OkCupid

Think that politics and dating don’t mix? In this unprecedented election year where political beliefs and emotions are running high, it turns out that more people than ever aren’t willing to date across party lines.

OkCupid just released a new survey that finds 50% of their users would NOT date someone with opposing political views – an all-time high according to their records.

When they dug a little deeper however, they found that the words people choose in their profiles do indicate political and personal leanings in terms of conservative and liberal mindsets, which might explain this trend.

Jason Hill was in for a surprise when he attended a meetup of OkCupid users in 2009. Sam Yagan, co-founder of OkCupid and current CEO of Match.com, dropped by the gathering and spoke to Hill. When Hill told him he joined the site in March 2004, Yagan was shocked.

“That was less than a month after we started,” Yagan exclaimed. “You must be our longest user!”

Fusion recently spoke with Hill about his status as OkCupid’s longest continual user, and the lessons he learned along the way. His story offers key insights into the world of online dating:

Match Group released first quarter 2016 financial results on May 3. The company went public last November, and in its first earnings announcement as a publicly-traded company, Match Group fell short of earnings estimates by 5.3%. This time around, things are looking up.

Match Group reported sharply higher sales and profits in Q1 2016. Last quarter, the company’s dating revenues rose 14%, driven by a 30% increase in paid members. With that momentum, Match Group continued to perform well. Highlights of the quarter include:

• Total revenue rose 21% year over year to $285 million
• Dating revenue grew 24%, led by strong contributions from Tinder and PlentyOfFish
• Adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled over the prior year to $64.6 million
• Average PMC (paid member count) grew 36% to 5.1 million
• Tinder surpassed 1 million PMC as of the end of the quarter and successfully launched its first à la carte paid feature
• Operating income was up 8%, reflecting the strong Adjusted EBITDA growth
• Adjusted Net Income increased 30% as a result of the increase in Adjusted EBITDA
• Cash Flow nearly doubled to $68.5 million, while operating cash flow increased 88% to $75.0 million

Leading the charge is Tinder. “Tinder is really killing it. The numbers are great,” said Chairman and CEO Greg Blatt in an earnings call. “We're spending a lot of time improving the core product experience, experimenting with new product experiences, and yet continuing to rollout modernization initiatives, each of which has basically exceeded our expectations at the time of rolling it out.”

Along with its successes, the quarter saw Match Group slip in a few areas. Average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) declined 10% to $0.54, mostly due to the growth of relatively low-cost services such as Tinder, as well as the continued shift to mobile platforms. Non-dating revenue was flat at $25 million as a result of lower SAT test preparation course volume at The Princeton Review.

Looking forward, Match Group management expects second quarter dating revenue to grow by between 4% and 5% compared to Q1, with EBITDA margin percentage in the low to mid-30s. For the full year, the company predicts total dating revenue between $1.1 billion and $1.14 billion and overall adjusted EBITDA between $410 million and $425 million.

"Match Group posted very strong revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth in the first quarter, driven by exceptional growth at Tinder, solid performance of Meetic and Match, and the PlentyOfFish acquisition," Blatt said in a press release. "We expect solid year over year performance throughout the balance of 2016."

The Match Group list of dating services which we have reviewed include Match, OkCupid, Tinder, and Plenty of Fish.

There has been speculation that Match Group’s star performer in the online dating space – dating app Tinder – would cannibalize its other online dating companies. But so far, contrary to analysts’ reports, this hasn’t happened.

Tinder is by far the dating app industry giant, with over 25 million active users and about 1 million paid subscribers in its tiered program. Some analysts have feared that because of Tinder’s rapid growth and free platform, it would mean users would leave other popular online dating sites in Match Group (like Match, Plenty of Fish and OkCupid) to join Tinder, making them obsolete.

What they found instead was that Match Group’s overall earnings were up in the first quarter of 2016, thanks in part to the POF acquisition and Match Group’s strategy to grow and invest in Tinder’s rivals.

Overall revenue came in at $285 million in its first quarter, $3 million over expected revenues.

Greg Blatt, chairman and CEO of Match Group, said in the first quarter earnings release: "Match Group posted very strong revenue and Adjusted EBITDA growth in the first quarter, driven by exceptional growth at Tinder, solid performance of Meetic and Match, and the PlentyOfFish acquisition."

Bank of America Merrill Lynch explained that "even without Tinder, Match would have grown its core Dating subscribers by 6% (up from about 1% last quarter) and its Dating revenue by significantly more."

The POF acquisition is an important factor in the revenue numbers. The dating website grew tremendously itself over the years with 70 million registered users, and operated for many years on a shoestring budget with one employee, Markus Frind, who created the dating site and sold it to IAC (Match Group’s parent company) for $575 million in 2015.

Over time if Tinder’s popularity continues to grow, and the app itself makes improvements that resonate with its users, then there could be an impact to Match Group’s other businesses. For now, POF, Match, and OkCupid are still going strong.

One solution that has been floated in the media is for Tinder to advertise other Match Group properties on its app. (Tinder’s revenue comes mainly from paid advertising, rather than its tiered service.)

For the most part, online daters are not beholden to one site or app, preferring to join two or more at any given time. Because of Tinder’s growth, it has grown the entire online dating industry in just three short years, and made online dating a more acceptable practice. Numerous dating apps are launching every week, hoping to cash in on Tinder’s market share and success.

It seems to be a win-win for the online dating industry as a whole, even in a saturated market.

I just turned 58-years-old and am still clicking on women’s faces appearing on OK Cupid, one of the most popular internet dating sites. No dates went beyond a few, but I have some great stories to tell. Here’s my favorite and most horrific which i call SCREENSAVER GIRL:

I took Screensaver Girl to a seafood restaurant in Sheepshead Bay. Our conversation was typical for a first OK Cupid date. A Q&A followed by the parts of our life stories that weren’t too revealing. We continued our conversation as we walked along the bay. Suddenly, she bent over the metal fence along the perimeter of the bay and regurgitated on the mother of a swan family.

Was it the calamari? That legendary squid? Who knows. All I knew was that Screensaver Girl turned the swan’s white head to dark green. After a few minutes, she raised herself back up. “I’m so sorry, Barry. I ruined a great evening.”

A team of Danish researchers caused an uproar last month by publishing data from the online profiles of nearly 70,000 OkCupid users. Information including usernames, political leanings, drug usage, and intimate sexual details were exposed, creating a massive privacy crisis.

The researchers, Emil Kirkegaard and Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær, used data scraping software developed by a third contributor, Oliver Nordbjerg, to collect the information. It was used for a study that analyzed members of OkCupid across a variety of factors. The database was posted along with a draft paper on Open Science Framework, a “scholarly commons” that supports open source research and collaboration.