Online Dating

If you’ve tried out Tinder (or any dating service, for that matter) you’ve probably run across your fair share of bizarre conversations. It's a strange world out there. Sometimes the weirdness borders on amusing, but all too often it's annoying or downright creepy.

Thankfully, the Internet makes it easy to disengage from the creeps. It takes no effort whatsoever to ignore a message and hardly anything extra to block or report a user. But where's the fun in that? Why take the high road when you could take the low road, where all the fun is?

Anna Gensler, a 23-year-old artist, has a much more interesting way of dealing with the deadbeats of online dating. She began drawing nude portraits of the creeps who contacted her via Tinder, and posting the results to Instagram (NSFW, of course) alongside their offensive messages. And then, for the cherry on top, she sends the finished product back to the culprit for a final review.

Slate spoke with Gensler about her unique approach to turning harassment into art. “I feel like this gets me in trouble a lot,” she said of her inspiration for the project, “but when someone does something I think is rude, I always want to give them a taste of their own medicine. I’m an artist, and I try to use art as my weapon, even though that sounds so lame. So I thought, ‘What is something I can do to make me feel the way that they’re making me feel?’”

She settled on drawing them “sad-naked,” the most immature thing she could think of, because “their pickup lines are the most juvenile, basic things, but also still oddly offensive.” Each of her portraits is based on the guys' profile pictures, but modified to be as unflattering as possible. The subjects are all made chubbier, scrawnier, or just not particularly well-endowed.

Not satisfied with taking on the creeps of Tinder, Gensler joined OkCupid in hopes of finding new subjects worthy of her artistic intentions. She even put a blatant warning on her profile – “I’m going to draw you naked if you send me rude messages” – and a link back to the Instagram. Whether or not it deterred potential creeps is unknown, but it did intrigue a surprising number of nice guys who found the project funny and requested a portrait of their own.

And what about the guys who receive Gensler’s works of art? “There are a few approaches,” she explained. “Some of them get really angry and say a bunch of mean stuff. Some of them get a little bit offended ‘and say, “Why am I so fat? My facial hair doesn’t really look like that. My nipples are smaller than that!’ They think I didn’t do them justice. Some people just block me. But a couple of guys have actually said smart things after I sent it to them.”

MillionaireMatch.com has just surpassed the 2 million member mark and is celebrating with a new digital billboard in Times Square.

“Join the 1%: Don’t get left behind,” the ad reads. It's a slightly odd choice, given the bad rap of the 1% and the fact that the term was coined due to protests in New York City in the first place, but it also begs the question: how many MillionaireMatch.com users are actually millionaires?

Darren Shuster, North American CEO for the dating service, recently spoke with MarketWatch about the milestone and their membership. Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

On what it means to be a “certified millionaire”…

“You can become a “Diamond Member,” which shows you have $1 million in assets or a large income, a minimum of $200,000 a year. Then you can search for other Diamond Members who’ve had their income verified.”

On online dating’s notorious reputation for being full of fakes…

“MillionaireMatch has as many fakes as most dating sites. Some people are great, some people are phony, some people get a lot out of it and some people quit in a week. You have to know who is exaggerating and who’s not. Some people say they own the car and the house, but they’re leasing the car and they’re renting the house.”

On sexism…

“People say all sorts of things when it comes to love or money. Women are attracted to wealth whether the website exists or not. We’re not exactly reinventing the wheel here. I’m sure there are people who will call it sexist and call it weird, and will say things like, ‘How could you go after them for money?’ If you met someone and they both have a sense of humor and good physical condition, who would you go for? I’d go after the woman with the big bank account. Wouldn’t you?”

On the clientele who make up the MillionaireMatch userbase…

“Some of these people are making $100,000 a year. On paper, they’re a millionaires. But they’re not necessarily bringing in $40,000 a month. Women are smart and intuitive. It’s almost like crowdsourcing to weed out the phonies. They’re probably our best security.”

And finally, the big question: How many members are actually millionaires?

“That I would rather not disclose, if I can help it. Most of the men have a million dollars or more at least in assets, including their house, and have money in savings. We have a fair share of those.”

