Types (Niche)

Hinge is focusing on helping their customers find long-term relationships these days in order to compete with apps like Tinder, an app known mostly for its hook-up reputation. One of the ways Hinge is catering to the more serious dating crowd is by studying their behavior online.

Now, Hinge has published a new relationship study, with data from 1,000 couples who met through Hinge within two months of joining the service. The company found several insights about what seemed to work for these couples and the experiences they shared.

One interesting revelation from the study is that men who are successful with dating apps (or at least with Hinge) were actually pickier than your average guy. Instead of endlessly swiping right in the hopes that a few women will respond in kind, these guys on Hinge decided to be a little more selective in choosing their matches.

On the other hand, women from the study who managed to find love on Hinge turned out to be less picky than your average female dater. The successfully coupled females on Hinge were 20% less picky on average. (Yes, they were swiping right more, not less – keeping more of an open mind.)

This change of approach seemed to make a winning combo for both genders. Also, in case you were wondering, Sunday turns out to be the best day of the week for online dating, so be sure to log in to your app. Response rates are 36% higher on Sunday evenings compared to any other day of the week. (Perhaps because the Tinder dates over the weekend didn’t quite work out as planned?)

So, if you’re using a dating app but want a more focused, successful experience (read: not just hooking up with people or messaging endlessly), here are some additional stats for you:

• Don’t just stop messaging, because you never know. Couples who met on Hinge messaged an average of 16 people before finding their matches.
• Messaging can work. On average, couples who met through Hinge messaged for 3 days and swapped 25 messages before giving their phone numbers to their partners. (However, don’t get carried away and message endlessly – try to get to the date sooner than later!)
• 80% of the couples listed their education and job, because they considered them important factors in making decisions about potential dates.
• Don’t expect instant gratification. Couples who met on Hinge went on 4-5 dates on average before meeting their significant others.

The bottom line? Keep an open mind, and keep your options open. For more on this dating app you can read our review of Hinge.

Hinge doesn’t want to be another version of Tinder. Instead of focusing on the swiping game with attractive profiles, Hinge wants its users to engage, message and date – in other words, take the process of dating a bit more seriously.

Millennials are by far the biggest users of dating apps, and are less inclined to pay for a dating service. They also take dating less seriously than older daters. Tinder attracted the young market because the app was free, easy and accessible. But then apps like Hinge came along, who wanted to change the “hook-up” mentality many online daters have become accustomed to.

The majority of Hinge users are Tinder’s target market – Millennials. Hinge is betting on the fact that many young daters want to be more serious in their search, and not just use apps for that last-minute hook-up.

Hinge has done several things in trying to find its sweet spot, including launching a new feature this past November where users had to respond to a new match within 24 hours or they would disappear from their match list. Apparently, this didn’t go over well, because in February, the company announced that it was removing the feature.

In an email sent to its users, Hinge said: “You are busy, and 24 hours is sometimes not enough. At the end of the day, our job is about helping you find someone great, and timed matches didn’t do that. We want to make it right. So we’re turning off the clock. The 24 hour clock that is.”

Users still have to make contact with matches within a 14-day period, because the company maintains a time limit does increase communication and the likelihood of matches actually getting to the date.

And last month, Hinge launched a feature called Story Cards that helps users initiate conversation by letting them answer yes or no to “life experience” questions. According to website Global Dating Insights, the app’s CEO Justin McLeod revealed that during beta testing, Story Cards “generated a 20% increase in two-way messages between users, as well as more phone numbers exchanged.”  

News website Tech Crunch has suspicions that the next Hinge announcement will be a paid service, since Tinder is the only app that can really make money solely on advertising spend. 

In the article, writer Jordan Crook says: “Hinge is undergoing a huge makeover, ditching the swipe mechanic and adding a paid subscription layer to ensure folks who use it are there for the right reasons.”

Hinge also provided the following statement, causing more raised eyebrows:

“We are continually focused on helping our users find meaningful relationships. To that end, we’re always working with our users to test new concepts. However, at this point nothing is confirmed – everything from friend endorsements to concierge matchmaking has been on table. What we do know is that each global release continues to be the result of enormous amounts of work alongside our community in an effort to understand what sparks online connections that have the power to become lasting offline relationships.”

One thing seems clear: Hinge wants to focus on the sweet spot that is missing in popular dating apps – building real, lasting relationships. To find out more about this dating app you can read our review about Hinge.

Last month on the Canadian TV show The Disruptors, an unlikely interview took place between host Bruce Croxton and Markus Frind, the founder of popular online dating site Plenty of Fish. (Broxton was the founder of dating site Lavalife, which raked in members until POF’s free service hit the market.)

For the first time, the two former rivals were sitting down together to discuss the current state of the dating industry, and the history of their two companies.

Broxton noted the quick success of POF, which because of its free service, quickly gained a lot of users – many of whom hadn’t tried online dating previously. Typically, dating sites made their money through selling subscriptions to members, but POF tried a different model to attract a larger audience, and it worked. Instead of selling subscriptions, the site made its money by selling ad space. After all, they had an engaged audience.

