Dating Services

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.

eHarmony is offering a free trial this Halloween weekend here in the United States and Canada. It starts Thursday October 29th and ends on Sunday November 1st.

Are you ready to be scared this Halloween weekend? If so, you should check out your matches at OTHER dating sites! At eHarmony there are no ghouls or trolls 😉 to worry about as all matches are generated using the eHarmony matching algorithm and are based on what you want in a partner as well as what traits matches best with your personality. eHarmony's goal is to find you a long-term relationship.

All eHarmony memberships are free and no credit card is required. It is also free to receive and review your matches. Normally you do have to pay a membership fee to communicate (sending emails) with those matches, the only exception is on free communication and trial weekends like this one. Free eHarmony communication and trial events do not include secure call (anonymous phone service), skipping the guided communication process, and viewing of profile photos.

For more details on this popular matchmaking service designed to find members long-term relationships you can read our eHarmony review.

Ashley Madison, the notorious dating website for married people, has been immersed in scandal since the company’s database was hacked a few months back. First, the hackers threatened to reveal users of the site, and then, it was discovered that most of the 5 million women registered on the site (a fraction of the number of men registered on the site) were actually linked to fake email addresses set up by employees of the website.

Now another potentially damaging piece of information has been uncovered by The Toronto Sun. Apparently, Ashley Madison’s parent company Avid Life Media, which owns several other dubious dating sites such as Cougar Life, The Big and the Beautiful, and Established Men, have been hiring attractive women to pose as founders of these dating sites.

According to the report in The Toronto Sun, Avid Life Media was trying to work the best PR angles possible to attract attention to these sites, a strategy that worked with Ashley Madison. Simply by trying to purchase ad space in a mainstream publication or even airtime during the Super Bowl, Ashley Madison received a lot of media attention – notably because they were refused the ad space/ time. However, new angles had to be thought out for the other Avid Life sites, including Cougar Life.

Cougar Life was repped by Claudia Opdenkelder, a beautiful spokesperson who portrayed herself to be the founder of the dating site which matched older women with younger men. "Why shouldn’t older women have younger men to love, just as older men can pursue younger women?" she campaigned to such outlets as The Globe and Mail and New York Times. She managed to generate a lot of coverage for the dating site.

The Big and the Beautiful followed suit by hiring plus-size America’s Next Top Model winner Whitney Thompson, who claimed to have founded the dating site, which caters to men looking for plus-sized women. Simone Dadoun-Cohen represented herself as the founder of Established Men, a site aimed at wealthy men who are looking for some arm candy – much like dating site SugarDaddy.com. Dadoun-Cohen claimed to be stripping to put herself through college before she met her wealthy boyfriend, hence the idea for the app. However, this turned out to be a made-up story.

The information was leaked from hackers of the Ashley Madison site, who also managed to get their hands on emails between former Avid Life CEO Noel Biderman, who stepped down after the hacking incident, and former media relations manager Shari Cogan. In the emails, the two discussed plans of what they would do about a potentially damaging segment about Cougar Life on ABC’s Nightline. “I don’t want this turning in to a witch hunt,” Biderman wrote. “We don’t want the site and Claudia to look like ‘frauds.'”

As of now, the three women who posed as the websites’ CEOs are no longer employed by Avid Life Media. Opdenkelder settled a lawsuit she brought against the company.

It must be noted that journalists went along with the stories of the CEOs without fact-checking, just taking their sources’ word for it – in this case, the PR staff of Avid Life Media. It seems the story made for better headlines than the truth.

Let’s face it – our information is out there digitally for all the world to see, or at least those who are interested in Googling our names. But we like to know what kind of privacy controls are still in place for our social media accounts. We don’t want Facebook sharing our posts with just anyone, and perhaps you keep your Instagram account private, too.

But what happens when Facebook starts to encroach on what you like to keep separate? For example, Facebook has a “suggested friends” page where it connects you with people in your social circles – maybe someone you knew back in high school or through a previous employer, and you would like to friend him/her. But what happens when the suggested friend is someone you don’t care to see again – say a Tinder date gone wrong?

Apparently, this is happening more and more, but strangely, no one really knows why. News website Motherboard investigated the link between Facebook and dating apps like Tinder and OkCupid, to see where the connection lies and if they are sharing information unbeknownst to their users.

According to Motherboard, Tinder, OkCupid and Facebook all deny sharing information with each other. Plus, most of these unwanted contacts that are suggested to Facebook users share no Facebook friends nor do they have a shared workplace history or any other connection besides being a potential or previous date.

So exactly how are these apps and Facebook tracking movement (and connections) we don’t necessarily want them to see? Shouldn’t your online dating life be kept separate from your social media circles until you meet someone special and YOU want to include them in your circles? Probably the last person you want to see as a Facebook friend suggestion is your one-night stand from two weeks ago or the date who stood you up.

So why does this keep happening? The answers are unclear. As the companies deny sharing information, there are other ways that your connections can leave a digital trail that makes its way to Facebook.

One such way is through your phone. If you message one of your dates, even if you don’t save the contact information, depending on your Facebook settings the service is able to pull contacts you have messaged and called on your phone to help expand your social circles. Motherboard found one such notice from Facebook while testing this out. The article says: “Facebook does say it bases its suggestions in part on ‘imported contacts,’ but this is something users have to opt into on the mobile app or desktop... I don’t ever remember agreeing to import my contacts, and yet when I checked my “invite history” page I had 900+ contacts saved, apparently were continuously syncing and updating, that I promptly removed. Facebook warned this could make my friend suggestions ‘less relevant.’”

Another reason could lie in Facebook searches. Chances are before a date you want to look up some information about a person over social media, doing due diligence to get to know the person you were about to meet. Perhaps you searched for them on Facebook, which would mean they could show up as a suggested friend – after all, Facebook knows you looked for them, not that you were interested in dating them.

At any rate, these digital connections will continue to increase, so it’s important to be prepared to see people you may not want in your suggested circles. If nothing else, just delete.