Dating Services

There’s no doubt about it: JDate is a big name in the world of online dating, and when it wants something, it will go to great lengths to get it. And recently, its parent company Spark Networks decided that it wanted popular dating app JSwipe, owned by Smooch Labs. The two companies struck a deal in late October, and now JSwipe is one of the dating properties of Spark Networks, along with dating sites Christian Mingle and Black Singles in addition to JDate.

JSwipe, which launched in April of 2014, has grown rapidly, with over 450,000 downloads worldwide and over 40 million messages between users. The dating app was definitely posing some competition to JDate, and attracting a younger user base who prefer apps to the traditional dating websites. This made the company an attractive target for Spark Networks, JDate’s owner.

In fact, JSwipe and JDate have had a tumultuous dating history, so to speak. Earlier this year, Forbes broke the story that JDate was suing JSwipe for copyright infringement because JSwipe was using the trademark “J” in the name of their app. In the lawsuit, JDate also claimed it owned the patent on software that “confidentially determines matches and notifies users of mutual matches in feelings and interests,” which would ultimately interfere with all dating apps using this technology (in other words, all dating apps).

JSwipe at first fought back, going to the press with the story of the lawsuit and calling out JDate for trying to shut the app down. JSwipe also started an IndieGoGo fundraising campaign to help them fight the lawsuit against JDate, assumingly because they didn’t have the funds to fight on their own. As it turns out, either the company ran out of money, or JDate put forth a really compelling offer, which Spark Networks said they would reveal later in the company’s 4^th quarter financial statements.

The lawsuit has been dropped and Sparks Networks put out a press release, praising the new relationship between JDate and JSwipe. Michael Egan, Chief Executive Officer of Spark Networks, stated in the release, “We’re very excited to welcome the Smooch Labs team into Spark.  They’ve created a fantastic mobile application that helps young Jews meet and form meaningful relationships, and together with JDate, our leading Jewish focused dating platform, Spark is now able to significantly build on its mission to strengthen the Jewish community through dating and marriage.” David Yarus, founder of JSwipe had equally glowing statements about the union.

While JSwipe remains free to download right now, Sparks Networks has promised that new paid premium services will be rolled out in the near future. For more information on JDate you can read our review of JDate.

If Tinder has been a sea of left swipes lately, the app's recently announced update could change your luck for the holidays. Tinder’s founder Sean Rad announced forthcoming changes to the algorithm during Ireland’s Web Summit on November 4.

The update is set to be Tinder's biggest yet. "It's been our mission since day one to uncover ... every possible meaningful relationship," Rad told Mashable. In service of that goal, Rad says the company is looking to "reduce the barriers to people connecting" and help them form "deeper connections." He claims the upcoming changes will boost connections made on the dating app by 30%.

Unfortunately, actual details about the algorithm update are scarce. Tinder has not yet made a formal announcement and is keeping mostly mum until then. Rad only said to expect a "series of things you're going to see that will help you make more sense of the sheer volume of people around you and build deeper connections...and more ways to connect."

What Tinder is talking about is its reputation as a “hookup app,” which its eager to shed. Rad made yet another attempt to distance the company from that status, adding that 80% of users are looking for long-term relationships.

This year has seen Tinder release features designed to make the app more engaging. Not long ago it launched 'Super Like' - a function that can only be used once a day to let a user know you really (like, really really) like them. Rad compares it to walking over and saying hi to someone, instead of winking at them from across the room.

The CEO also shared some of Tinder's impressive numbers with the Web Summit. The app currently receives 1.6 billion swipes per day, 26 million matches per day and 9 billion total matches since its debut in 2012. As a result of those swipes, 1.5 million in-person dates stem from Tinder each week. More than half of those make it to a second date.

Up next, Tinder will focus on monetization. Most of the company's revenue currently comes from Tinder Plus, a paid service that allows users to search outside of their geographical location and undo swipes. Advertising hasn't yet hit the app in a major way, but there will be a bigger focus on ads in the near future.

Rad is nothing if not confident about Tinder's success. "There is no doubt that Tinder is increasing the number of connections in this world," he said. "We are bringing the world closer together at a scale that no platform has ever been able to do and in that sense, we are changing the world."

For more on this popular dating app, please read our Tinder review.

Plenty of Fish may have taken a backseat to services like Tinder in terms of cultural recognition, but 2015 has been a big year for the company nonetheless.

