Dating Services

After more than 5 years DateHookup has received a major Facelift. We are a little slow on reporting this since it appears to have happened in October of 2014. Gone is the navy blue and square box design of the Date Hookup of the past. The new DateHookup look is about simplicity with the use of a solid color pallet (in the pastel range) and an interface that takes up the whole browser window.

With the new facelift comes an almost completely updated list of features. Everything from profiles to searching has changed and been minimized. Profiles attributes have been reduced by half and interests have been completely removed. Searching has been reduced to gender, age, and location. You can filter these results by Best Match, Last Online, and Newest Profile. Email communication also have been dropped in favor of quick instant message type texts.

The upgraded membership has changed as well. DH Points are no more and so is all of the profile highlighting and the higher rank in search results. The new VIP Upgrade gives you a site with no ads plus the ability to see who likes you.

While the new interface is much nicer especially the large photo’s used when finding people I am not sure if I like the simpler feature set. It doesn’t really allow you to find people based on personality or interests. You can’t even search for a text phrase to find people using what information they include in their BIO. Because of this Date Hookup is now purely a Hookup only site. This is ideal for a person who wants to find someone who is online now, based on their photo, age, and location.

We plan to soon update our DateHookup review with all of these latest changes.

517,000 relationships. 92,000 marriages. 1 million babies. Those impressive stats come from Karl Gregory, Match.com's UK manager and European director. “We've been responsible for all of those,” he says, understandably proud. “Isn't it incredible?”

It is incredible, and not just because of all the zeroes on those numbers. Match.com is also the most popular dating website in the world and, on top of that, it's one of the oldest. This year it's celebrating its 20^th birthday.

When Match launched in April 1995, it had only 100,000 users worldwide. Today, that number is 75 million users (registered since inception) spread across 40 countries. It all goes back to December 27, 1992 when, dissatisfied with traditional dating methods, entrepreneur Eric Klien created a 170-point questionnaire to game the system. The questionnaire covered everything from horoscopes, to music tastes, to cleanliness. He dubbed it the “Electronic Matchmaker” and uploaded it to his private internet database. Online dating was born.

In 1993 Klien sold his questionnaire and the domain name Match.com. The buyer was Gary Kremen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who paid $2,500 for it and launched Match as a dating service on the open internet in 1995. “Match.com will bring more love to the planet than anything since Jesus Christ,” he said during an interview.

He may have been right. Though stigma was high in the early days of online dating, 100,000 people registered with Match.com within 6 months of its launch. The next time it was sold (in 1998 to its current owner, IAC), it was for $50 million. Not bad for just a few years of growth.

Klien's original questionnaire is still part of the service, though it's evolved over the years. Now it's known as “Synapse,” the official Match.com algorithm. It evaluates both a user's stated preferences and their actions on the site, offering 6 tailored profiles for review each day. There is some debate about whether dating algorithms have any scientific credibility, but those big numbers at the top mean Match must be doing something right.

These days, Match.com's biggest user-group is aged 25-44 with its fastest growing demographic being the over-55s. There are more men than women on the site, but only slightly. Amongst men, the most common professions are engineering, finance and retail. Amongst women, it's secretaries, teachers and doctors. All sexualities are represented, as are all kinds of relationships. There are people looking for flings, for friendships, and for life-long partners. All these users do a lot of communicating, they send out over 415 million emails a year on Match.com.

Marriages that begin online are 25% more likely to last than marriages that begin in more traditional ways, said a University of Chicago study, so here's to 20 more years of magic from Match.com. To find out more about this service, please read our review of Match.com

While Tinder is looking for ways to increase its revenue stream with new premium service Tinder Plus, it is steering clear of any advertising that affects its service.

Although the company has strategically lent its brand to clever marketing campaigns - like Gillette’s facial hair survey and Domino’s Pizza Valentine’s Day campaign – they have avoided advertising that would compromise the app experience for users. Namely, in-app advertising.

The Gap however, decided that Tinder was the perfect fit for its new social media-inspired ad campaign: #SpringIsWeird, which included in-app advertising on Tinder. The campaign featured fake “profiles” of the Gap logo with messages including “you’re invited to the pants party” and “we’re taking 30% off all Gap denim,” which would appear when users were swiping through potential matches on the app. The Gap also created a “micro series” on Instagram as part of the campaign.

The Gap announced their campaign to a reporter for AdWeek in a story he promoted on Twitter after it was posted. But Tinder never approved the campaign, and apparently did not know it was happening.

In a tweeted response to the AdWeek reporter, Tinder’s VP of Communications & Branding, Rosette Pambakian, responded: “@GarettSloane we will be deleting those GAP profiles. It violates our TOS. We did not approve this campaign and it is not an ad.”

Trishna Nichols, The Gap’s leader of consumer engagement and brand strategies, described the campaign to AdWeek before the fallout: “We did a little something special on Tinder. It's a guerrilla [marketing] idea where you'll see a profile with clever messaging in the spirit of love and the perfect match. It's the perfect fit for Tinder.”

