Milestones

PlentyofFish might not be making headlines the way Tinder has in the past few months, but its growth continues to be one of the online dating industry’s biggest successes. The company has announced that it hit the 100 million user milestone recently, and also revealed that it’s been a profitable company from its beginning, now with a $100 million run rate predicted for 2015.

POF has relied on a mixture of ads and premium subscriptions for revenue since 2008 (prior to this, ads only). In the last three years however, the company’s user base has shifted from primarily desktop computers to 80-85% using their mobile devices to access their accounts. Other traditional online dating sites have noticed the same trend of their user bases from desktop to mobile.

CEO Marcus Frind admits to website Business Vancouver that “finding love on a desktop computer is quickly vanishing.” Really, the appeal and ease of online dating makes more sense on a mobile device, which can be accessed anytime, anywhere. Mobile access means more users logging in and engaging with each other, a necessity for the longevity of any online dating service.

Frind said: “Since our shift to mobile we’ve seen rapid growth both in terms of users and revenue...Our revenue model has also evolved from one driven by advertising to one driven by paid membership, indicating that, now more than ever, singles are willing to pay for an enhanced user experience.”

For POF, that means their source of revenue has shifted to the mobile space and its premium service. An upgraded membership includes features like detecting when another user views a profile or when a personal message has been checked.

According to Frind, the user milestone and financial state of the company is significant in and of itself - and is no indication of his future plans, though he's never revealed this kind of data before. He’s not looking to take the company public, since he is the sole owner of POF. In recent years, the company also acquired speed dating service Fast Company to complement its offerings, but the main revenue source seems to be POF’s premium dating service.

POF has hit some bumps in the road since its launch back in 2003. For one, Frind refocused the dating site’s image, which had garnered a reputation of being primarily a hook-up site. With the facelift – which included focusing on the mobile app technology and re-branding the dating service for long-term relationships, not hook-ups - Frind seems to have found a winning formula.

The company, which used to employ only Frind, now has 75 employees, and doesn’t seem to be daunted by its mobile competition. POF is holding its own, despite a fickle online dating market.

For more information on this online dating service you can read our POF review.

It was only a matter of time before Tinder started monetizing its service. And that time, apparently, is now.

Tinder Plus, the dating app’s first foray into the brave new world of freemium monetization, just launched for $9.99. The new update adds at least one highly requested feature alongside a few others designed to improve the experience.

“The most-requested feature we get is a button to go back and have a second chance with people that users swipe left on,” said co-founder Sean Rad told TechCrunch last year. “Everyone has wanted it from the beginning. It’s absolutely at the top of the list.”

Tinder Plus' new Rewind function lets users go back to the most recent person they swiped left on. If you decide you made the wrong choice, you can pay a little extra to bring them back and get a second chance. Your long-lost love may not be so lost, but only if you're willing to cough up the cash to meet them.

Also included is a Passport feature, which lets users search for matches anywhere in the world instead of being limited to their actual location.

“We often hear that people want to be able to start swiping in a location before they’ve left to go on a trip or vacation, and that once they’ve actually made a meaningful connection with someone in a new location, their trip has come to an end,” said Rad. “We also hear people saying that they want to get recommendations for places to go and where to eat in a new city, and Tinder Plus can do better at that.”

Another interesting update, at least from a business standpoint, is the fact that Tinder Plus will remove ads from the network. You knew it had to happen eventually, right? Re/code reports that Tinder is working on a long-awaited ad product that Greg Blatt, chairman of IAC’s The Match Group, expects to be “a meaningful part of the mix” for the company's revenue.

Rad told the Evening Standard that he believes heavy Tinder users are willing to pay for enhanced service. "There are users that are just so active — they are just almost addicted to the platform," he said. However, he also acknowledges that Tinder Plus won't appeal to all users. "These features aren’t something that everyone is going to want to use, and we sort of don’t want everyone to use them."

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

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.

For those who have been following the trajectory of the phenomenal success of dating app Tinder, for the founders of the app, it wasn’t such a successful match.

Whitney Wolfe was one of the founders of Tinder along with Justin Mateen and Sean Rad, who were the face of the company  as it launched to great success. Then Wolfe and Mateen became romantically involved and when that ended, so did their professional relationship – through reports of abusive behavior and a lawsuit that ended in a $1 million settlement for Wolfe.

The young entrepreneur wants to put all that behind her however. In a recent interview with Business Insider Australia, she addressed the lawsuit, her critics, and the launch of her new dating app Bumble.

Wolfe claims she has moved on, but her history with Tinder is still a bit convoluted. According to Wolfe, she came up with the name and first shepherded the dating app herself by reaching out to students on college campuses, urging them to try it. However, Mateen and Rad have stated that Mateen was the one who brought Tinder to potential users, mainly through the fraternities and his contacts with large social networks at college campuses.

The fight between Mateen and Wolfe got nasty, with text messages back and forth that were exposed in the media. From an outsider’s perspective, neither one of them looked innocent, but in the end, it was a case of he said she said.

Wolfe took her experience at Tinder and decided to try her hand in launching her own female-friendly dating app called Bumble. Although it has the same user-friendly photo-based structure and ease of Tinder, Bumble encourages women to make the first move by giving them 24 hours to reach out to a match before he disappears. (The guys have to sit back and wait for the women to message them.)

Other female-friendly dating apps have come before Bumble with their own spin – like LuLu, which allows women to rate their dates and discuss them with other women on the app. There’s also JessMeetKen, which allows women to promote one of their single guy friends to other women on the site, in order to give them a little endorsement for potential dates. But Bumble is showing promise too, with Wolfe reaching out to college students and encouraging them to give it a try.

“We’re definitely not trying to be sexist, that’s not the goal,” Wolfe told Business Insider. “I know guys get sick of making the first move all the time. Why does a girl feel like she should sit and wait around? Why is there this standard that, as a woman, you can get your dream job but you can’t talk to a guy first? Let’s make dating feel more modern.”

According to Wolfe, 60% of matches on Bumble turn into conversations, and in a little over a month since the launch, there have been more than 100,000 downloads. 

Zoosk may be a leading online dating company, but recent times have proved it isn't smooth sailing even if you're a hit.

Sources told TechCrunch Zoosk laid off 15% of its employees in January 2015, a figure the company has since confirmed. The change was made as part of a larger effort to cut costs in many areas.

This latest news comes after a string of ill omens for Zoosk. The company's founders left their leadership positions at the end of 2014, hinting at trouble that may be happening behind the scenes. Shayan Zadeh and Alex Mehr pulled back from their daily involvement with the company, choosing to become members of the board instead. CFO Kelly Steckelberg stepped up as CEO in the wake of their departures.