Online Dating

Sometimes it feels like online dating involves more rules and regulations then meeting the Queen of England. There’s a little less bowing and way fewer “Your Majesty’s,” but on the whole online dating etiquette is totally insane. Just when you think it couldn't possibly get harder than dating someone in real life, the Internet swoops in and dumped a bunch of new rules on you.

There's no shortage of dating experts discussing the do's and don'ts of that pivotal first message, but that's where the communication advice tends to end. Unfortunately, that's also where a lot of the communication itself tends to end. You send a message, you never hear back, and that's it. Done. Finito. Fin. Game over.

That leaves a big question hovering in the air, one that could have a huge impact on what actually happens in your romantic life: is it ever okay to send a second message if you didn't get a response to the first?

The messages daters hear are seriously conflicting. On one hand, we are inundated with tales of (mostly) women who are sick and tired of overly persistent admirers. On the other hand, we're told to go after what we want and that persistence is rewarded. So which is it? Is no response a nonnegotiable snub, or is it possible for a suitor to score on a second try?

Speaking as someone who's typically on the receiving end of messages, there are several reasons someone might not respond:

1. First, and most obviously, they might just not be that into you. A non-response does, in some situations, mean a polite “no.”
2. On the other hand, maybe the person's dance card is temporarily too full. Online daters often juggle multiple suitors at once, which takes up a lot of mental bandwidth. Perhaps you just caught them at a bad moment, when they had neither the time nor the mental capacity to add another person to their schedule.
3. On the other other hand, they might not yet be convinced that you're the one for them. A little pursuit – provided you actually have something interesting, engaging, and thoughtful to say – might be what it takes to move them off the fence and onto a date with you.
4. On the other other other hand, it could be purely accidental. It's easy to see a message and forget to respond to it. We’re all busy and important (at least in our own heads), so it's hardly surprising that sometimes a message slips straight out of our minds.

Out of all the possible reasons for a message to go un-answered, only one is based on actual, unambiguous disinterest. The rest are all up for interpretation, so what does it hurt to send a follow-up? At worst nothing changes, and at best you might meet someone amazing.

What makes Tinder so damn special?

There’s certainly something that’s catapulted the dating app straight into the mobile stratosphere, but users, investors, fans, and detractors alike are still trying to put their finger on exactly what makes the app so popular. Carrie Yurie, a writer for the Huffington Post, had a chance to interview Tinder CEO Sean Rad after his talk at GigaOm Roadmap to hear more about what's going on behind the scenes.

Though Tinder seems simple on the surface, the app leverages a fundamental understanding of human behavior in order to optimize user experience. Rad says “We built…a flow that emulates interactions in the real world. What we’re striving to do with Tinder is understand what are the sort of social dynamics, physical dynamics, the flows of where you start with a request or desire to make a new relationship and how that progresses to you actually meeting that person, talking to that person and getting to know them.” Armed with an understanding of how human relationships are built in the real world, Tinder attempts to emulate that natural flow with its app.

One question that continually comes up where online dating is concerned is whether users are looking for serious relationships or just searching for short-term hook-ups. Rad thinks Tinder is effective either way – it all depends on a user’s original intentions.

“I think it emulates whatever you want in the real world,” he told Yurie. “So if you are young and you don’t want to be in a serious relationship, you are going to look for that on Tinder, or if you are older and desire something more serious you will look for that.” Ultimately, the younger generation that makes up the largest portion of Tinder's user base is all about going with the flow and dating without a specific outcome in mind.

Tinder has worked hard to appeal to its target millennial market. We all know how it works on the front end, but what’s happening backstage? According to Rad, Tinder observes a user's behavior in the app to determine compatibility. That's nothing new, but Tinder is able to take it to an extreme degree. “When you match with somebody,” Rad explains, “we look at the depth of the conversations you are having with your various matches. You might have a deeper conversation with one person of a certain characteristic or another person of another different characteristic.”

At the end of the day, Tinder prefers to keep things simple. The app is consistently grounded in real life, putting the focus on the human experience outside the digital realm. “It all comes down to what do people want to do, how do they want to do it, and how do we create a frictionless experience to allow them to do that?” Rad says. “Whether we are coming up with a feature or improving something, we always look at, first and foremost, how does that relate to some desire or some thought process that the user has.”

