Hinge

Teri Hatcher, the popular actress who starred in the hit tv series Desperate Housewives and Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, has shared that she was kicked off dating app Hinge after being accused of posting a fake profile.

The actress spoke about the incident in an episode of Getting Grilled with Curtis Stone when he asked her about her dating life.

"I've tried them all, and I tried my latest one. I tried Hinge," she told host Curtis Stone while sharing that she doesn't "meet people," according to People Magazine.

Bumble has shared the best time to be on a dating app – down to the exact hour. According to the popular dating app platform, being on the app on Mondays between 7pm and 8pm in the U.S. and between 8pm and 9pm in the U.K. will boost your chances of matching.

The dating app shared that these are the busiest times with the most people active on the app - and will give you more opportunities to match and set up dates. Other good times to be active on the platform is Tuesday evenings at 9pm, Thursdays at 7pm, and Sundays at 5pm, according to recent user data.

Dating Sunday (the first Sunday in January following the holidays) might be the busiest day of the year for online dating. But on a regular basis, searching for potential matches on the weekend won’t yield the same results as looking during weekday evenings. More people are with friends and family (and on other dates), and only log back in after work during the week to match with more people.

Shares of Match Group rose as much as 12 percent after The Wall Street Journal reported that Elliott Management had invested almost $1 billion in the company.

According to the report, Elliott has a long history of success in tech investments, including in Salesforce and Pinterest. The Match Group investment showed signs of promise to investors who have recently shied away from dating app companies in the wake of decreasing revenues and management turnover. As a result, share prices for Match rose as high as 12 percent and ended the day up 3 percent.

According to CNBC and The Wall Street Journal, Elliott plans to engage with Match Group’s management, but it is unclear as to how involved they will be, and if that would include nominating its directors. Match Group recently appointed a new CEO for Tinder, so Tinder’s previous acting CEO Bernard Kim can focus his attention on Match Group’s entire suite of apps, which include Hinge, OkCupid, Match and BLK.

The founder of Hinge, the fastest-growing app in parent company Match Group’s portfolio, says AI will change the game for dating apps.

McLeod spoke to the Financial Times about a range of topics, including Hinge’s success and where he sees it going, and the advances with generative AI. He noted that the key with AI and dating apps is continually “dialing up the sophistication of our matching algorithms” so that it continues learning about the nuances of preferences and delivering better results, according to The Financial Times.

“Every single time someone goes on a great date, we can look at all the information that led up to it, “ McLeod told the Times. “Everything from their profile information to their behavior on the app, to how many matches they had at the time that they met.”

Image: Hinge

Hinge is launching a million-dollar social impact fund called One More Hour to help encourage people to meet in real life in response to the loneliness epidemic. The fund will offer $10,000 to $25,000 grants to 501(c)3 groups in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York to develop “fresh, free/low-cost and recurring in-person connection opportunities” for young adults, according to Fast Company.

The idea is to get people engaging more with each other in real life and not just online. The program is intended to fund events that will be organized and ongoing, so that people will feel more encouraged to show up and see what happens.

Hinge’s social impact director Josh Penny told Fast Company that social clubs stand out as a way to combat the loneliness epidemic because of “their welcoming, low-pressure nature.” He adds that telling people to hang out in person doesn’t necessarily work, that you need to offer the structure and support to encourage people to do it.

Tinder and Hinge have recently released new ultra-premium subscriptions for what they called “motivated daters,” but a significant population of singles would rather not pay the steep price for a dating app experience. In fact, the more companies try to monetize dating app features, the more it seems to turn off daters altogether.

A recent report from Bloomberg found that people are gravitating back to in-person events like speed dating, which saw a 63 percent increase in participation this past year according to Eventbrite. And they are reluctant to pay the $500 subscription for Tinder or $60 subscription for Hinge, though Match Group has noticed an uptick in revenue since releasing the premium services.

According to Bloomberg, third-quarter downloads for Hinge were the app’s best ever and that 1.3 million of its users pay for a subscription. Bumble will be offering short term subscriptions as well as its own high-priced premium service in the coming months.