To find out more about this dating service you can read our review of Millionaire Match.

If you tried to access PlentyOfFish on May 20^th, you may have run into a major roadblock. The site’s 503 page simply said “The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. Check back shortly!" Behind the scenes of the service outage, something a little more sinister was going on.

Around 7am that morning, POF received a warning of an impending DDoS attack. It isn't unusual for large websites to receive similar threats that turn out to be fake, but in this case the threat was real.

The DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack hit just before 8:15am. Such attacks are launched from thousands of computers around the world that have been infected with malware. Without the owner's knowledge, each computer repeatedly sends false requests to a site until it’s overwhelmed. The initial attacks took down the Plenty of Fish website, followed later by the company’s mobile apps on iPhone, iPad and Android.

POF was quick to note that although the attack was large, it did not compromise anyone's data in any way. “That said,” the POF blog noted, “these requests can overload our servers and can even cause ISP problems, so we quickly worked with our ISP to identify the offending traffic and tried various means to block it.”

Later in the day, another message was sent to POF, this time asking for money in exchange for ending the DDoS attack. POF refused to negotiate, and by 1pm they had successfully blocked the attack and returned all services to normal.

“We’re still on high alert and working hard to respond to attacks like this more quickly in the future,” concluded the blog post about the attack, “but in the meantime I’m happy to report that all of you are back to doing what you do best; sending messages, going on dates, and forging meaningful relationships. Thanks for your patience today.”

DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly popular and increasingly powerful, thanks to new methods being used by attackers. The attack on Plenty of Fish was 40 Gigabits in size, making it much larger than the attack that took Meetup.com off-line for nearly 5 days last month (which was “only” 8 GBps). The list of companies that have been attacked in this manner is increasing all the time, including Basecamp, Vimeo, Bit.ly, and Moz.

The good news is, that although DDoS attacks are irritating for users and even more frustrating for the companies who fall victim, they do not put users’ data in danger.

No dating service gets more attention than Tinder these days. We hear from a lot of uptight journalists who worry that the app encourages hook-ups, and from finance experts wondering how the app will eventually monetize, and from discouraged daters telling their Tinder horror stories.

But today let’s take a look at the lighter side of Tinder. There’s a lot going on in the mobile app’s world, and plenty of it is downright hysterical.

First, a man posed as a cupcake on Tinder and wrote about his experience for Thrillist. “If there's one thing I've learned about heterosexual women,” he writes, “it's that they like men. They enjoy their company. They even marry them, sometimes. But they love cupcakes. And if there's another thing I know, it's that single women are on Tinder. So armed with those two pieces of knowledge, I set out to create a Tinder persona that no woman could resist: a man's face drawn on a cupcake.” The results of his experiment are hilarious.

Perhaps inspired by the cupcake, another man decided to join Tinder as a golden retriever named Hero. Hero, like the cupcake before him, proved to be a very popular match. The faux canine received 206 matches – 154 from men and 52 from women – after just four fun-filled days on the app.

If hilarious and heart-warming stories of baked goods and puppies aren’t your thing, try Humanitarians of Tinder. The sarcastic Tumblr ruthlessly rolls its eyes at the single do-gooders annoyingly capitalizing on their charity work (and maybe just regular travels) around the world. Warning: with all the facepalming you’re about to do, forehead bruising is a serious possibility.

Then there’s Tinderfessions, a Twitter account that's exactly what it sounds like. This is a prime destination for awkward, funny, and sorta depressing tales of Tinder gone wrong, mixed in with happy stories of Tinder love gone oh-so-right. “Only met one guy in person. haven’t left his place since our first date. this was over a month ago. #thankstinder #keeper.” writes a user named Kels. “All my pics are with my really good-looking friend and in my bio I say I’m him. #catfish,” admits Trent. Expect to feel a lot of ups and downs as you read this feed.

If you want to skip the ups and cut straight to the downs (the comical kind, that is) head on over to Tinderlines.com, where you’ll be treated to a collection of “the best, the worst, and the funniest Tinder pick-up lines.” Prepare yourself for bad jokes, snappy comebacks, sexual innuendo, mathematical equations, song lyrics, one-sided conversations, and a whole lotta laughter.

