Online Dating

Cheating. Adultery. Stepping out. Having an affair. Two-timing. Infidelity. Extracurricular activities.

We have a number of words for it, and an equally plentiful number of excuses for doing it. A new survey from Ashley Madison, the infamous online dating service that caters to extramarital encounters and claims more than 56 million members worldwide, has uncovered the most common reasons people cheat on their partners.

Ashley Madison teamed up with YourTango to ask 1,300 male and female respondents about how and why they partake in their illicit affairs. You may think the answer is simple - one too many drinks, and suddenly otherwise-attached strangers are hooking up in a grungy bar bathroom - but in fact, the act is often more premeditated than that.

Match Group LLC stock got a boost in early October, thanks to the success of Tinder Gold. The new premium app was among the top apps in the Apple Store, not just among dating apps, but alongside Netflix and Pandora. Match shares were up 3.6% Wednesday October 11, and the stock has jumped more than 50% since the start of the year.

But one question on investors’ minds is: what should we expect from Match Group’s other dating apps?

Match Group owns four of the five most popular dating sites, including Match, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish and Tinder, along with several niche dating sites. The problem for investors despite the good news is that these older sites have gotten less attention in Match Group’s overall valuation, because they aren’t generating the users or attention that Tinder does on an ongoing basis, despite their longevity in the online dating market.

Following in the footsteps of Facebook and iMessage, Tinder has introduced a collection of custom animated responses called Reactions. The emoji-like animations include hearts, an eye roll, a round of applause, and what’s surely doomed to become omnipresent and overused: a martini being tossed (presumably in someone’s face).

Tinder introduced Giphy support and bigger emojis in January of last year. Reactions further cement Tinder’s reputation as a more casual place to date, and though they may seem to be yet another excuse for singles to put minimal effort into conversations, they were actually designed to serve a higher purpose.

“In a perfect world, everyone would always treat each other with respect—whether it's from behind a phone screen or IRL. Unfortunately, it’s not a perfect world and most women have encountered douchey behavior at some point,” says Tinder’s Reactions announcement. “So the women of Tinder are on a mission to make calling it out, when it happens on Tinder, easy and fun while letting the nice guys know they aren’t finishing last.”

How Chemistry looked before the update.

It looks like on May 3^rd 2017 Chemistry.com was completely redesigned and switched over to a new version of the service. This redesign not only affect the look of Chemistry but the features as well.

Chemistry which is part of the Match Group of online dating services was originally designed as a personality matchmaking service similar to eHarmony. With the original version of Chemistry you could not search through all members of the service using your own search parameters, you could only search through and communicate with the matches Chemistry assigns to you based on their matchmaking algorithm. The matchmaking algorithm used was very complex and designed in part by the relationship expert Dr. Helen Fisher.

Unfortunately Chemistry.com had seen it's popularity wan over the past few years which is why we assume they decided to do a complete service overhaul.

The new version of the online dating service Chemistry.com appears now to be run by People Media (which is owned by Match Group).

Online dating has always held some risk, and in recent years, the challenge of protecting consumers from trolls and unwanted messages has increased. Many dating apps like Tinder are finding themselves at risk to hackers who are creating fake accounts and hacking other users - this in addition to increasing problems with lewd messages. A new dating app called Hily aims to change that trend.

Many dating apps are trying to put more safety measures in place to verify their users. According to an article in TechCrunch, cyber security researchers found that hackers could create a Chrome plugin so that a Tinder user could find the locations of Facebook friends who were also on Tinder (even though they didn’t disclose this information on their social media feeds), a scary thought for online daters who are trying to keep their personal information private.

The lack of security has been especially difficult for young women who use dating apps. More and more are reporting getting trolled or harassed by other users on online dating sites, or sent unwanted messages and photos. This is one of the reasons female-friendly apps like Bumble have become so popular – women have more control of their experience on the app. But verifying profiles has remained a challenge, as hackers have found ways around protections.

Since the company launched in the late-nineties, eHarmony has branded itself as a more serious online dating service, focused on helping users find relationships and cultivating a different reputation that popular hookup app Tinder.

The company has long prided itself on this distinction, but in the process, has also fallen behind fast-growing apps like Tinder and Bumble who cater to a more tech and social media-saavy audience. eHarmony’s strategy to attract new users has focused primarily on TV advertising, an old school approach, but now they are ready to move forward and capture more users via social media ads.

“When I became CEO a year ago, there were a number of things that needed changing,” said eHarmony’s Grant Langston in an interview with Digiday. “The apps, communications and design all felt antiquated — it was like we stopped working on the product in 2010.”