General News

Bumble has been making big moves this year. First, in an effort to even the playing field, the app announced that male users must respond to women’s messages within 24 hours or they lose the match. CEO Whitney Wolfe also announced plans to take Bumble beyond dating into the world of business networking.

The company’s latest update is designed to prevent its users from falling prey to catfishers. How they intend to do it is the fun part.

Bumble’s new plan to outsmart scammers is a photo feature that prompts users to verify their accounts by submitting selfies. Yes, it’s 2016 and selfies are here to save us all.

The word “squad’ is ubiquitous in 2016, so it was only a matter of time before someone turned it into a dating app.

The thing is, Squad is not just the newest app on the mobile dating scene - it may be the year’s best new dating app.

For starters, the relationship experts on the judging panel of the inaugural US Dating Awards named it Best New Dating App 2016. It beat out The Catch, faith-based Crosspaths, video-centric Lively, and the matchmakers of Once. It’s also received write-ups from the likes of TechCrunch, Thrillist, CNN, Observer, and the Washington Post.

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).