Partnerships

Recently, Gap came under fire from Tinder executives by posting fake profiles advertising their wares on the dating app, hoping people would swipe right to participate in a new campaign. The problem was that Gap didn’t get Tinder’s permission, so Tinder ordered Gap to take them down.

But Tinder isn't cracking down on fake profiles or spam-like ads for all companies looking to promote (though it did hire an agency who is cracking down on their spamming issue). Tinder only allows companies who are actually paying to post their fake “profiles” - and these companies are reaching their target audience of young consumers in a really big way.

Native advertising on Tinder works like this: the company creates a "profile" targeted to its audience, and uploads to Tinder. From there, users will come across the profile and swipe left or right, depending on if they like what they see. Companies that have done this recently include Starbucks and Dominos Pizza.

But now, it's not only companies looking to advertise - musicians are taking advantage of Tinder’s user base, using the service to promote new videos and album releases. Because musicians are constantly looking for new ways to reach their audiences and gather new fans, they have become more creative in their online promotions. Tinder is the latest tool, and recently did a campaign with singer Jason DeRulo.

Forbes reported that Jason Derulo became the first musician to use the Tinder promotional strategy to launch a new single. When users swiped right, they were given in link to a YouTube page where they could watch the brand new video for his new song, which was also getting a huge push via radio. The campaign was a success: over 1.1 million people swiped right (meaning they liked him) – in three days. The song became a top 40 hit, with 14% clicking through to purchase his song on iTunes.

Of course, it helped that the song was speaking to his target market – daters who are looking for a late-night hook-up, a la Tinder. In the video, DeRulo is shown fantasizing about a woman he had sex with, jumping out of bed in the middle of the night to go to her apartment, where she is of course fantasizing about him, too.

The success of the campaign will surely capture the attention of other musicians and companies who want to appeal to their target audience: young singles. These companies are also finding that effective advertising means meeting these people on their own turf – social media, rather than traditional stuffy ad campaigns. People are much more mobile, and looking at their phones more than looking up at a billboard.

One thing’s for sure, Tinder doesn’t have to worry about meeting revenue goals through subscriptions to its premium (and pricey) service. Companies will likely be more than willing to offer money for campaigns that have this type of success rate.

For more on this popular dating app you can read our review of Tinder.

Have you ever swiped right on a Tinder match only to discover her profile isn’t real? Since the famous dating app partnered with mobile identity company TeleSign, it claims spam is down as much as 90%.

Spam has been a growing problem for Tinder– prostitutes masquerading as potential love matches eager to sell their services, hackers using the dating app to obtain valuable user information, and even companies like The Gap aiming to capitalize on the 18-25 market with clever marketing campaigns. (Last month they set up their campaign ads as Tinder user profiles without explicit permission from the company – and were asked to take them down.) Also, there was the incident of a hacker tinkering with their API to match straight men with other straight men, which ended up confusing and embarrassing a lot of users.

Even though Tinder verifies people through their Facebook accounts, many people have become adept at creating fake social media accounts, too. So Tinder’s new deal with Telesign seems to be alleviating the problem.

Telesign works by analyzing massive amounts of real-time and historical data on phone numbers, including associated contact information, phone types, geographies, and carriers. Their technology uses PhoneID verification to determine how potentially risky a phone number is, and whether the number really belongs to the person creating the account. If the score is high (meaning high risk), the user is blocked. Telesign also recommended that Tinder implement rate limits. This means that Tinder can set a limit for the number of accounts created using the same phone number. The companies did not say whether the analyzed information from Tinder users is kept private, or how it could be used by TeleSign or Tinder.

Ryan Ogle, Tinder’s CTO said in a statement: “Once we had TeleSign in place, we were able to block fraudulent accounts in a much more sophisticated way. It’s been 100 percent accurate and we’ve seen about a 90 percent reduction in spam traffic as a result, from day one.”

Tinder has taken other steps to cut back on spammers, including limiting the amount of swipes people can do in a 24-hour period with the free service. If they want to swipe indefinitely (as spam bots often do), they will have to pay for Tinder Plus.

This is another big step for the company, which seems to be making significant changes in recent months. IAC, the parent company of Tinder, has brought in a new CEO, and in March, Tinder rolled out its first paid service, Tinder Plus.

Check out our review of Tinder for more information on this popular dating app.

Mark Zuckerberg has made plenty of comments over the years about the increasingly public way in which we live (something he seems to be an outspoken advocate of). There was also the recent controversy over Facebook's nearly-enacted real name policy. So it certainly comes as a surprise that a site so anti-anonymity has just joined forces with the Web’s most anonymous network.

Wired reports that Facebook launched “a Tor hidden service, a version of its website that runs the anonymity software Tor.” The new site can only be accessed by users running the Tor software, which bounces their connections “through three extra encrypted hops to random computers around the Internet, making it far harder for any network spy observing that traffic to trace their origin.”

Before you get excited that you'll finally be safe from Facebook's prying eyes, know that even Tor users are not anonymous to Facebook itself. But Tor can now protect your identity from every other threat to your security and privacy you may encounter while liking the latest clickbait from Upworthy. “You get around the censorship and local adversarial surveillance,” explains former Tor developer Runa Sandvik, “and it adds another layer of security on top of your connection.”

