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IAC, the company who is the majority stakeholder in popular dating app Tinder, no longer wants Sean Rad in the driver’s seat. As of late March, the company has named the new CEO who will be taking his place: Christopher Payne.

Payne previously worked for eBay as a senior vice president in the company’s marketplaces division, where he was responsible for the North American market. He also founded Positronic, a search technology company, which eBay acquired in 2008. Before that, he worked for 13 years at Microsoft, including heading its search unit, which was then called Windows Search Live.

“Christopher brings invaluable experience running consumer technology businesses that operate at massive scale,” Mr. Rad said in a statement.

But the change might not be completely embraced by Rad, who was embroiled in a very public sexual harassment lawsuit brought about by former employee Whitney Wolfe. They settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, and she has now launched a new dating app of her own that directly competes with Tinder. Rad will remain President of Tinder and retains a seat on the company’s board. According to reports, he will still be in charge of product and marketing, but Payne will take over everything else.

The spotlight that has been on Rad the past few years has not been flattering, and the most recent scrutiny has come as a result of the new premium service Tinder Plus, which is costing as much as $19.99 US per month for two additional features. Users have asked to be able to use Tinder in multiple cities, as well as to “go back” and swipe right on matches they’d previously turned down. The new service offers these features for a price – but if you want to just keep the basic free service, the company has also put limits on the amount of swiping you can do in a 24-hour period. This caused controversy when it launched in the UK, and the app’s rating in the iTunes store went down to one and a half stars as a result.

Another controversial decision was pricing for the new service, which is based on age. For users under 30, Tinder Plus costs $9.99 per month, but for those 30 and older, it goes up to $19.99, and even more in European countries. Rad says a lot of research went into the pricing, and he stands by what he says customers are willing to pay.

Tinder also plans to launch an ad product, but has not disclosed how this will affect the service or user’s experience. Until now, advertising revenue has come from product placement, but the app has a lot of valuable user information for marketing departments to tap into.

IAC hopes that Payne can refocus Tinder’s business goals and help it grow into a more profitable as well as popular company.

Read our review of Tinder to find out more about this popular dating app.

Are you excited about the new Tinder Plus service that has rolled out in the U.S.? Don't get too carried away – turns out, if you’re 30 or older, you’ll have to pay more than your younger single counterparts.

Tinder is charging users of its premium service only $9.99 if they are under 30, but those 30 and older have to pay $19.99 per month for the same service. In the U.K., the pay gap is even larger.

Tinder has been testing pricing and features of Tinder Plus in various markets prior to its U.S. roll out, which is expected to happen in late March. Reports have been mixed – while Tinder claims that its users have responded favorably to the premium service and its features (as well as pricing), the app’s ratings have declined in the U.K. app store thanks to several harsh reviews.

The success of the new service is important to Tinder, who has yet to capitalize on the sheer number of users of the free service. The company has struggled to come up with viable revenue streams that don’t take away from the user experience (they have tried to avoid in-app advertising), in order to maintain their growing user base. Offering a tiered premium service like Tinder Plus seems the best answer, adding some popular features based on users’ requests - such as the ability to go back and see rejected profiles, or to meet matches in different cities.

But along with these improvements, there are reports that Tinder is placing limits on the number of swipes any user can do per day for the free service (which sparked outrage in the U.K. app stores), prompting users to buy the premium service if they want to continue swiping.

And the latest controversy appears to be age discrimination. In a statement to defend its unusual pricing technique, Tinder said this to NPR: "Over the past few months, we've tested Tinder Plus extensively in several countries…Lots of products offer differentiated price tiers by age, like Spotify does for students, for example. Tinder is no different; during our testing we've learned, not surprisingly, that younger users are just as excited about Tinder Plus but are more budget constrained and need a lower price to pull the trigger." 

Not everyone is buying Tinder’s explanation. As website Engadget pointed out, this “sleazy” move by Tinder will likely cause more people to lie about their ages on Facebook.

The real test will has come now since Tinder Plus made its U.S. debut this month. Perhaps this is the move that will make room for other competitors in the crowded dating app market.

Tinder has already rolled out its new premium paid service Tinder Plus in the U.S., and among the new features are some protections from spammers.

Tinder Plus includes a new feature called “Unlimited Likes,” which seems counter-intuitive since users of the free app already have the ability to swipe left and right without limits. Unfortunately, spammers have taken advantage of this feature by creating spam bots which swipe right on thousands of profiles simultaneously, increasing users’ match potential.

Tinder has dealt with increasing abuse of its service from spammers. Chances are if you’ve downloaded Tinder, you’ve also come across a fake profile or two that are actually staged to sell you something or obtain personal information, (violating Tinder’s terms and conditions), rather than to make an actual connection with a real person.

Tinder sees its paid service as a way to reduce spamming, as the rewards for this kind of power matching wouldn’t be worth the cost. Apps capitalizing on users’ penchant to say yes to all their potential matches have cropped up, too – like Tinderoid (now labeling itself as “Tools for Tinder”), which enables users to “like” en masse. 

The roll-out of Tinder Plus has already happened in a few other countries, and so far limiting the number of likes has not been received kindly by users who are used to unlimited swiping. According to reviews in the UK’s app store (which dropped the service to only one and a half stars in its rating), Tinder has prevented quite a few users from swiping endlessly unless they pay for the premium service, and they are not happy about it.

