Milestones

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.

Do singles prefer taking selfies or traveling? What city has the highest number of active daters, or at least those who message the most? What height do most women prefer when they filter their matches?

If you like knowing the answers to these kinds of questions – in other words, identifying peoples’ preferences and what are they actually doing when they’re online dating - Match has just presented a wrap-up list of dating stats for 2014, culled from its extensive database. 

Tinder might be taking the dating world by storm, but so far the traditional dating websites like OkCupid and Match have been studying their users and providing us with valuable data about how people actually date, instead of just making assumptions. As it turns out, not everyone is into hooking up or taking selfies despite popular opinion and Tinder. But singles do tend to be visually stimulated. It’s all about the photos.

According to Match.com, 4.8 million photos were added to its site in 2014, and 280 million total were “liked.” It seems the ladies know that men are looking at their photos more than anything else, because straight women topped the list of most photos posted, with an average of 3.6 photos uploaded per woman (compared to Lesbian women and Gay men with 2.3 photos on average, and straight men with 2.8 photos on average).

And what cities are the best in terms of active online daters? Interestingly, Miami subscribers sent the most messages (over both New York and Los Angeles); users in Albany, New York logged in the most; and not surprisingly, those from Anchorage, Alaska searched most frequently outside their city looking for potential dates. Salt Lake City was the runner up, with the second highest number of users looking outside the city limits for love.

As for keywords people include in their profiles, “travel” came in first with over 1,000,000 people using the term to describe their interests. “Down to earth” is another popular phrase used in online dating profiles, with over 232,000 including it in theirs. The word “selfie” appeared in profiles far less often – just north of 5,600 times. Match.com even discovered who included the most hashtags in a profile – (44 hashtags to be exact).

Among the most common words used in profiles: Electrician, Welcoming, Warmhearted, Quickest, and Ladies. Other interesting choices that were among the most popular include crochet, sewing and Cosmetology. (I’m kind of surprised things like “jogging” or “watching football” didn’t make the top of the list, but maybe people are starting to branch out?)

And apologies guys – the height that most of your female Match.com counterparts were looking for was 6 feet. Being tall is definitely an advantage for men.

What’s in store for 2015? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. For more information on this dating service please check out our Match.com review.

Tinder who? Dating app Hinge has been on a slow climb uphill, but is gathering a lot of momentum as it goes. The app has broadened its reach beyond the initial major cities, which helped build not only its user base but also its brand as a serious competitor to Tinder.

This month, the app also made Time Magazine’s “Top 10 apps of 2014,” beating out the sensationally popular Kim Kardashian Hollywood despite the fact it made $100 million this year alone. (Tinder did not make the list.) Time took a dig at Tinder, noting: “Hinge sparked a flame in 2014 as it spread to more and more cities around the U.S…[Its] matchmaking connects to your Facebook account to foster friend-of-a-friend connections, a novel concept in a sea of dating apps that prioritize immediate, nearby and mostly anonymous relationships.”

Now Hinge is launching version 3.2, and due to audience demand is starting to change some of its policies, allowing for greater access to matches. Instead of providing potential matches once a day at noon, you can now view them at your convenience throughout the day. (I’m guessing this is to get people to log in more than once a day as opposed to creating a daily traffic jam.)

Hinge is also offering more matches per day. Unlike Tinder which provides an endless array of matches whenever you log in, Hinge is more particular, mostly because it has a more limited network to pull from – namely, your Facebook social circles. In order for Hinge to match you, you have to have a Facebook friend in common. (This probably encourages users to add more Facebook friends to their network, too.)

The app began in Washington D.C. and made its way to major cities including New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Hinge has further expanded its territories in recent months – adding St. Paul and Minneapolis, Omaha, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Denver, Seattle, Houston and Austin.

According to a recent article in Wired, the company has experienced 500% growth since January. While it isn’t doing Tinder’s numbers in terms of downloads and number of matches per day, the company feels its more measured growth is a better indication of its potential for long-term success.

What is in store for Hinge in 2015? On December 11th, the company announced that it raised an additional $12 million, which will help its expansion into even more cities, including its first launch into international territory in February, when it debuts in London.

Hinge is definitely a dating app to follow. For more details on this dating app you can read our Hinge review.

Just as Tinder’s founder Sean Rad was at the top of his game, enjoying the enormous success of his dating app Tinder after two short years on the market - and about to announce the new features offered in the latest version of the app - the board has decided to take away his CEO title.

As reported originally in a cover story for Forbes Magazine, Rad has been demoted to President, his management power greatly reduced for a yet-to-be-determined CEO who will take the reins of Tinder from him. According to Forbes, IAC decided that the company needed a more seasoned CEO (“an Eric Schmidt-like person”) leading it and taking it to the next level of a viable, revenue-generating business, as opposed to the young and green entrepreneur who brought Tinder to its current success. And also, preferably not a CEO tainted with scandal.

When Rad first launched Tinder, he did so with a lot of help from his friend and social trendsetter Justin Mateen. By approaching social influencers at universities (such as fraternity leaders), Mateen managed to get a lot of people using the app quickly, so the user base only grew stronger with time and more than a little PR.