For more on this dating app you can read review of Tinder.

This week’s round of congratulatory applause goes to Zoosk, which just filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC and announced its plans to raise $100 million in an initial public offering.

The company will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ZSK, with Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, and Citigroup Global Markets underwriting the IPO. Oppenheimer & Co. and William Blair will also be joining as co-managers.

As part of its filing, Zoosk provided details of its global online dating business.  The company states that the website now has 26 million members across 80 countries, including 650,000 subscribers (users who pay for access to additional features and products). The company also states that its user base grew from 18 million at the end of the year in 2012 to its current numbers, a 44% growth rate. The number of paying subscribers grew to 650,000 in 2013 from 483,000 in December 2012.

As those subscriber numbers have grown, so too has revenue. Revenue increased 63% from 2012 to 2013, rising from $109.1 million to $178.2 million. Net loss also decreased drastically during that period, from $20.7 million in 2012 to just $2.6 million at the end of 2013. Subscriptions account for much of that revenue ($153.8 million), but Zoosk also has a rapidly growing virtual currency business that jumped from $5.4 million in revenue in 2012 to $24.3 million a year later.

On top of that, Zoosk has raised more than $60 million since being founded in 2007. Investors include Crosslink Capital, Keating Capital, Canaan Partners, Bessemer Ventures, ATA Ventures, Jeff Epstein, Plug & Play Ventures, and Amidzad Partners.

While it started out on the web, Zoosk has been hugely successful in the mobile arena. In the Apple App Store it's the #1 grossing dating app and a top 25 grossing app overall. Much of that success can be chalked up to the site's proprietary Behavioral Matchmaking engine, which learns from a user's clicks, messages and other actions to produce more compatible matches. The better the data it gathers, the better its recommendations get.

Looking to the future, Zoosk knows the biggest challenges it will face. The service must optimize its strategy for retaining current members as well as its approach to attracting new members and subscribers. Zoosk must find a way to retain high levels of user engagement and subscription rates and, most importantly, must continue honing its Behavioral Matchmaking engine in order to connect users with mutual attraction.

To find out more about this service you can read our review of Zoosk.

Online dating has become a typical way to meet people outside of your own social networks. In fact, the majority of people have tried it at least once.

But what about the opportunity to connect via social media? Most people have a Facebook or Twitter account, and they contain a wealth of information about what we like, who we are, who are friends are, and what we do. The natural progression of social media is to harness this information and look to who might benefit from it – including online daters.

In fact, eHarmony released a study recently which found 7% of people who married after meeting online had met for the first time on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and ClassMates – not through matchmaking chat rooms, online dating sites or other romance-based online connections.

In an article in Time Magazine, Jeffrey Hall, associate professor of Communication Studies at University of Kansas, decided to investigate this connection. He wanted to learn more about who was meeting their significant others through social media, and how well these marriages fared.

He surveyed over 19,000 people who had been married between 2005 and 2012, and asked them how they’d met. Those who met on social networking sites were more likely to be younger and married more recently compared to those who met online in other ways. He was surprised to find that those who met via social networking sites were just as happy as those who met online, and those who met online in general were happier than those couples who met in more traditional ways, such as through friends.

Social networking sites have potential advantages over online dating sites, Hall noted. For one, you can meet people through networks of friends, which means there is some connection first. This puts many people – especially women – more at ease. Also, people are more likely to represent themselves in an honest light over Facebook, because their friends are reading their posts and making comments. You get a more complete view of the person you’re meeting – where she likes to eat, what TV shows she watches, what she does for a living. A Facebook page is a little more personal than an online dating profile.

Another interesting finding in the study was that most of the marriages resulting from social media connections were among African Americans. Hall attributes this to the fact that African Americans and Latinos were over-represented on social networking sites between 2005 and 2012, and use social networks to engage with their already close network of friends.

Social media is an important part of making romantic connections, and is growing in popularity every day. Maybe it’s time to check Facebook if you want to meet someone new.

