why not think about what female Tinder users want in an app – if only to capture a different market?

Reviews for Tinderly have been mixed, with some users claiming that the only thing you are able to do with Tinderly is swipe left or right for multiple users, but you’re unable to message or look at profiles. Others have been happy with its efficiency.

Tinderly is available only for iOS, not for Android phones.

By now, you’ve probably heard of Tinder even if you haven’t already tried it. The app has taken the dating world by storm, mostly because of its easy access through your phone, simple set-up, and the sheer number of people using it. Tinder makes it seem like dating options are endless.

But accessing Tinder through your phone and looking through each individual match takes way too much time, at least according to some daters. Botinder intends to resolve this problem by offering a desktop version of Tinder, where you can see several potential dates at once.

Developers are launching new unofficial Tinder apps and complementary extensions regularly, just to capture this fast-growing market and capitalize on it with the latest and greatest in dating technology, or at least establishing their own marketing spin. Botinder is an unofficial Google Chrome Extension that allows you to like and dislike Tinder users even faster than you can using the official app. And if there’s one thing Tinder users need, it’s speed. Swiping left and right through each individual candidate is way too time-consuming.

There is a strategy to Tinder which makes technology like Botinder appealing, at least for the guys. By saying “yes” to as many women as possible as quickly as possible, you greatly improve your chances of getting matched (or laid). For the women, it’s a bit different. They tend to be much more discerning, turning down potential matches a lot more often than accepting. With Botinder, they too can dislike matches more quickly, making the process more efficient for everyone.

According to website Business Insider, creating a desktop version of Tinder has been a popular request for a long time. Typically, users had been downloading an Android emulator to run a version of the app, but now this is a much easier way to run it on your laptop, for those who aren’t quite so tech-saavy.

Botinder sorts users by row, allowing you to organize your matches so you can compare or view photos several at a time. There is also a “Booster” function where you can choose “like automatically” and Botinder will start liking every Tinder user near you – multiple people a second – so you can’t really even see who you are liking. But that’s not really the point – it’s actually playing a numbers game with dating. It would take weeks of being a dedicated Tinder app user before you got the kind of instant matching success that is likely with Botinder.

The real question is: will Botinder improve the overall dating experience, or just add to the noise and confusion?

For more information on service this Chrome Extension works with you can read our Tinder page.

I could say something about how hard IAC/InterActiveCorp is trouncing the competition, but…um… It hardly has any competition. The media conglomerate, helmed by Barry Diller, has been killing it in the online dating realm for years and shows no signs of stopping.

Thanks to its two massive dating sites, Match.com and OkCupid, IAC was already the biggest player in the game when it decided to shake things up last December by creating a special division for its online dating holdings called the Match Group.

This year, IAC has made more powerful strides in its quest to dominate online dating. It increased its majority stake in Tinder, the mobile app at the top of the mobile dating heap, and acquired most of the Brooklyn-based dating site HowAboutWe.

Slowly but surely, IAC has bought its way into the dating market. By the end of 2013, IAC reportedly hosted 30 million active users throughout its dating properties, 3.4 million of whom are paying subscribers. The Match Group is now responsible for approximately one quarter of IAC's total revenue. And they're not shy about singing their own praises.

“We are not just the acquirer of choice,” said Sam Yagan, chief executive of the Match Group, “we are the only acquirer.”

Investors, on the other hand, are a little more wary. Analysts are convinced that online dating's growth is likely to slow, despite the fact that the market has never been stronger in the US or abroad. The primary bump in the road is free mobile dating services, which are making it increasingly difficult for other dating services to generate a profit.

Mobile dating now accounts for around 27% of dating site services. As mobile audiences grow, dating sites are finding it challenging to turn those users into paying members. They are also challenged by a crowded market, which becomes more congested all the time as various niche sites pop up. Although many don't last for long, they're still successful in drawing audiences away from larger, more general dating sites.

With that in mind, IAC’s future may lie in Tinder. So far the app has put growth above revenue, but it is estimated that Tinder could eventually earn $75 million a year. First, the company has to figure out how to monetize it without losing users or slowing growth. Yagan is feeling positive about the future.

“It is not a winner take all dynamic,” he said. “There is a lot of concurrent usage. Unlike a car, the majority of online daters use multiple products, so you want to have a portfolio — a multibranded approach.”

One of the most famous posts ever featured on OKCupid’s beloved OkTrends blog was a massive examination of the ways race and ethnicity affect the online dating experience. It was one of the very first OkTrends posts ever made, way back in 2009, but the issues are still relevant today. Writer Christian Rudder has decided to revisit them in an updated post for 2014.

Back in 2009, race and attraction on OkCupid looked like this:

• Non-black men discriminated against black women
• But black men showed little racial preference either way
• All women preferred to date men of their own race
• But otherwise, they consistently discriminated against Asian and black men

So the big question is: has anything changed?

In the last five years, OkCupid users haven’t had any epiphanies of open-mindedness. In fact, Rudder notes, racial bias may have intensified a bit. See the second chart here for a demonstration.

What has noticeably changed are people's answers to match questions like "Is interracial marriage a bad idea?" and "Do you strongly prefer to date someone of your own race?" The percentage of users answering YES to those questions has been slowly trending downwards, although their actual behavior has stayed the same.

