Online Dating

MeetMe Battles

The Meet Group, a portfolio of brands in the mobile social networking and entertainment space, is rolling out a new feature called Battles on its MeetMe and Skout apps.

“Battles brings an exciting competitive dynamic to Live, and we are thrilled to bring this new feature to our users,” said Geoff Cook, CEO of The Meet Group. “We believe that the addition of Battles will contribute to our growing video revenue run-rate, which exceeded $62 million annualized, based on the month of November, up from the $55 million number we reported in October. Momentum in video revenue has continued into December, and this past weekend we achieved the highest video revenue day in our history.”

Battles is The Meet Group’s latest bid to harness the power of streaming video. The feature brings together two livestreamers and their audiences for a live showdown. The competitors can challenge each other in a variety of categories ranging from music, to dance, to comedy and more. Each battle lasts only a few minutes. The winner is the streamer who earns the most diamonds by receiving gifts from viewers during the battle.

Match has just launched a new feature called the Super Match Badge (currently in the UK only), allowing women to award men who check off all parts of Match’s profile and behavior requirements. The purpose of the badge is for women to immediately identify great candidates who they might want to meet.

Match is making an effort to appeal to women who have had to deal with less-than-tolerable behavior from men over dating apps. Many online daters have complained about ghosting and sending inappropriate messages and photos, and this is Match’s way of addressing the issue.

It’s also a good strategy for men who use dating apps – you can set yourself apart from the crowd.

These so-called Match Heroes who receive the Super Match Badge have to complete many steps in the process, including:

Facebook is closing out a troubling year with even more bad news. On December 14, the company revealed that a software bug had exposed the photos of millions of users to outside developers. This latest privacy misstep reportedly involves up to 1500 apps by 876 developers and may have affected as many as 6.8 million users.

For an app to be affected by the bug, it had to have been approved by Facebook to access the photos API as well as authorized by users to access their photos. A spokeswoman declined to provide a list of developers who had access to the photos to The Guardian, saying only that Facebook does not think all of them took advantage of that access while it was available.

Tomer Bar, an engineering director at Facebook, explained the details of the bug in a post on the company’s developer blog.

Dating app Hinge wants its users to meet in person over cuffing season, specifically over burritos from Chipotle.

Hinge partnered with the popular Mexican food chain to offer free burritos for its users from December 13-31, the height of cuffing season when people tend to hook up during the cold days of winter. What better time to share a hot, delicious meal with someone you met over a dating app?

Hinge users get a buy one/ get one free deal for burritos, salad, or an order of tacos, according to website Bustle.

Bumble made headlines this year when it announced plans for an expansion into India. Though the Indian market is large and tech-savvy, western dating apps have struggled to find a foothold. India’s traditional approach to courtship has raised concerns about whether online dating has a place in a society with a history of arranged marriages, class divides, and parental oversight of relationships.

A recent survey by Indian dating app Woo reveals the ways centuries of conservative values continue to affect singles in the country. According to the data, the gender divide on dating apps is immense. Only 26 percent of users are female, while 74 percent are male - in other words, there are nearly three times as many men as women on online dating platforms in India.

For comparison, women are slightly more than 40 percent of the user base on dating apps like Bumble and Tinder in the United States. Users in the US also differ from users in India in their reasons for joining dating services. Many Americans are comfortable openly using dating platforms for hookups and casual dating, but in India, dating app users say they have more serious goals.

In the increasingly crowded dating industry, the only way to stay relevant is to differentiate yourself from the competition. Coffee Meets Bagel initially set itself apart by focusing on quality over quantity, providing users a limited number of curated matches each day at noon. Last year the company introduced an ephemeral video feature and an ongoing series of real-world events called CMB Experiences.

Coffee Meets Bagel’s latest updates come in response to an extensive user study conducted earlier this year. The app’s interface now boasts a cleaner, more modern aesthetic and a new comment feature has been added to help members make more efficient use of their time.

Co-CEO and cofounder Dawoon Kang told VentureBeat in a phone interview that users in the study repeatedly expressed frustration at matching with someone in the app only to have their messages go unanswered or the conversation fizzle quickly.