Prior to this development, Facebook made it difficult for Tor users to access the site – sometimes even blocking their connections altogether. Because Tor users appear to log in from IP address all over the world, Facebook's security infrastructure often mislabeled them as potential attacks from hackers. According to the Tor blog, “a high volume of malicious activity across Tor exit nodes triggered Facebook's site integrity systems which are designed to protect people who use the service.”

Now Facebook plans to be friendly to the odd, international connections that were formerly causing problems, and Sandvik says it provides an extra layer of security beyond what running Tor on the user’s end alone can offer. “When both the user and Facebook are running Tor,” explains Wired, “the traffic doesn’t leave the Tor network until it’s safely within Facebook’s infrastructure.” That means there's no opportunity for outsiders to spy on unencrypted traffic or decrypt it themselves.

Over the past few years, SSL encryption has become the standard for major sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter looking to protect their users’ privacy. Sandvik believes Facebook’s Tor hidden service may mean that Tor will become the next basic privacy protection leading tech companies will be expected to offer their users.

For more on this social network you can read our review of Facebook.

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.

After teaching women to Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Steve Harvey is gearing up for a new crusade to “help women become more dateable.”

Anyone else cringing, or is that just me?

It’s not that the man hasn’t had plenty of successful ideas. He’s made it as a comic, a talk show presenter, a game show host, and the author of two relationship advice books, so he must be doing something right. But if that mission statement doesn’t immediately raise a red flag, you’re not reading it correctly.

Here’s the deal: Harvey has launched a dating website, Delightful.com, as a joint venture with IAC (the company that owns Match.com, OkCupid, Tinder, and a slew of niche dating services). In addition to being the face of the site, he will supply articles and videos to help subscribers “find love and keep it.” So far so good.

But then you get to the philosophy behind the site, which Harvey kindly shared with Forbes recently.

“Women are wired differently,” he says. Online dating is great for people who want to go on a lot of dates - which means it’s good for men in Harvey’s mind, because only men are interested in playing the field. “A man doesn’t have any problem at all dating several or a wide variety of people until he finds the right one,” he says.

On the other hand, “women don’t really want to just date,” explains Harvey. “They want to date with the hope that it leads to a relationship.” And the reason is simple: “A lot of women have that biological clock that ticks in them.”

He’s not the first to say so. And undoubtedly, in some cases, he’s right. But it’s also a painfully problematic approach to 21st century dating. Just when you thought we were moving away from ideas that divide the sexes, here comes every “women are from Venus, men are from Mars” cliché that’s been ruining things so far.

Harvey goes on to say that women are too picky when it comes to dating, and that Delightful will include advice columns for women on important topics like “how to become more datable.” For men, Delightful will offer “instructionals on being the kind of man who knows how to treat a woman.” At no point does it appear Delightful will explain that it takes two people to make a relationship work, and that men and women need to learn to meet each other halfway for relationships to survive.

And what does Match CEO Sam Yagan have to say about Harvey’s prehistoric approach to modern romance?

“It’s not like we’re standing behind everything he’s ever said.” Well ok then.

eHarmony was on the brink of disaster in 2012, ready to be sold to the highest bidder on the auction block, at least according to a recent article on Online Dating Insider. But the company was determined to turn things around.

According to eHarmony executives, “We took our hard won stash of capital and used $153.2M to buy out all the “Class B” shares, and we began the pursuit of our own company.  We asked five of our former and highly-esteemed board members to step aside and give us a chance to do more of what we needed to do to bring this company back.  We made tough decisions…let some people go, terminated vendor contracts. Moreover, we have cleaned up “our house” by appointing an all-new executive management team that is a more aligned team than we have ever had before.”

For those of us who did not know eHarmony was on the brink of financial ruin, this letter came as a surprise. In the time they were desperately struggling to tread water, Neil Clarke Warren, the company’s founder, came back on board as CEO and reminded the company of the reason they were successful in the first place – their focus on matching for long-term relationships.

While most dating sites and apps have gone in the opposite direction – focusing on quantity instead of quality of matches, and casual meetings instead of long-term relationship potential, eHamorny’s serious focus has paid off.

“Instead of losing 100,000 end of period subscribers each year, suffering...losses of 50% every single year, our EBITDA for 2014 will literally be dramatic and the cash in the bank increasing substantially each month. EBITDA is currently running $9.4M ahead of plan as we work with our forecasts. Our end of period paying subscriber count has hit its all-time high...”

eHarmony was not afraid to get rid of what wasn’t working. Trimming staff by over 30%, they went from about 300 employees to only 190 in all of the U.S., U.K. and Australia. They have also dropped vendors who weren’t contributing to the primary focus of the site – relationships. (That is, focusing on the long-term potential.)

eHarmony’s success rate speaks for itself. It claims to have made more than 600,000 marriages, and has only a 3.86% divorce rate (compared to the over 50% divorce rate of Americans in general).

The company plans to take its technology in other directions besides love. They are planning the launch of Elevated Careers by eHarmony, where they hope to make successful coupling between potential employees and employers by using the same psychologically-based matching system to help people find their dream jobs.

While the company didn’t offer exact figures, they did claim to have hundreds of thousands of users as well as 1.2 million matches. It looks like they have turned things around, though most of us didn’t even realize how much they were struggling.

To find out more about this dating service, you can read our eHarmony review.