How About We

The incredible proliferation of niche dating sites is a popular topic these days. When we say there's something for everyone, we really mean there’s something for everyone. Whether you’re looking for a vampire, a farmer, or a sea captain (or maybe all three?), there’s a site looking to match you with your perfect partner.

By comparison, dating sites for foodies seem downright normal. Stefanie Tuder, culinary school graduate and online food writer for ABC News-“Good Morning America,” decided to take three foodie sites for a test drive (make that "a taste test") to survey the scene.

HowAboutWe

First on her list was HowAboutWe, which recently announced a partnership with Serious Eats. The sites are collaborating to get online daters offline, via activities like “tacos and a spin around the Bronx zoo" or "a crawl of the essential dumplings of Flushing." Other popular food-focused sites also have similar partnerships to connect like-minded singles. All members, regardless of which co-branded page they use to sign up, can interact with all other members in order to offer as wide a dating pool as possible.

For Tuder, that wasn’t ideal. “Rather than see other readers of Serious Eats, Eater, etc.,” she writes, “which is the reason I signed up and went to that branded landing page, I see everyone in my area on HowAboutWe. And not even only the ones who are particularly interested in food.” It’s possible to narrow down searches to people who suggest food and drink date ideas, but messaging someone requires at least an $8 monthly membership.

HiDine

HiDine stirred up some controversy when it hit the scene in November. Taking a staunchly traditional approach, only men can ask women out on a date on Hi Dine and by doing so they commit to picking up the tab. Tuder found that she received many more messages and date requests on HiDine than on the other sites she experimented with. Her two critiques include the messaging system, which she calls "pretty clunky," and the fact that women do not have the option of messaging men. All a woman can do to indicate her interest in a profile is "wink" at it.

SamePlate

“While SamePlate has the best of intentions,” Tuder writes, “it simply doesn't have enough members yet to be successful." SamePlate was founded in 2012 by a man who wanted to find a partner to eat Paleo with him. SamePlate covers the Paleo phenomenon as well as anything else a food lover could want. Members can use the free site to cross-reference search any mix of diet and food combinations, which is a pretty unbeatable feature if you consider yourself foodie.

Ultimately, Tuder concludes that foodie dating is “interesting,” but doesn’t have “strong enough of a pull to stay on full time."

In an expansion to reinvent itself as a lifestyle media network, HowAboutWe announced the acquisition of long time dating site Nerve.com.

HowAboutWe caters to both singles and those in relationships with separate subscription-based memberships, one for meeting singles and dating and one that is more of a date-planning service for couples.

The addition of Nerve.com means HowAboutWe is acquiring Nerve Dating and a database of singles who had already been using the service. Members will be automatically rolled in to the HowAboutWe for singles service, and offered a free sixth-month membership to try it out.

Nerve.com's main attraction was not its dating site, but the edgy content of its online magazine, with articles that discuss all things sexual and offbeat. HowAboutWe will be doing a redesign and relaunch of Nerve.com, though they haven't announced what that would include or how much (if at all) the content focus will change. The strength and appeal of Nerve is the brand itself, which has been around since 1997 and was one of the first web-only magazines.

HowAboutWe is focused on becoming a media powerhouse as well as an online dating service. Its roster of online magazines also includes Swimmingly.com for couples and Famously.com for celebrity news and gossip, both of which were launched the last week of January. Also under the HowAboutWe media banner is TheDateReport, which centers around dating and the single life and will also get a fresh redesign by HowAboutWe.

Brian Moylan, a former Gawker writer who has been editing TheDateReport, is now editor-in-chief of the new HowAboutWe Media, which includes all four sites.

The founders of HowAboutWe are purposeful in their media pursuits: they recognize the competition in the online dating industry, where IAC owns the majority of branded dating sites such as Match.com, OkCupid, and a number of niche sites like BlackPeopleMeet and OurTime. But these dating sites are specifically geared towards singles looking for dates. They want HowAboutWe to be a destination for people not only to meet each other, but for singles and couples to get news, advice, and also ideas about what to do together and how to nurture their relationships.

With the new sites and new content, HowAboutWe is also hoping to cash in on new advertising revenue, instead of just relying on subscriptions.

"Every lifestyle publication is speaking, in one way or another, to people and their love lives," HowAboutWe co-founder and co-CEO Brian Schechter told Observer.com. "We think that there's actually a huge opportunity to address that consumer demand as opposed to just circling around it."

There has always been a nagging problem lurking in the back of the online dating industry's head: when you've built your business around helping singles find true love, what happens when they find it? On one hand, your marketing department has a lot to brag about. On the other hand, you just lost a customer.

HowAboutWe has answered the question and solved the online dating paradox with an innovative strategy: aim for a whole new market. Co-founders Brian Schechter and Aaron Schildkrout turned the problem into a business advantage by creating a dedicated site for people who are already paired up. The site was christened HowAboutWe for Couples, and a new era of online dating was born.

"We had always focused on bringing online dating offline," Schildkrout told Fast Company. "All the sites are designed to keep users chatting, poking, and endlessly searching profiles online," but HowAboutWe's purpose was "to connect people in the real world." Its original incarnation earned over 1 million users easily, but the dating experience doesn't end at a meet up.

"Couples go on thousands of dates in the course of their relationship," Schildkrout observed. Multiple studies have shown the positive effects of date nights for committed couples. One such study from the National Marriage Project found that married men and women who go on dates at least once a week are 3.5 times more likely to report being "very happy" in their marriages. Consequently, they're also less likely to get divorced than those who do not spend dedicated time with their mates.

