Types (Niche)

To coincide with LGBT Pride Month in the United States, China’s most popular gay social networking app announced last month a major milestone. Blued, founded in 2012, has completed its latest rounds of investor financing and now has a value of $300 million.

Blued claimed more than 27 million registered users globally as a February 2016, with overseas users accounting for more than 20 percent of the total. Not only does that make it China’s biggest gay dating app and bigger than Grindr, it also makes Blued one of the top social networking apps on the App Store.

Geng Le, CEO of Blued, said the company has seen significant revenue growth, particularly in the first half of 2016 when it started to make a profit. The app primarily makes money from advertising and live streaming, where audiences can tune into live-streaming video broadcasts and send virtual gifts to the broadcasters.

"With the funding, we plan to speed up our international expansion, and localize our products overseas,” Geng said. “We will promote the marketing and branding, and set up more offices overseas. We also plan to hire more competitive staff, and we will pay them a considerable salary."

Blued currently operates offices abroad in the United States and Thailand. The app has been translated into nine languages and its users hail from more than 190 countries and regions.

What has made Blued so explosively popular? As one of the earliest Chinese-language, geo-dating apps for gay singles in the region, Blued got an early foothold in the market. And given that China’s population is 1.3 billion - 1.7 million of which are estimated to fall on the LGBT spectrum - that market is potentially enormous.

“The gay business is a piece of virgin territory in China, and we hope to become a leader of this lucrative market,” Geng Le told China Daily this week. “The substantial spending ability of gays and the funding support we got indicate the strong power of the so-called pink economy.”

For comparison, consider Grindr. As the world’s other best-known gay dating app, Grindr was valued at $155 million earlier this year when it sought its most recent investment in China. Grindr has more than two million daily active users, according to a factsheet from June 2015. Blued has over three million.

The numbers bode well for Blued, which is preparing to shift its strategy in light of the good news. Last November, Geng Le said that Blued was aiming for a stock market flotation within five years. China Daily reports that the company now hopes to achieve it within the next one to two years, though the location of the listing is not yet known.

Tinder has been at the forefront of online dating industry growth, making it more accessible to more users than any other online dating platform. So it’s only natural that its accessibility extends to daters in the transgender community.

Transgender online daters don’t have many options when they go online to try and date, because most apps, including Tinder, only allow them to identify as male or female. In the next couple of months, Tinder has said they will be adding more gender identification choices along with more dating preferences.

Tinder is owned by Match Group, but it’s late to the party: other online dating platforms within Match Group, such as OkCupid, have already added more gender preferences to their platforms. In addition to “woman” and “man,” OkCupid’s gender options include “agender, adrogynous, bigender, cis man, cis woman, genderfluid, genderqueer, hijra, intersex, non-binary, other, pangender, transfeminine, transgender, transmasculine, transsexual, trans man, trans woman,” and “two-spirit,” as of November 2014.

Members of the LGBTQ community have pushed for this change in online dating, as they have felt excluded and left out of the conversation as more features are added and improvements made to the online dating experience – except when it comes to their needs and preferences.

Huffington Post Live’s Alex Berg reported deleting her online dating account, writing: “In the grand scheme of problems for LGBTQ people, the options of a dating website might seem like minutia ... [but] that recognition has the power to change the hearts and minds of those who would deny our rights in the physical world.”

It seems Tinder Founder and CEO Sean Rad agrees. “For a long time we haven’t done enough to give [transgender members] a good experience,” he said at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. “It’s harder for them to get what they are looking for. We have to modify our experience to address that.”

Tinder is working on the changes with transgender activist Andrea James and GLAAD, as part of its promise to be more inclusive to its community of daters.

“One challenge we face at Tinder is making sure our tens of millions of users around the world have the same user experience. No matter who you are, no matter what you’re looking for, you should get quality matches through the Tinder experience,” the company said to Fortune Magazine. “There’s an important transgender (and gender nonconforming) community on Tinder who haven’t had that experience … yet.”

Dating apps are no longer the upstarts of the matchmaking world. Like traditional websites before them, they’re now firmly mainstream and wildly popular. Millions of people around the world using dating applications and the number increases daily.

As users increase, so do the number of apps available. From Tinder and Bumble and Hinge, to newcomers like SWEATT and The Grade, dating apps are efficient, fun, easy to use, and often free. To get the most out of the experience, brush up on these expert dating app hacks.

1. Don’t Be A Slacker. Dating apps are the pared-down, lazy alternative to dating sites, right? Oh so wrong. A blank profile says you’re either only looking for a hookup or a scammer in search of their next victim. Your profile doesn’t have to be as detailed as it would be on Match or eHarmony, but you should offer a brief intro to your life, your personality, and what you’re looking for.
2. Swipe Often. Dating apps only work if members use them regularly, so most punish infrequent users by showing them other sporadic users - meaning you’re stuck choosing from a pool of people who are less interested in meeting someone and fewer matches overall. The more you open the app, and the more often you swipe, the better your chances and the higher the quality of your matches.
3. But Do Exercise Restraint. Dating apps penalize both picky swipers and indiscriminate swipers. A user who swipes right on everyone looks like a spambot or scammer, which algorithms are designed to weed out. Don’t say yes to everyone in a desperate attempt to increase your odds of getting a yes back.
4. Use Your Words. Swiping is a perfect way to pass the time on public transportation or in line at your local coffee shop, and no one is immune to the ego boost of receiving a right swipe, but there’s more to the experience than that. Why waste time making tons of matches that go nowhere? Dating app users are notoriously lax when it comes to communicating, so buck the trend by sending a message as soon as a match is made.