In March, POF released its revenue numbers for the first time. The dating app and website reached 100 million users worldwide and announced that its run rate – the revenue a company can expect to bring in if business continues as it has so far that year – for 2015 was expected to hit $100 million. That's a dollar per year per user, even though most POF users don't pay a dime for the service.

In July POF was acquired by Match Group, an IAC/InterActive subsidiary, for $575 million in cash. Match Group had purchased a number of dating services over the previous six years, including How About We and OkCupid. Add those to Tinder, which Match had funded early in its lifetime, and Match Group became a serious power player in the online dating world.

After much speculation, Match Group filed for an IPO in October of this year with a tentative offering amount of $100 million. It will operate under the ticker symbol "MTCH" on NASDAQ.

And that's not where the big news ends for Plenty of Fish in 2015. As part of Match Group's filing with the SEC, the company revealed POF's current financial status. This is only the second time the public has seen POF's revenue numbers.

POF's revenue is divided into two categories: subscription and advertising. The majority of the website's funding comes from subscriptions, which make up 75% of POF's income compared to 25% from ads. POF currently estimates 2015 revenue to be $80 million.

With a little math magic, we can find out how many paying users Plenty Of Fish has. Seventy-five percent of $80 million is $60 million per year from subscriptions. Divide that by 12 and POF pulls in $5 million per month. Then divide again by $10, the average monthly revenue per paid member, and the final number is 500,000 paid members. That's a remarkably small percentage of POF's 100 million users.

There's a reason the company relies so heavily on subscription revenue over ads. As singles increasingly favor mobile devices over computers, services like Plenty Of Fish are forced to adapt to smaller screens. Ads are more distracting and harder to read in the cramped space of a smartphone screen.

In other ways, mobile has strongly contributed to the success of POF. “Since our shift to mobile we’ve seen rapid growth both in terms of users and revenue,” says founder and CEO Markus Frind.

“Our revenue model has also evolved from one driven by advertising to one driven by paid membership,” he adds. “Now more than ever, singles are willing to pay for an enhanced user experience.”

There’s no doubt about it: online dating has become even more popular, and at the same time, more frustrating than ever. Believe it or not, there is a correlation between the two.

Dating apps work very similarly to a game. You swipe left and right, amassing lots of matches to your dating bank account, and feeling great. More people, more possibilities. But in reality – how many of your matches are you actually going out with? How many send you messages, and how many respond to yours? Unfortunately, more often than not, the numbers are low. (Or worse – female daters tend to be the recipients of unwanted and aggressive texts.)

So what do we do with this information? Do we declare this to be "the end of dating" along with The New York Times? Do we delete those apps from our phones, as one writer for website Bustle has declared she will do?

You do have the option to drop out of online dating altogether, but I would argue for keeping it a part of how you meet people to date. Dating apps are here to stay, so it's time to embrace them. But we also need to learn how to date - in real life.

The problem doesn't lie with dating apps per se - technology in general is changing how we behave and interact. People are spending more time updating and commenting on their social media accounts than they are having actual conversations or meeting up with people IRL. Take a look at any bar or restaurant, and inevitably you see a group of people at a table, and none of them are talking to each other – they are staring at their phones.

There is an element of social anxiety that comes along with dating, but our phones are giving us an easy way out, rather than learning to overcome this anxiety. It’s much easier to drop a conversation online than try to think of something witty to say. And the thought of making small talk on a first date for half an hour can terrify many young daters who have grown accustomed to safely hiding behind their phones.

Instead of complaining about the technology, it’s time to do something about what we would like to see in the dating world. Ask someone out on a real date. Pick up the phone and have a conversation, don’t just text until one of you drops off. And if you don’t get a response? On to the next.

Most people want to find a connection to someone else. Online dating provides a way to meet people, not a way to actually date them. Instead, the search for connection is totally left up to us – a scary thought. (Why can’t we just blame the dating apps for peoples’ behavior?)

If you want your online dating experience to change, you first need to change your own approach to it. Don’t endlessly swipe. Talk to more people over the phone or in person. Look them in the eye when you are having a conversation. Don’t become distracted by your phone, or lean on it like a crutch when you get bored. Learn the art of making conversation, of flirting. Practice it!

There’s no shame in asking someone out, and to follow through and go on a real date. In fact, it’s the only thing that will lead to a real-life relationship.