To help its couples stay together, and keep them coming back for more, HowAboutWe for Couples curates a list of date ideas culled from existing data on dates, information gleaned from the site's user base, and a team devoted to uncovering the best undiscovered dates. Think dessert tastings, archery lessons, hot air balloon rides, and an aphrodisiac pop-up dinner, whatever that is.

The couples' site operates similarly to the original dating site. Users pay a membership fee ($18 per month) to browse dates, and pay per date based on the ones they choose. Unlike coupon sites like Groupon or LivingSocial, HowAboutWe doesn't extract a percentage from the cost of the date. 100% of the proceeds go to the vendor. Because of this, Schildkrout says, HowAboutWe is able to offer more unique experiences then the daily coupon companies.

So far, HowAboutWe's move seems to be a good one. Though only 12% of users who met through the site are currently using the couples service, Schildkrout reports that it has maintained a 90% month-over-month retention and has over half a million users. To find out more about this dating and couple service you can read our How About We review.

Two is hardly enough to call it a trend, but if online dating sites collaborating with relationship experts does become a thing, I am fully in support of it.

Earlier this fall, one of America's longest-serving advice columnists, E. Jean Carroll, began a new partnership between HowAboutWe and Elle magazine. The arrangement, called Elle dating, is part of HowAboutWe's media partners program. Joining forces with a fashion magazine may not seem like the natural course of action for a dating site, but HowAboutWe believes the alliance could go a long way towards helping people who might otherwise object to finding love on the Web warm up to the idea.

Carroll's Elle column has long been an important fixture for the magazine. A membership to HowAboutWe through Elle will cost $30 per month, and for $500 an Elle reader can get a one-on-one telephone consultation with Carroll and the services of Tawkify, the small matchmaking firm she founded two years ago. Carroll hopes that her influence will bring a sense of serendipity to HowAboutWe that can be lost in other online dating services.

Are You Interested is also jumping on the expert bandwagon. AYI.com recently announced that author and relationship expert Laurel House will join the site as its resident dating coach. Laurel has appeared on numerous television shows, including E! News, Weekend TODAY, and most recently MTV, where she was the ultimate "It Girl" dating and confidence-boosting coach for an episode of the channel's MADE show. She is also the author of QuickieChick's Cheat Sheet to Life, Love, Food, Fitness, Fashion and Finance on a Less than Fabulous Budget and the upcoming book No-Games Guide to Love.

For her collaboration with AYI, House will post written and video content to the site's blog to help guide singles through the online dating experience. She will be available via AYI.com's social platforms to offer personalized dating tips to members, and will act as a face of the AYI brand in media interviews.

SNAP's Chief Executive Officer Clifford Lerner commented, "We believe Laurel's depth of experience and professional expertise is unmatched and will greatly help singles looking to connect online. She is aware of what single men and women are looking for in the online dating experience and her ability to guide them in their search for love will only better the AYI.com experience."

My favorite collaboration between an expert and a dating site remains the inimitable Dr. Helen Fisher, who serves as leading expert on the biology of love and attraction for Chemistry.com, but I'm excited to see more professionals in various dating and relationships fields lend their support to the online dating movement.

Julie Spira has come a long way since she created her first online dating profile nearly 20 years ago. She is now a dating coach and leading online dating expert, as well as the best-selling author of two books: The Perils of Cyber-Dating: Confessions of a Hopeful Romantic Looking for Love Online and The Rules of Netiquette: How to Mind Your Digital Manners.

Each year, Spira and her team curate a list of the latest and greatest mobile dating apps on the market. With the current explosion of mobile dating, it couldn't come at a better time.

Who made it onto this year's Cyber-Dating Expert Top 10 Mobile Dating Apps list? Let's find out.

HowAboutWe is about to take over the world - literally.

The dating service has announced the launch of the first internationalized versions of its iOS application. Though the web-based version of HowAboutWe already had international users, the app was only available in English, significantly limiting its reach. Now it's available in 15 new languages that cover more than 30 countries, including France, Russia, and Japan.

And it gets even better. The company says it's also making all features in the mobile application available for free to international users. (Sorry, America, you still have to pay. Premium features for United States-based users, like unlimited membership, will continue to cost between $8 and $35 per month.) In addition to full access to all of the exclusive features offered to American HowAboutWe members, global users will also enjoy:

• Browsing date ideas suggested by local singles
• Finding people who want to meet in person
• Checking out profiles and full-screen photos
• Posting their favorite nearby places as date ideas - instantly
• Seeing who's online now, nearby

When asked why the company was choosing to offer services entirely for free, HowAboutWe's head of PR, Jade Clark, explained that their primary concern is to extend their reach as a brand and become an established figure in a new market before weighing monetization options.

HowAboutWe isn't just planning to bring its emphasis on real-world activities to the international stage. Half a million members are signed up for HowAboutWe for Couples. When asked about mobile and international plans for the couple's product, Clark adds that the company is working to expand their mobile offerings and plans to make some major announcements in the early parts of 2014.

To celebrate the launch of the app around the world, co-founder and co-CEO Aaron Schildkrout posted a guide to his blog called "10 Things You Need To Know Before Internationalizing Your App." I'll spare you the details, because many of them are quite technical, but Schildkrout did speak of the challenges that come from language barriers and different cultural expectations. His final piece of advice is something we can all understand, regardless of your location: "It will always take 3x longer than you think!"

I'm intrigued by this new development. Just think of all the opportunities for cross-cultural connections that might now be possible. Imagine being an American tourist in a foreign land, connecting with locals (and possible tour guides) using the same dating app you're already familiar with. It could add a whole new dimension to travel.

For more on this service you can read our HowAboutWe review