And why stop there? If the conversation is going well, take the next step and meet in person. Waiting too long leaves ample opportunity for your date to get bored and move on or - possibly worse - to create an idealized image you can’t live up to when you’re finally face-to-face. For more information, you can view our list of reviewed dating apps.

Despite criticism every time it surfaces, there’s at least one app idea that refuses to die. Stroovy is the latest in a long line of apps for rating and reviewing people - especially your exes. What makes this one different, however, is that it’s limited to people who use dating services.

“Finding the perfect mate can seem impossible,” reads the app’s website. “Stroovy provides serious online daters a community-led platform for peer-to-peer dater review.” The app encourages singles to “authenticate before you date” and “Stroove before you groove” - ostensibly for the purpose of making online dating safer, but it’s hard to believe users won’t be more attracted by the possibility of pettiness and scandal.

The idea is similar to Lulu, an app for women to review men, which stirred up plenty of controversy when it launched. Lulu has since transitioned beyond its original intent and Stroovy vows to be different by accepting reviews from users of all genders. Stroovy also promises to help users:

Tinder might be the dating app giant, but other dating apps are seeing success by catering to specific market needs that don't involve endless swiping.

Last month at Tech Crunch Disrupt, a panel of dating app CEOS gathered to discuss the industry, trends, and how things are changing – they think for the better. Specifically, the talk was given by three female CEOs about how women are changing the dating app game: Whitney Wolfe from Bumble, Dawoon Kang from Coffee Meets Bagel, and Robyn Exton of Her.

One thing to note: while these are all dating apps, they made sure to point out that their focuses and application are different. Bumble is a female-centric dating app similar to Tinder and free to use, although the company is looking for ways to monetize the app without resorting to all-paid memberships or advertising. Wolfe says that they have noticed an interesting trend among users: that they are looking for friendships, too. Right now, Bumble’s platform allows you to look for friends as well as dates, but soon they will be rolling out a feature that includes finding groups with similar interests.

Coffee Meets Bagel is an app that stresses quality over quantity, allowing only one match per day, and giving the users only twenty-four hours to accept a match. Kang is focused on the success of the matches, which she says only helps other people spread the word about the app. She is rolling out a paid feature that lets daters use an A/B test to see which photos they should put on their profile. Right now, users can also pay for a premium membership, which includes more matches and other incentives.

Her is aimed specifically toward female dating in the LGBTQ community. Exton points out that they have been lucky to be able to focus on one gender when studying patterns for dating and befriending people over the app. The app offers users a community – with news of local events, social networking, and dating applications.

All three CEOs agreed that a more nuanced approach to features is the key to an app’s success, designed to benefit a specific group of users, whether that is women, same-sex daters or people looking for friendship.

Despite the popularity of Tinder and our swipe-happy culture of dating, there is still room in the market for other players – even new apps. Most people (while they do still use Tinder) are looking to other apps to help fill a need that they feel Tinder isn’t serving. Whether daters have concerns about security, or are looking for an app that offers more than photos, or look to a niche market (like Farmer Dating) to satisfy their particular requests for mates, many more apps are launching and some are seeing success.

Competition, no matter how saturated the market, is always good for the consumer.

Fresh off the news that BeautifulPeople.com had been hacked comes another tale of privacy violation. This time, Fling.com is the victim of the breach.

International Business Times reports that tens of millions of credentials were stolen from the adult dating website and put up for sale on the dark web. The information allegedly includes usernames, plain text passwords, email addresses, IP addresses, gender, sexual preferences, and date of birth records. It appears that some of the accounts belong to Fling administrators.

According to the hacker responsible for the breach - who goes by the pseudonym ‘peace_of_mind’ - the data dump contains more than 40 million Fling.com records. It’s currently on sale for 0.8874 bitcoins, which is worth approximately $411 at the time of writing.

Vice Motherboard obtained a sample of the data from the hacker. The individual to whom the Fling.com domain is registered then confirmed its legitimacy.

“We take internet security very seriously,” he wrote in an email to Motherboard. “Our site is free to join and we do not store any credit card information. We've investigated the sample data and it is from a breach that happened in 2011.”

Motherboard also shared the sample data with security researcher Troy Hunt, proprietor of the breach notification website “Have I Been Pwned?” Using HIBP, Hunt discovered and contacted two victims of the Fling breach. One confirmed their full password in the sample. The second claimed they had no recollection of joining the site, but said the beginning of the password was something they have used in the past.

On the bright side, some of the email addresses in the sample did not appear to belong to any Fling accounts. Motherboard tested 101 addresses and found that only 61 were already in use.

Additionally, some of the accounts included in the data may have been disabled prior to the breach. “Accounts in the sample were also flagged with settings such as ‘admin_disabled,’ ‘user_disabled,’ or “active,’” writes Motherboard. “However, these flags seemed to have no bearing on whether an email address was already in use or not on Fling.”

Continued investigation provided further reason to believe that not all the accounts for sale are valid. Motherboard found that accounts can be created on Fling without clicking a verification link sent to an email address. They also found that Fling passwords are required to include numbers, though many passwords in the sample data only contained letters.

To be on the safe side, anyone who has used Fling.com should change their password - particularly if it has been used for more valuable services, like an email account or bank account.