Statistics

A revealing report published by ProPublica found that Match Group did not conduct background checks on users of their popular free platforms, including Tinder, Plenty of Fish, and OkCupid, leaving their members vulnerable to sexual assault.

Columbia Journalism Investigations analyzed more than 150 incidents of sexual assault among people who met through dating apps over the last decade, ProPublica reported. Most met their matches through Match Group apps. The researchers discovered that registered sex offenders were using Match Group apps like Tinder and went on dates with women who had no idea, because while Match Group conducts background checks for paid apps like Match, they don’t for their free apps.

Tinder claims to have made about 30 billion matches to date over its highly successful app (about 26 million per day, according to an article in The Daily Mail), but it seems only 50 percent of them ever meet one of their matches face-to-face. In order to increase their chances of meeting a date IRL, users have to match with far more people than they actually expect to meet, according to the study.

On average, when participants were asked how many matches they had actually met up with in real life, men averaged 1.9 partners and women 2.2 partners, despite matching with 111 and 124 respectively.

A team from Norwegian University of Science and Technology surveyed 269 students in Norway who were all Tinder users, and 60 percent of those surveyed were women.

Dating app users find those who have typos and grammatical errors in their profiles to be less attractive, according to a new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

Interestingly, only 33.5 percent of participants noticed the errors and called attention to them, so most participants didn’t catch the mistakes. But those who did notice rated the grammatically incorrect profiles as less attractive than those profiles without errors.

You swipe right on someone special on a dating app. You start communicating, and soon they want to move the conversation off the app to email or phone calls. The relationship progresses. You can feel yourself falling for them. They tell you they love you. But they live far away — as close as you think you’ve become, you’ve never actually met in person.

Then they ask you for money. They say it’s for a family emergency. Or an unexpected medical expense. Or a plane ticket to finally visit you. Their scam is almost complete.

Millions of men and women turn to online dating services to meet someone. But instead of finding the love of their life, many find a scammer trying to dupe them out of money. In 2018, people reported losing $143 million to romance scams — a higher total than for any other type of scam reported to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network, an online database of millions of consumer complaints.

Image: Bumble

Bumble is fighting ghosting once again – this time with a marketing campaign whose launch coincides with Halloween.

“Ghosting” is a dating term that refers to two people who have been messaging or seeing each other, and one suddenly stops texting or returning calls, leaving their date to wonder what happened and why they “disappeared.”

The tie-in with Halloween is clever but ghosting itself can be very painful for those on the receiving end. Many daters have experience with ghosting and know how it can ruin the dating experience to be left in the dark. When someone is ghosted, it’s easy to assign blame and make up stories as to what happened, or worse – they can lose confidence as they consider how they might have fallen short - which is counter-productive to finding the right person.

Hinge CEO Justin McLeod

Image: Hinge

Justin McLeod, the founder and CEO of dating app Hinge, has delved further into the mechanics of finding people their perfect match: this time, by launching a new dating lab.

Hinge differentiates itself from dating app Tinder, also one of Match Group’s dating apps - namely by helping people get off the app and into relationships. (Tinder on the other hand is always looking for app stickiness, recently by launching its own interactive series Swipe Night to attract younger users.) McLeod’s philosophy is different: he doesn’t use social media himself, and while he wants to provide a way for people to meet via his app, he also wants them to put their phones down and engage face-to-face.