To find out more about this dating app you can read our review of Tinder.

Olympic athlete and heartthrob Ryan Lochte has been quoted saying he’s never had a one-night stand (even while people were hot and heavy on Tinder in Olympic Village). And he’s not alone. Most Americans – 53% - claim they’ve never had a one-night stand.

A new study by Dating Advice found that while most Americans haven’t participated in this type of casual sexual encounter, men were more likely to have participated than women. Sixty-four percent of women said they’ve never had a one-nighter compared to only 41% of men in Lochte’s camp, which means that traditional gender roles when it comes to sexuality are still at play in American society.

Age was a factor in the study. Americans aged 18 to 24 had a 25 percent higher likelihood of saying they’d never had a one-night stand than those aged 25 to 34. The age difference makes sense, as there might be more life experience or opportunities for casual encounters as you get older and break away from your college relationship, opting instead for clubs and bars with other singles.

Not surprisingly, those who are married are also least likely to have had a one-night stand, with 56% saying they had never. On the other hand, only 41% of divorcees have not had one-night stands, compared to 50% of singles who have never been married.

There seems to be a distinction between straight and gay Americans, with only 32% of gay people saying they’d never had a one-night stand compared to 54% of straight people. As for race, 45% of African Americans and 47% of Latinos have admitted to never having a one-night stand compared to 74% of Asians.

It seems there isn’t much difference among income earners, with about the same percentage of people earning less than $25,000 a year saying they’ve never had a one-night stand compared to those earning $125,000 or more at 56% and 55% respectively. However, those earning in the median range from $75,000-$99,000 were the most likely to have had a one-night stand, with only 49% saying they hadn’t.

As expected, the South and Midwest are more conservative, with 54% of their residents saying they’d never had a one-night stand compared to the Northeast at 50% and the West at 51%.

The study surveyed 1,080 respondents over the course of three weeks, balancing responses by age, gender, income, race, sexuality and other factors in order to accurately represent the U.S. population.

Despite still facing the occasional naysayer, the Internet and dating have proved to be a match made in heaven. With consumers using the Internet more and more each year, demand for online dating services continues its meteoric rise. In particular, the ever-increasing popularity of smartphones has made mobile applications a booming business for dating services.

IBISWorld, a global business intelligence leader specializing in Industry Market Research and Procurement and Purchasing research reports, recently put together a comprehensive guide to the online dating industry's market size and growth prospects. By all accounts, the future looks bright for the industry's biggest forces.

InterActiveCorp is the one to beat. The largest company in the industry, IAC counts Match, OkCupid, and Tinder amongst its brands. The New York City-based company is expected to grab 27% of the estimated $2.2 billion market for US dating services in 2014, according to the new IBISWorld report. Analyst Jeremy Edwards predicts IAC's US Match revenue will rise 11.5% to $605.1 million this year, with operating income up 14% to $192.8 million.

Coming solidly in second place is eHarmony, a privately held company based out of Santa Monica, CA. eHarmony proudly dominates 13.8% of the US dating service market, IBISWorld says. The company’s projected US revenue for 2014 is $310 million, up 6.9%, with operating income up 9.6% to $35.3 million.

Spot #3 goes to San Francisco-based Zoosk, with 5.1% market share. 2014 has been a big year for Zoosk so far. The company filed for an initial public offering in April and IBISWorld predicts it will generate $114.2 million in US sales, up 24.5%, and operating income of $3.5 million. That's a nice change from a loss of $100,000 in 2013.

Finally, occupying fourth place, is dating service Spark Networks, with 3.2% US market share.

Altogether, the four largest companies account for 49.1% of US dating service revenue. The industry’s other winners are mobile dating (26%), matchmakers (14%), and singles events (7%).  IBISWorld expects the US dating service industry to grow at an annual rate of 4.2% from 2014 through 2019 - at which point it predicts sales will reach a whopping $2.7 billion.

"It is estimated that niche dating networks and services catering to the baby boomer generation will see the most growth," Edwards said. "In addition, revenue for the mobile dating market is expected to nearly double in the next five years, with rising smartphone adoption and new location-based features leading the market."