Dating Services

How many times have you been on a date where the person you’re meeting seems angry, frustrated, or negative? And how many times have you been on dates where you felt that way yourself?

We all feel negative from time to time, but it definitely affects your love life if you allow those feelings to take hold and shape your attitude towards dating. This month, dating site Match released a study based on a survey it conducted among one thousand of its users to determine how positive and negative thinking affect the dating experience.

Not surprisingly, especially with this election year, nearly 80% of Match members feel the country has become MORE negative over the last 4 years and more than half of Match members have broken up with someone because they were too negative or pessimistic. The majority of Match members agree, the most attractive attribute of positivity is the fact that it signals a good outlook on life (68%).

I am sad to say it looks like Avalanche LCC has gone out of business. Date.com is one of their premier dating services which we last visited on October 6th and was confirmed still up and operating on October 7th, 2016 by the Internet Archive. It seems a week or so later when the dating site was again visited an error was reported indicating the dating service was down. When you visit Date.com now your browser will receive an "Error 522 Connection timed out" from CloudFlare. In fact all of Avalanche's websites including Matchmaker, Amor, and Gay Dating are now unreachable, including Avalanche's own corporate website. I sent a few emails out to see what was going on this week and they bounced back undelivered. With all of this evidence and with over a week of their web sites being down I think it safe to assume that unfortunately Avalanche and the dating services they own have gone out of business.

Avalanche ran over 20 dating services which we had reviews up for 4 of the more popular ones. This includes some of the oldest ones on the internet like Date.com which was started in 1997 and MatchMaker, which could be the oldest computer dating service since it was first started as a bulletin board system in 1986 (and in 1996 became a website). Other dating services we reviewed included Amor and GayDating.com.

In this every changing landscape of online dating, dating apps like Tinder now rule the single's love life. If you don't keep your business current and in the media it is hard to survive for long online. We wish those who worked at Avalanche all the best in their new endeavors.

Dating app Hinge started out with some stiff competition against Tinder. Since its debut in 2012, several other new dating apps have launched and attracted a growing user base as well as media attention, including female-centric dating app Bumble. Meanwhile, after steady growth since its launch, this year Hinge has seen its numbers declining.

Hinge’s marketing and product development have always focused on attracting more serious daters. The app is geared toward young professionals in their late twenties and thirties who are looking for long-term relationships, as opposed to the hook-up reputation that has followed Tinder since its inception. The app is billed as a “grown-up” alternative to the young users of Tinder, which at first seemed to serve the market well.

eHarmony is reporting on their website (homepage and About page) that an average of 438 eHarmony members marry every day in the United States as a result of being matched on their service. This is from a study by Harris Interactive which was done in 2012 for eHarmony. For this study, data was collected from 19,131 people in the United States who were married between 2005 and 2012. The divorce rate of these marriages was 3.86%.

Unfortunately we missed some these statistics when we first reported about this study back in 2013 and have updated our eHarmony Statistics page with the new information.

For comparison sake the previous Harris Interactive Study done in 2010 showed on average 542 eHarmony members get married every day in the United States (see Story).

Astute readers will note that there are still several months of 2016 left, nevertheless, the US Dating Awards have announced this year’s big winners.

Established in 2014 in the UK, the Dating Awards recognize both newcomers and established names in the field. This year marked the first US Awards show in New York City, where journalists, websites, events companies, and bloggers came together to celebrate 2016’s best achievements in Dating Technology, Marketing, Media, Customer Service, Expertise and Entrepreneurship.

The judging panel consisted of a variety of dating experts and industry professionals. Caroline Brealey, founding matchmaker of London dating agency Mutual Attraction, served as head judge. She was joined by Charly Lester, Founder and CEO of the UK Dating Awards, and Charreah Jackson, international coach and the Lifestyle and Relationships Editor for ESSENCE magazine, amongst others.

Dating app Momo, China’s answer to Tinder, has been a popular dating app among the country’s singles with a record 75 million users. But in recent weeks, Momo seems to be expanding out of the dating business and into something more lucrative.

For its latest update, Momo executives decided to supplement the app's location-based dating service that matches people through swiping and messaging. Now, the app offers a live-streaming function, catering to music lovers and even musicians themselves. The update allows users to watch their favorite musicians perform live, as well as giving them the ability to interact with the musicians.