Unfortunately, the campaign wasn’t a fit for Tinder, and The Gap had never received authorization to post the ads. Tinder’s terms of service state that the service is "for personal use only" and that users may not use the service or any content contained in the service for "advertising or soliciting any user to buy or sell any products or services not offered by the company."

Other companies have done guerilla marketing on the app before, such as in 2013 when USA Network was promoting their show “Suits.” Advertisers for the show posted profiles of the show’s characters on Tinder, and they were not taken down. But now that Tinder is gearing up for creating new revenue streams, it could be that they will be cracking down harder on this type of “organic” advertising.

For now, The Gap will be moving forward with the campaign via social media, releasing an episode a week of its micro series on Instagram.

IAC released its Q4 2014 financial results at the beginning of February, reporting a 9% decline in profit for the fourth quarter from last year. Though revenue growth was in double digits, it was offset by higher expenses that ultimately led to the decline in profit. On the plus side, both revenue and adjusted earnings per share for the quarter beat analysts' estimates.

Here are some of the highlights from the report:

Coffee Meets Bagel has been overshadowed by its more aggressive competitors (like Tinder), but lately has emerged as a serious, lasting contender in the dating app space. The company is showing its app has real growth potential by securing $7.8 million in a Series A financing round led by existing investor DCM Ventures. Quest Ventures and Azure Capital also participated in the round.

This round of financing is followed by the steadily growing success of an app whose founders like to take things slowly, testing what works in each market (starting with its launch in 2012 to New York and Boston markets) before moving on to the next. Recently, the company expanded from an iPhone-only app to include an Android app as well, opening markets further.

Coffee Meets Bagel sets itself apart by making the dating app experience feel more personal. People are connected through their social networks – through mutual friends on Facebook, for instance – so there is a level of assurance that you can avoid the scammers and fake profiles. Also, CMB users receive only one match per day, avoiding the whole Tinder hook-up potential. Each day, users have 24 hours to message their match, and then a week to set up a date before they vanish into the ethers. The point is to keep the conversation going, instead of just letting messages and matches accumulate while users see who else is out there.

While the design is game-like (you can get “coffee beans” by providing information or referring friends to the service, which in turn can be used to access additional features, like the ability to see who your mutual friends are, or to rekindle the flame with a match you neglected to message in time.) The company also teamed up in certain cities with local businesses to offer discounts to places you could go for a first date, although the growth of the app nation-wide has prevented them from doing this in more than a few major cities.

The additional funding will pay for engineers and developers to help build the core business so it can handle the projected growth in users. While the company hasn’t publicly shared their subscriber figures lately, the interest from investors is telling.

CMB has been compared to dating app Hinge and Are You Interested, which also focus on matches based on mutual social media connections.

The additional financing follows the company’s earlier participation in the TV series “Shark Tank,” where the founders proposed their business plans to celebrity investors in the hopes of gaining additional funding. While they didn’t get it from the TV show’s panel of judges, they have been successful in raising the funds elsewhere.

More than one in ten Americans have used a dating app or online dating service of some kind, according to a recent study from Pew Research. And dating apps are only increasing in popularity.

But despite peoples’ love of technology, online daters don’t seem to be finding what they want, and are not so satisfied with the dating app experience. No matter how many new apps hit the market, it seems the inherent problems with online dating (lying, old photos, bad behavior) – are still lingering, and affecting the overall user experience.

People tend to be more critical of dating apps than any other type of app, according to a recent report from Applause, which aggregates app ratings.

According to their report, dating apps consistently rank lower than almost any other kind of app available in stores to download. According to MarketWatch, “while the average app quality score in the U.S. is 67 out of 100 points across all categories, for dating apps, that number is 42 out of 100 — the lowest average score across categories.” The study looked at 53 different dating apps, all of which had more than 1,000 reviews.

While many people may blame apps for their poor online dating experience, the fact that the overall market is leaving people unsatisfied is telling. Online dating is a business, but one that involves people – who can be unpredictable and emotional, especially when it comes to dating.

For one thing, the currency of dating apps are people, so these apps must have a large database with a variety of choices to even compete with some of the major players like Tinder. If people receive the same matches over and over, or somehow “run out of options,” the dating app can be perceived as less valuable than other dating apps. Also, if a dating app user doesn’t like his matches, he’s likely to give it a lower rating, as opposed to others who have a good or even mediocre experience.

Of course, there are other things to consider when it comes to why dating apps aren’t faring so well among users. Some are annoyed with having to pay for special features, or when in-app advertising interrupts the service itself.

Surprisingly, Hinge and eHarmony – two online dating apps that emphasize the quality of their matches – scored low on overall user satisfaction, at least according to their ratings. They both earned an average score of 22 out of 100, and ranked as two of the 10 worst dating apps. OkCupid however, earned 62 points out of 100, putting it in the top 10 category with Skout and Let’s Date. Tinder ranked in the top 20, despite the many complaints and its reputation for being a “hook-up” app.

So what does this mean for online daters?  I guess we’ll have to see how dating apps evolve.