Mateen and Rad built up the company together, but the scandal started when Mateen started dating one of their employees. When that relationship went south, the employee decided to pursue a sexual harassment lawsuit based on angry and inappropriate texts she had received from Mateen, and sued the company. She reportedly walked away with a little over a million dollars, but Mateen and Rad seem to be paying a higher price. Rad was implicated because he was the one who stripped her of her VP title and later “wrongfully terminated” her, according to the lawsuit.

But will all this drama derail Tinder itself? Not likely. The company continues to grow, and the revenue plan for its new premium service – Tinder Plus – rolls out this month with two new features for paying customers. The basic Tinder app will remain free.

The new version includes a travel feature called Passport, which lets users journey around the globe, swiping through matches in various cities instead of having to choose one based on their GPS location. The second feature is something users have been requesting from the beginning – an “undo” button that lets them revisit profiles they’d already rejected. Everyone deserves a second chance, right?

The company plans to launch another feature in the near future called “Places,” which will allow users who frequent the same places to meet over the app.

Will Tinder maintain the enthusiasm of its investors and the public at large after Rad steps down? Will customers be willing to pay for the benefits of Tinder Plus? We’ll have to wait and see.

At the end of 2012, dating site Hinge had recently launched and was overshadowed by the popularity of dating app Tinder. Unsure of how to proceed with less than $32,000 in the bank and only a few thousand users according to Business Insider, Hinge decided to bet big on the mobile platform.

"We made some business assumptions that turned out to be wrong," Hinge CEO and founder Justin McLeod told the news website. "We were like, 'This thing is running out of money, and we need to do something drastic."

In what seems to be a spur-of-the-moment business decision, McLeod and a couple of developers holed up for a few weeks and launched a mobile version of Hinge on February 7th of 2013. But the launch wasn't as smooth as expected - Apple at first rejected the app, which caused many sleepless night for McLeod and his company. They had planned a huge launch party in Washington DC where the app first launched, and until the morning of the launch party, there was no app available.

The launch party turned out to be a success, and more people signed up right after it than had signed up for the beta in all of 2012. It seemed Hinge struck a chord with users where Tinder left them feeling insecure - especially women. Hinge does not just match users based on location like Tinder does (which means a lot of random profiles get into the mix) - you only get matched through your circle of Facebook friends of friends, so everyone you meet on Hinge has some kind of link to your circle. This security has been particularly attractive to female dating app consumers.

McLeod is not about to sit still. He is grabbing a good portion of the dating app market share, and expects to compete heavily with Tinder for its core user base. But he's taking things one step at a time.

Instead of launching his app nationally, he has launched city by city, building up a solid user base based on demand before he moves into a new market. Also, potential Hinge users must be invited by current Hinge users - adding a level of exclusivity and security to the app.

Hinge is now one of New York's hottest startups. Although Tinder is much larger (it makes more matches per day than Hinge has in its entire history), McLeod's company is starting to steal some Tinder users. It has expanded to 20 cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. It uses a waitlist to assess demand in other cities, then launches when a few thousand people have signed up.

"There is no shortage of companies that have tried to build what we've built," McLeod says to Business Insider. "But we're using the organic, city-by-city method, which I think is the biggest thing ... We're a utility to help users meet great people in the flesh as effectively as possible ...We want to be a house party that has a really good host."

It's one thing to speculate about what's going on with eHarmony these days, but it's quite another to hear it straight from the horse's mouth.

Ok, not a horse – Dr. Neil Clark Warren, CEO of eHarmony and instantly-recognizable white-haired man from the eHarmony commercials. On August 22nd, 2014, the 14th anniversary of eHarmony's founding, Warren sent an internal memo with an insider's look at the company he believes could become “one of the most important companies in the history of the world.”

Read the full thing www.onlinepersonalswatch.com/news/2014/10/eharmony-internal-memo.html and check out some of the highlights below:

• After nearly losing the company in 2012, eHarmony is back on track with a five-year turnaround plan.
• It wasn't easy. Board members were asked to step down, employees were fired, vendor contracts were terminated, and an all-new executive management team was put in place.
• Even some of eHarmony's top leadership changed. Grant Langston and Dan Erickson were appointed to the Management Team, and Armen Avedissian was hired as the new COO.
• Just two years in, the company is showing signs of a major comeback. “Instead of losing 100,000 end of period subscribers each year,” writes Warren, “suffering EBITDA losses of 50% every single year, our EBITDA for 2014 will literally be dramatic and the cash in the bank increasing substantially each month.” eHarmony's end of period paying subscriber count has hit an all-time high.
• A major move is in the works. eHarmony's offices will be relocating to prestigious digs on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.
• The current business plan includes building ten separate relationship businesses with ten separate revenue streams.
• eHarmony intends to scale up by increasing its international reach. The company now employs 190 staff members in North America, the UK, and Australia, but hopes to reach other countries in the future – first in English, then in their native languages.
• Selling the company is definitely not part of the plan. “We do not ever again wish to expose the ownership and management of our business to persons who know almost nothing about relationships,” says Warren, “and have even less commitment to the sacredness of the relationships we are attempting to assist.”

Warren is feeling confident about the future of eHarmony. Maybe even a little over-confident, actually. Case in point:

“Bottom line, as a company, we want to bring about a world in which literally everyone has peace, love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Then, we will know that we have reached our loftiest and most idealistic goals.”

Whew. “Idealistic” is right. But all the best to them, and if they get even halfway there, eHarmony will be a rousing success. For more on this dating site you can check out our eHarmony review.