Online Dating

When Pew Research Center first studied online dating in 2005, few Americans had ventured into that uncharted territory. More than a decade later, digital technology - especially smartphones - has drastically transformed all aspects of our society, including our love lives. Today 15% of American adults say they have used online dating sites or mobile dating apps.

Pew Research Center continues to produce some of the most comprehensive and interesting data on online dating, most recently with the release of five facts about online dating in 2016:

1. Online dating has lost much of the stigma that once plagued it. In 2005, most Americans had little exposure to online dating. It was viewed as a poor way to meet people and those who used it were considered desperate. These days, nearly half of the public knows someone who has met a partner using a dating service. Attitudes have shifted significantly, making it much more culturally acceptable to find a romantic partner online. Nearly half of US adults agree that online dating is a good way to meet people.
2. Online dating is increasingly popular with singles under 25, as well as those in their late 50s and early 60s. Between 2013 and today, the share of 18- to 24-year olds who use online dating has roughly tripled from 10% to 27%. Usage amongst 55- to 64-year-olds has also risen substantially. Only 6% of adults in that age bracket reported using dating services in 2013. Today that number is 12%.
3. One-third of people who have tried online dating have never actually gone on a date with someone they met using those services. Two thirds (66%) of online daters told Pew Research Center that they’ve gone on a date with someone they met through a dating site or app. That’s a large increase from the 43% percent who answered the same in 2005, but it still means that one-third of online daters have never turned their online activities into offline romance.
4. One-in-five online daters have sought help with their profile. Online daters recruit friends to help them put their best digital foot forward. Around 22% have asked someone to review or help create their profile. Women are especially likely to seek outside advice - 30% of female online daters have done this, compared to 16% of men.
5. 5% of Americans who are in a marriage or committed relationship say they met their significant other online. Online dating plays a larger role in modern romance than ever before, but the vast majority of relationships still begin offline. Even newer relationships are more likely to start in traditional ways. Eighty-eight percent of Americans who have been with their partner for five years or less say they met their partner without the help of a dating site.

For more statistics from Pew Research Center, click here. For our own information on the subject you can visit our Dating Statistics and Facts page.

It’s no secret that scammers flock to dating sites. Lovelorn singles are easy targets for con artists looking to lure victims into financial fraud, and over and over again, we hear tales of hackers stealing sensitive personal information to sell to the highest bidder.

What we don’t hear about nearly as often are infractions from the dating sites themselves. In fact, many popular dating services have a poor track record of security vulnerabilities and privacy violations.

Signing up for anything online puts you at risk, but dating services may be some of the most dangerous online destinations. Dating sites regularly collect data on users, then sell the information to marketers. Profiles can remain on company servers for years after subscriptions are canceled. Profiles may also be indexed by search engines, allowing services like Google Image Search to link photos on your profile with your real identity.

Even well-known, trusted dating sites have been guilty of privacy violations over the years. Here are some breaches:

Who amongst us can honestly say they have never agonized over an online dating photo? It's a rite of passage in 2016: take a photo, edit it, post it, rethink it, delete it, start again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

If you've ever struggled to determine which of your many (many) selfies belong on your dating profile, Coffee Meets Bagel now offers a solution. From now on, CMB users can A/B test photos by uploading two options and letting other users vote for the best one.

The new feature is called Photo Lab. When clicked, a screen that says “Put your best face forward” is shown. Hit the “+” button to add two photos from your profile, from Facebook, or from your smartphone’s photo gallery. When other users have had time to vote and your report is ready, you’ll receive a notification. The report is unlocked by using “beans,” Coffee Meets Bagel’s in-app currency.  

Of course, Photo Lab also allows you take the opposite role and give other users photo feedback. You'll see a familiar Hot Or Not-style interface and can vote by clicking on the photo you prefer. After you’ve voted, you’ll see a percentage that indicates how other users rated the same two pictures and will earn beans for your efforts.

It will come as a shock to no online dater that pictures are one of the most important parts of your profile. Coffee Meets Bagel polled singles and found that 54% pass on prospective dates for picture-related reasons. The most common offenses include blurry images and the so-called “Where’s Waldo” pics that feature so many people that the profile owner is unidentifiable.

“Surprisingly, a large percentage of online daters have a hard time when it comes to choosing which photo to use on their profile,” Dawoon Kang, co-founder of Coffee Meets Bagel, told TechCrunch. Yet they “get no feedback whatsoever on which profile photo actually works best.”  

This isn't the first time Coffee Meets Bagel has tried to give its users a leg up in the search for love. The site and mobile app already offer premium features to help singles determine whether their profile is working. CMB members with enough beans can find out how they rank on the site and get feedback on the reasons matches say yes.  