Tinder however, says that regular users of the service should not be affected (as opposed to the tiny fraction that swipe right on every single match they can as frequently as possible).

“That behavior happens with a very small percentage of our users, and they usually find that the experience isn’t very good and self-correct on their own,” Sean Rad, the company’s cofounder and CEO, told Tech Crunch.

The algorithm Tinder has set up to block spammers analyzes a few things before it is triggered: namely, the number of swipes, whether the user is only swiping right, velocity, time spent looking at a profile, etc. According to Tinder, a user can swipe through as many as 500 profiles and still not be blocked or prompted to upgrade to Tinder Plus, so long as the user spends a certain amount of time looking at each profile instead of mindlessly swiping.

Tinder launched Tinder Plus in the U.S. this month. For more information about this app, please read our Tinder review.

This month, Tinder began rolling out its new premium service Tinder Plus in select European markets, and the feedback hasn’t been good.

The popular dating app surged to the top of the online dating market when it launched in 2012, attracting users who had never thought of signing up for an online dating site. Its easy-to-use format and free game-like service offered more entertainment than dating stress, and users flocked to check it out.

But in an effort to make money from this hugely successful endeavor, it was only a matter of time before Tinder’s owners developed a paid model for the app – opting for a premium service over adding distracting in-app advertisements. (Although the company has strategically lent its brand to marketing campaigns, like Gillette’s facial hair survey and Domino’s Pizza Valentine’s Day campaign.)

But Tinder Plus has not been greeted favorably, at least in its initial roll out – and the free service is suffering as a result. Although Tinder Plus is not set to launch in the U.S. until March, and prices are still to be determined, the company needs to find a new strategy - considering the backlash it has gotten in markets where the roll out has already taken place, such as the U.K. Tinder users who are not opting to pay for Tinder Plus and want to stick to the old free version of the app have been leaving bad reviews in the iTunes store (enough to drive the free service’s rating down to one and a half stars).

The problem has to do with new restrictions to the free service. Once a user has swiped a certain number of times, they are blocked for 24 hours from seeing any new profiles, unless they want to pay for the new Tinder Plus service. Since most users log in to Tinder multiple times a day to swipe through matches, this puts a serious hindrance on Tinder’s competitive advantage. Other dating apps that have restrictions on the number of profiles a user can see per day – like Hinge - have been easing up on their requirements, and seeing a surge of new downloads as a result.

With all the promising new free apps coming on the market, such as Bumble (started by an ex-Tinder employee), Tinder will need to think outside the box to keep its market share. After all, any online dating app or site’s currency is their user base. If Tinder loses theirs, then they stand to lose a lot more than the revenue from the premium service. Perhaps they should stick to advertising deals, or instead of taking away features from loyal users, offer more enticing new features.

Just how crazy are single consumers for Tinder? And how much will they be willing to pay for the service?

The company is betting that certain features will be very valuable to Tinder users who have been requesting them since the service launched. So valuable that the company will be beta testing different price points in the UK, Germany and Brazil, with prices ranging from $.99 US to $4.99 to as high as $20.00 US for the premium version of the app, Tinder Plus.

Tinder Plus will roll out in these three markets first to determine how to proceed in other markets.

It seems dating site Plenty of Fish (POF) is staying true to its word of turning its image around. Known by many daters as a hook-up site, in the last couple of years the company's founder has promised that the site is cleaning up and wants to go back to its original purpose - helping singles meet people for relationships, not one-night stands.

The company recently shared on its blog exactly how they are enforcing their mission, and it seems they are doing this by deleting the accounts of members who violate site rules. According to POF, many users are in the dark about why their accounts are deleted, but they don't have the staff to respond to these requests individually. Just how many people are violating POF rules? About 5% of members, which considering the thousands of people signing up for the free site on a regular basis, amounts to more than its 75-person staff can handle. So, they decided to post the most common reasons on their blog.

Following are some of the rules that POF enforces. Be warned, if you violate their rules, the company claims that it can find out through its technology and advanced software. They can even detect if you're a scammer when you sign up.

Here are some reasons why your POF account may have been deleted:

1. You were looking for casual sex. The example the site gives is pretty cut and dry - one user was asking another user if he could pay her for having sex with him. While many lewd messages have double meaning and can be argued, if you are propositioning anyone on the site, you won't have your account for long.

2. You're married. The site is strict about this, and if POF discovers you are married, your account will be deleted.

3. You are a "scammer, a spammer, a fake, underage, or are soliciting a business." This can get a little murky, as scammers generally tend to hide beneath their online dating persona. But POF claims to catch 98% of them before they can even sign up on the website, captured through their "sophisticated spam detection system."

4. You are rude to users. If you put someone down because of how they look, or make discriminating remarks, or are blocked by other users often, you risk being deleted.

5. You post inappropriate photos. This includes the infamous "shirtless" photo that guys tend to gravitate to in online dating. If you are a woman, don't advertise your body with revealing clothing. If you question whether you should upload a particular photo, then don't.

6. You login from a country where POF doesn't exist yet. While POF is in many countries, they aren't in all and they can't support a user account in places where they aren't set up. So, check the site to see if your country is included before attempting to sign up.