Dating can feel like a spin of the roulette wheel. You could wind up a winner or go home a loser, and either way, your fate is in the fickle hands of Lady Luck. Run into a particularly bad string of dates and you might even think your odds are better in Vegas.

Online dating can't take luck out of the equation entirely, but matching algorithms attempt to add science into the mix. Much has been said about how data is used to help online daters meet their match, but what about the dating sites themselves?

Lynsey Tomkinson, senior marketing manager at eHarmony, spoke to CMO about how an audience segmentation project opened up a whole new world of possibilities for eHarmony. Tasked with increasing the effectiveness of the company's marketing programs, Tomkinson's team relied on data to find ways to better understand and interact with prospects and customers.

The team's investigation began with eHarmony's testimonials. In an age that's widely accepting of online dating, testimonials are no longer needed to persuade new prospects to try it for the first time. Instead, it's about persuading them to switch to eHarmony.

eHarmony also decided to dial down on its marriage-based messaging. Although the company built a strong reputation as a marriage-minded site, that motif becomes increasingly less relevant in the modern world. The company will now showcase that it's a relationship-oriented site without focusing on marriage specifically.

eHarmony launched an audience segmentation project late in 2014 to delve deeper into audience insights. The goal was to find better ways to target individuals using messages carefully tailored to their needs, interests and lifestyles. eHarmony drew on data from its 2.6 million Australian members and analyzed more than 70 million data points – the largest bespoke audience segmentation project in the company's eight-year history in Australia.

Ten unique audiences were identified based on profitability, volume and opportunity. Tomkinson's team emphasized the top three, most commercially viable segments. As a result, customer subscriptions and engagement rates leapt by double digits, while eHarmony improved the cost of its registration-to-subscription rate by 53 percent.

After the success of these data-driven experiments, the next step is to boost data analytics capability in-house. “This provides the business the case to get these systems running internally for us,” Tomkinson told CMO. eHarmony is now taking steps to build its infrastructure. Tomkinson hopes the company can produce more data-driven initiatives internally by this time next year.

“This work has set up a good foundation for us that hopefully will work well internally in the future,” she says.

For more information on this dating service please read our review of eHarmony.com.

Match Group is hoping to live happily ever after with Wall Street. The company, owner of more than 45 online dating brands including Tinder, OkCupid, and Match.com, has filed for an initial public offering of its stock.

Match Group filed for the IPO of common stock with U.S. regulators on October 16 with an offering amount of $100 million, but that figure is a placeholder that could change in the future. The company is set to operate under the ticker symbol "MTCH" on NASDAQ.

Following the IPO, IAC/InterActiveCorp., which owns Match, would retain control of more than 50% of voting rights under its ownership of Class B shares, which have 10 votes apiece. Match will contract with IAC for “administrative and other services,” but the exact amount of distance between IAC and Match Group going forward is so far unknown.

Here are some of the highlights of Match's SEC filing:

• Match makes serious money. The company had $888.3 million in revenue and $148.4 million in after-tax profit in 2014. For the first six months of 2015, revenue was $483.9 million and net earnings were $49.3 million. Match might hit $1 billion in revenue this year.
• Growth is steady, though not explosive. Wall Street wants to invest in technology companies that grow rapidly. Match Group doesn't meet that criterion, but growth between 2013 and 2014 was 10.6 percent. Between 2012 and 2013 it was 12.6 percent. The rate is nothing for the record books, but it's healthy and sustainable.
• Paying customers make up a surprisingly small percentage of total users. Match Group claims 59 million monthly active users across 38 languages and 190 countries. Of those 59 million, only 4.7 million pay to use the services. The company's income is in the hands of only 8 percent of its customers.

Although the online dating segment seems saturated, the IPO prospectus includes opportunities for future growth. According to the filing, the addressable market is currently about 511 million. That number is expected to grow to 672 million by 2019. Increased adoption of mobile and the Internet, the aging of the population and the increase in the number of singles are all positive trends for the industry.

Of course, there are risk factors too. Cybersecurity is more important than ever, and Match Group admits that it can't guarantee protection from attacks. Match also notes that one of its most important assets, Tinder, could essentially be destroyed if Facebook alters the terms and conditions for connecting with the social network. It remains to be seen if these issues will cause risk-averse Wall Street to balk.

The underwriters for the IPO include J.P. Morgan, Allen & Co. and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

For more information on the dating services owned by IAC, you can read our reviews on Match.com, OkCupid, and Tinder.