This prompts a few other questions, like:

• Are people on OkCupid just racist?
• Is it possible that a small number of users is throwing off the averages?
• Does preferring to date partners of a specific race mean you’re racist?
• Is data from an online dating site even relevant in the real world?

Rudder has all the answers.

• No, OkCupid users are no more or less racist than anyone else. Online dating data shows consistent results where race is concerned, regardless of the dating site in question. The same basic biases can be found everywhere.

• Again, these biases exist throughout the research on race and dating, not just on OkCupid. It therefore highly unlikely that a small portion of OkCupid users are affecting the data in a significant way.
• You don't have control over what foods you like and which you don't, and the same goes for your personal preferences in your dating life. Most everyone has a "type" of some kind, and it probably isn't something you actively chose. However, Rudder writes, "the trend—that fact that race is a sexual factor for so many individuals, and in such a consistent way—says something about race’s role in our society.”
• There are plenty of situations that aren't romantic that still bear a resemblance to dating. Any time you're trying to make an impression on a stranger, you're essentially going on a first date. “Beauty is a cultural idea as much as a physical one,” Rudder explains, “and the standard is of course set by the dominant culture.” So sure…it's just dating data, but it reveals our definition of beauty and that's something that affects everyone, everywhere.

Tinder has become incredibly popular in the last couple of years, thanks to its game-like format of swiping left and right, and to its easy set-up. There’s no time-consuming process of writing a profile and anguishing over what to say in your messages. You cut to the chase: yes or no.

But now, people are looking for easier ways to date than even Tinder can provide. For those daters, there’s a new app for that called Tinderoid, short for Tinder on Steroids.

This app is mainly catering to the male Tinder users and online daters, especially ones who feel they aren’t getting enough matches. With online dating, guys send out mass emails when they aren't getting responses, hoping someone will email back. It increases the odds, at least. With Tinder, guys are adopting the strategy of saying “yes” to every match, and are just swiping right without even looking at photos. They figure if they swipe right to as many candidates as possible, their chances of getting dates (or getting laid) increases significantly.

But all that swiping right can apparently be tiring.

Tinderoid adds features to Tinder that its creators think are missing, one of them being the ability for a user to like everyone in their area. Tinderoid founder Mike (he provides no last name) tells website TechVibes that a user can like as many as 10,000 potential matches in a few seconds.

Then you can skip all that swiping and order a beer, waiting for matches to roll in.

This isn’t the only new feature Tinderoid added. The app also allows users to search for potential matches using keywords, and view multiple results at the same time. So instead of looking at people one by one, you can select a bunch at a time, and again – see who bites.

And while Tinder doesn’t have an iPad app, Tinderoid offers support for the tablet’s larger screen.

According to Mike, the app is currently available for iOS and has been downloaded over 100,000 times. It has over 5,000 five-star reviews on the iTunes store, I’m guessing from its male user base.

Will this be helpful to daters in the long run? Maybe for some guys, but not for most daters. Women tend to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of matches and messages they can get when they are online dating, get frustrated, and stop using the service, and it’s no different with Tinder. Women are still more likely to swipe left, mostly because of tactics like this, where guys tend to always say yes, even if they might not be all that attracted or interested in a particular woman. They are just seeing who they can get.

Tinderoid is only available on iTunes, but the company is working on an Android version. It is free to download, but if you want all ads removed it costs $2.99.

If you were a fan of the OkTrends blog – and let’s be real, who wasn’t? – your day is about to get a little better. Though the brilliant blog is no more, its writer, Christian Rudder, has plenty more to say on the subject of the human side of Big Data. He has just released a new book that explores who we are in a world in which we make an increasing amount of data about ourselves available online.

The book is called Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). Sites like OkCupid collect vast amounts of information on their users in order to provide better service, and in doing so raise some interesting questions. Rudder believes the info isn’t just useful for the websites – he also believes it may change the way we see ourselves.

That being said, he readily admits that data isn’t everything. "Look,” he told NPR's Arun Rath, “there's no way OkCupid, Facebook, Twitter, these sites even added all together can stand in for the entirety of the human condition. People do all kinds of things they don't do online." But it would be silly to let all that data go to waste, wouldn’t it?

Rudder has examined everything from age, to race, to gender, to language, to attraction. His findings are consistently fascinating for both data geeks and non-data geeks alike, such as:

• There is a strong bias against African American users on online dating sites. They are rated lower, receive fewer messages, and are less often replied to than people of other races. Online daters of both genders tend to prefer to date within their own racial or ethnic group.
• Contrary to popular belief, women don’t prefer older men. Until women reach the age of 40, they are more interested in men in their age range. On the other hand, men across the board show a preference for younger women. 20-year-old female users were reliably rated highest by men of all ages.

As fascinating as Rudder’s analysis is, it has its limitations. There are potential hazards to taking consumer data collected for a specific purpose and using it to extract meaning about something else. Data also isn’t necessarily indicative of behavior. In the case of OkCupid’s users, it may measure opinions but not actual actions. Still, Rudder firmly believes collecting this kind of information is worthwhile.

“I definitely think it's good,” he told NPR. “When you put all this stuff together, you're able to look at people in a way that people have never been able to look at people before. ... You have millions and millions of people living their lives through an interface that records what they're doing as they live. ... It's the beginning of, I think, a revolution in how social science and behavioral science are done.”