Coffee Meets Bagel hopes the new feature will further cement its reputation as a platform for serious dating. CMBl is for “singles looking for real relationships – not browsing, not entertainment, not hook ups,” said Kang.

Watch a quick video on Photo Lab here.

Just when you get comfortable with the Internet again, a new story about a hacking disaster makes headlines. This time, a hacker on a dark web forum called “Hell” claims to have sold the email addresses and plaintext passwords of over 27 million users of dating site Mate1.com.

Last year, Hell made headlines when a hacker posted the personal details and sexual preferences of almost 4 million users of the hookup site Adult Friend Finder. The data dump was discovered months after the hack actually happened, forcing Adult Friend Finder to fess up about the breach.

Motherboard obtained a small sample of the stolen email addresses and passwords. Out of 500 addresses, 498 were linked to accounts on Mate1.com. According to its website, Mate1 has over 36.5 million users.

“Their server was compromised and the MySQL database was dumped,” the anonymous hacker told Motherboard. “I had shell/command access to their server.” The hacker claims to have obtained 40 million accounts initially, then whittled that number down by weeding out the bot logins. “They all had a common password pattern,” they said.

The database of poached user info was offered for 20 bitcoin on Hell (around $8,700) although it’s not clear if that was the actual selling price.

How did it happen? Motherboard found that Mate1 was shockingly open to such an attack. A reporter for the site clicked “forgotten password” on the login page and was sent a full, plaintext password via email. Mate1 made no attempt to conceal the password in any way.

The threat here isn't just that users’ dating accounts may now be compromised. A second danger comes from the fact that victims may have used the same passwords across multiple websites, potentially leaving accounts on Gmail, Amazon - anything, really - now open to attack. Anyone who purchased the database could test their newly-acquired passwords on more valuable accounts, and given the high number of credentials the hacker claims to have obtained, there’s a real chance that a significant number will indeed compromise accounts on other websites.  

The first step, if you have an account with Mate1.com, is to change your password there. You’ll also want to update any accounts that share the same password and check to make sure they haven’t been tampered with.  

This hack won’t make news the way the Ashley Madison hack did (catch up here, here, and here if you missed that story), but it serves as yet another reminder that digital security is a subject to be taken seriously.

For more information on this dating service you can read our full review of Mate1.

Update 2019-05-19: Please note that these coupons have expired and there are currently no coupon codes available for the Jewish dating service JDate.

What JDate is now offering is up to 25% off a 3 and 6 month subscription (as of the last time we checked which is January 16, 2018).

Depending on the subscription term length, JDate subscriptions are as low as $19.99 a month. This sale could expiry at any time so act soon if you are thinking of joining. When you decide to upgrade your free JDate account the sale prices will be presented to you at that time.

JDate does offer extra promotions every now and then. When these discounts are available, this post will be updated with more information on how to use them. To find out more about this popular Jewish dating service you can read our review of JDate. User reviews and comments of JDate are also accessible from this page.

Last month on the Canadian TV show The Disruptors, an unlikely interview took place between host Bruce Croxton and Markus Frind, the founder of popular online dating site Plenty of Fish. (Broxton was the founder of dating site Lavalife, which raked in members until POF’s free service hit the market.)

For the first time, the two former rivals were sitting down together to discuss the current state of the dating industry, and the history of their two companies.

Broxton noted the quick success of POF, which because of its free service, quickly gained a lot of users – many of whom hadn’t tried online dating previously. Typically, dating sites made their money through selling subscriptions to members, but POF tried a different model to attract a larger audience, and it worked. Instead of selling subscriptions, the site made its money by selling ad space. After all, they had an engaged audience.

At its peak and before its sale in 2004, Lavalife had over four hundred employees. Frind launched POF in 2003 and operated the service alone from his apartment for the first five years, without hiring another employee despite the service’s rapid growth. He managed to turn it into the largest dating site in the world by focusing on the US market (even though he was based in Canada), and by keeping the service free despite the naysayers.

Frind’s experience wasn’t in the dating industry when he first thought of the idea for POF. In the interview, he admitted that he just needed to learn a new programming language and the best way to do that would be through creating a dating website.

Croxton was complimentary in the interview, admitting that Frind was incredibly innovative in the dating space, despite the endless number of dating apps launched in the last few years claiming to change the online dating industry. “I find it ironic because many of the tech ideas on the show really emphasize that it’s not about the technology anymore because you can be up and running very quickly, it’s really a marketing barrier to entry. But you were pioneering that back in 2003,” Croxon said.

Frind Agreed, noting that he sold his company (for $800 million) because he was tired: “There isn’t really much innovation in the dating space; the features we have today are the same features we had five years ago. It just got kind of boring and I wanted to do something new.”

You can watch the whole interview here. To find out more about POF you can read our review on Plenty of Fish.