Aaron Schildkrout and his friend Brian Schechter founded HowAboutWe four years ago as an alternative to traditional online dating. In a recent article in The New York Observer, he said that the fundamental problem with online dating sites was that they needed to keep subscribers. The sites work best when people are looking for dates, not when they are in relationships and dropping out. Dating sites depend on a huge database of subscribers.

HowAboutWe’s focus is a bit different for an online dating site. For one, they have branched out from their online dating platform to creating a valuable resource for all people interested in dating and relationships.

The primary goal of their dating site is to help people meet offline (and get them there as quickly as possible), so they can move towards forming relationships. Instead of searching through profiles, members can create an idea for a first date, put it out to the network, and see who’s interested. Schildkrout says it’s a way for people to meet more organically.

Because of the site’s focus on date activities, it was a natural progression to create a site for couples who are looking to be inspired. Many couples are bored with the same old dates they do all the time, but don’t have the time to research or a lot of money to do something more unique. This is where HowAboutWe comes in – they curate dates particular to each city they service, and set the whole thing up for a discounted price.

It’s an appealing idea for couples. As Schildkrout says, “We make the booking process and the reservation process extremely easy — you never have to show a voucher, your name’s already on the list. We do all the work for you. We take care of all the details.”

The company is also getting into media content, acquiring sites like The Date Report and Nerve.com and creating two additional new blogs related to dating and relationships. “We built out a world-class editorial team,” says Shildkrout, “and for the last three months, we’ve been working really hard to create a media wing focused on becoming the authoritative voice on all things love, and have grown traffic dramatically in that process.”

Popular apps like Tinder and the bigger or more traditional dating sites like OkCupid don’t seem to bother Shildkrout. He sees Tinder as more of a lightweight hook-up experience and OkCupid as an algorithm-matching experience which might not match you with someone outside your type. He is focused on his product, on connecting people in a real-world way. And he’s looking to build content that gets a conversation started. 

Is a company that's only 20 months old and has no revenue model really worth $5 billion? Spoiler alert: no.

IAC/InterActiveCorp recently bought back 10% of mobile dating service Tinder. Although it's easily the hottest mobile dating app on the market, it’s hard not to approach Tinder with a healthy dose of skepticism. $5 billion is, to put it bluntly, a completely insane number for such a young company.

According to the market research company IBISWorld, the entire online dating industry is worth just $2 billion. How on earth could a company that gives away its dating app for free be worth more than the entire dating industry? The answer is simple: it can't.

The number, first reported by Bloomberg and quickly picked up elsewhere, was based on the $500 million IAC had allegedly paid to buy a 10% stake in Tinder from venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, but it's far from accurate. Sam Yagan, CEO of IAC’s Match Group (which includes IAC’s online dating companies) recently confirmed that a deal was made, but declined to comment further.

“I can confirm on the record that we did a transaction with Chamath, but this valuation is nowhere near the truth,” he told Forbes. Tinder CEO Sean Rad added that the Bloomberg report was “meaningfully incorrect.” Forbes found that an e-mail to Palihapitiya did not receive an immediate response, but noted that his statement on Twitter read “My Tinder sale for $500M is inaccurate. I sold my stake but value was much less. Thx @samyagan for official IAC pos’n. #wishfulthinking”

That being said, it's far too early to write Tinder off as worthless. Just because it has no revenue model to speak of to date, doesn't mean it has no value to investors. With 10 million active daily users, Tinder is fundamentally changing the way a massive number of people behave and engage with each other. That's bound to be worth something.

“Tinder’s really doing something that has been the Holy Grail for online dating: it becomes fun,” says Mark Brooks, a consultant to the Internet dating industry. Unlike traditional dating sites, surfing profiles on Tinder is fun, low risk, and not time-consuming. Users don't have to fill out tedious surveys and the swiping process practically eliminates the fear of rejection. Thanks to Tinder, mobile dating is exciting and mainstream, a major coup that the rest of the dating industry has never been able to figure out.

“IAC’s not valuing Tinder based on what it’s worth,” Brooks notes. “They’re valuing it based on what they’ll lose if they don’t own it. If Tinder can own mobile and own the younger demographic, then IAC is owning the future with Tinder. It’s an international phenomenon.”