Industry

Market analysts have a fascination with Tinder and Bumble, the two fastest-growing dating apps in the online dating industry. Rumors have been persistent that Match Group and Tinder was interested in acquiring the female-friendly dating app for around $450 million as reported back in August of this year, but the company turned down the offer.

Now it seems that Match Group, the parent company of Tinder, is reportedly still in talks to acquire Bumble, but now for a much heftier price tag of one billion US dollars, according to a recent article in Forbes.

Currently, Match Group has only $500 million in cash and a market cap of under $8 billion, according to website TechCrunch. So potential options would be to fund Bumble with some debt, or to do a cash/ stock combination deal, or even to acquire a portion of the company rather than all of it.

It’s Saturday night. The stomach butterflies are building as you prepare to meet your latest Tinder date. You’re both Seinfeld fans who love animals and sweating it out in grueling CrossFit classes. And you’ve always had a secret thing for redheads. You have a good feeling about this one. But do you really know them?

Online dating fraud victim numbers have hit a record high. Scammers and catfishers develop increasingly clever cons, swindling lovesick singles out of money and property, and in some cases committing violent crimes. Even avowed advocates for digital dating have to admit the system has serious flaws.

Recent months have seen several companies in the industry take matters into their own hands. OkCupid introduced a member pledge in attempt to curb the unsolicited sending of explicit images. Bumble joined forces with the Anti-Defamation League to announce a zero-tolerance policy against misogynist, abusive, and inappropriate behavior. Tinder launched the ‘Menprovement Initiative’ to raise the bar for male behavior on the app.

Tinder’s new CTO Maria Zhang has her work cut out for her: she’s tasked with making the popular dating app Tinder more engaging for users around the world, and moving away from the mindless swipe the app introduced. She also wants to create a better user experience specifically for female Tinder users.

According to a feature in PC Magazine, Zhang hired a team of female developers to help her craft new premium features and make Tinder more inclusive for users in other countries, who don’t meet or date people in the same way Americans do. She also opened a satellite tech office in Silicon Valley in addition to hiring staff for the L.A. headquarters.

Save traveling to an untouched tribe in the Amazonian rainforest, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of Match Group.

The company was a pioneer in the industry, becoming the first major dating site to register a domain in 1995. Today Match Group offers dating products in 38 languages across more than 190 countries, and boasts a portfolio of over 45 brands including Match, OkCupid, Tinder, PlentyOfFish and Our Time.

So what keeps Match Group on top, more than two decades later?

On September 7, Su Xiangmao, the 37-year-old multi-millionaire entrepreneur behind a Skype-like app called WePhone, jumped to his death from the 15th floor of his Beijing apartment building. He left digital suicide notes on Google Plus and Sina Weibo, as well as a disturbing welcoming message on WePhone: "Company owner is forced to death by his evil wife Zhai Xinxin, and the app will stop working." The message included Zhai's phone number and her national ID information.

Su’s notes told a tragic tale of marriage gone wrong. He met his 29-year-old ex-wife in March on Jiayuan.com, China’s largest online dating website, where both were VIP members with "verified" personal profiles. In the months that followed, Su spent 13 million yuan ($1.96 million) on Zhai, showering her with gifts like a Tesla Model X and a seaside apartment in South China's Hainan Province. They married in June.

One month later, they divorced. Su agreed to pay Zhai 10 million yuan as part of their settlement. If he failed to do so, he wrote, Zhai threatened to report his business, which operated in a legal grey area, and his tax evasion to police.

CNN Money has declared Sam Yagan, co-founder of OkCupid and CEO of Match Inc., the "nerd king of online dating." I can't say it's the most flattering nickname I've ever heard, but I'm pretty sure Sam is too busy taking Scrooge McDuck-style dives into piles of money to care what CNN thinks of him.

Nicknames aside, CNN and Fortune actually seem to think quite highly of Yagan, who was recently included in the '40 Under 40' list and profiled by the magazine.

Yagan's journey to become one of the most famous names in the online dating biz started with almost no dating at all: he was engaged to his high school sweetheart, and his first company was a CliffsNotes-alternative called SparkNotes. Both ventures went well: he is still married to his high school girlfriend, and SparkNotes sold to iTurf, Inc. for $30 million in 1999.