At its peak and before its sale in 2004, Lavalife had over four hundred employees. Frind launched POF in 2003 and operated the service alone from his apartment for the first five years, without hiring another employee despite the service’s rapid growth. He managed to turn it into the largest dating site in the world by focusing on the US market (even though he was based in Canada), and by keeping the service free despite the naysayers.

Frind’s experience wasn’t in the dating industry when he first thought of the idea for POF. In the interview, he admitted that he just needed to learn a new programming language and the best way to do that would be through creating a dating website.

Croxton was complimentary in the interview, admitting that Frind was incredibly innovative in the dating space, despite the endless number of dating apps launched in the last few years claiming to change the online dating industry. “I find it ironic because many of the tech ideas on the show really emphasize that it’s not about the technology anymore because you can be up and running very quickly, it’s really a marketing barrier to entry. But you were pioneering that back in 2003,” Croxon said.

Frind Agreed, noting that he sold his company (for $800 million) because he was tired: “There isn’t really much innovation in the dating space; the features we have today are the same features we had five years ago. It just got kind of boring and I wanted to do something new.”

You can watch the whole interview here. To find out more about POF you can read our review on Plenty of Fish.

Tinder has released a new update for users to help improve the photo selection process and enhance messaging options.

The update is a result of one of Tinder’s most requested features: the ability to upload profile photos to the app directly from your camera roll. The old version of the app pulled photos from Facebook only, which didn’t give users much flexibility. Instead of being able to pull photos from their camera roll specifically for the dating app, they would have to post photos to their Facebook profile (and advertise their flirtatious Tinder selfies to all their friends), or try to get around the problem by creating a fake Facebook profile (not so easy to do), or adding “private” photo albums.

Now, users can pull photos directly from their camera rolls, bypassing Facebook. And to enhance this feature, Tinder has made cards and photos larger on the screen.

While this comes as a relief to many Tinder fans, another issue has been created. Tinder already has a challenge with some users creating fake profiles to scam other users, but the fact that every user has to tie their account to a real Facebook account made things a bit more secure. Now with the latest update, it’s much easier to post fake photos, so there might be a backlash with the current security measures.

Co-founder of Scamalytics Dan Winchester noted that this is good news for scammers, because it reduces the obstacle of having to create a fake Facebook profile. “Scammers almost universally rely on faking their identity in order to execute their scams. On a photo dating app like Tinder, clearly the photo is one of the key things they need to fake...adding direct from camera roll makes life even easier for scammers, and Tinder will want to balance the undoubted appeal of this feature with users against the increased security risk introduced into their platform.”

Another important feature in the new update concerns messaging. With a nod to Facebook features, Tinder is allowing you to “like” a message by tapping a green heart that appears next to a message you receive. iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users can also use 3D touch to preview links sent within messages. And yes, emojis will now be available in larger format – just to make things more fun.

Tinder has also teamed up with GIPHY to allow users to exchange GIFs with their matches. (And yes, there are millions of your favorite GIFS  - including one of a Kristin Wiig character from Saturday Night Live and numerous cute kittens, in case you were wondering about the options.) To use a GIF, you can select the blue “GIF” button found at the bottom left of the chat interface.

To find out more about this dating app, please read our review of Tinder.

In the days before online dating became the go-to method of finding love, our efforts were confined to more analog approaches. One-off hookups were found at bars as “Last call!” was announced. Blind dates were arranged by friends and family. High-status singles met at professional events and private clubs.

These days, the dating landscape is drastically different. Those same high-status singles no longer mingle behind velvet ropes. Instead, there's an app for that. Young professionals looking for suitable mates now flock to dating services that cater to an exclusive clientele. Don't meet their standards and you won't be granted entry.

Wondering how high society dates? Here's where the elite look for love:

Most of us have heard the term “six degrees of separation,” made famous first by the sociology study in the 1960’s, and later in the nineties through references to Kevin Bacon’s prolific acting career. The theory was born: we are all only “six degrees of separation” from him, or anyone else, on the planet.

Now, Facebook is concluding we could be even more connected to each other – by as little as 3.5 degrees.

What this means is that that when you are connected to all the people you know, and they are connected to all the people they know, and so on, you are inevitably linked – through your own network of friends, and friends of friends - to such notable figures as the President of the United States, a Kardashian, football star Tom Brady, or Senator Marco Rubio. That’s right, we’re all only six people removed from everyone else on the planet.

Recently, the numbers were studied again – this time by Facebook, using its own platform. The company found that despite the fact that over the last twenty years or so the population of the planet has increased – we are now closer to each other than ever before. We are all, on average, only three and a half degrees of separation from anyone else on the planet, thanks in large part to the role social media plays in our lives.

Think of it this way: If you have 100 friends, and each of your friends has 100 friends, that's already 10,000 friends of friends to whom you are connected.

In the United States, people are even more closely connected to each other – by an average of 3.46 degrees. At least among those who have Facebook accounts, which totals about 1.59 billion according to Facebook. And Pew Research Center’s report last year shows that about 72% of US adults are active online.

More people are signing up for the Facebook platform every day, which means the numbers are dynamic and makes the connections even closer. For instance, in 2011, researchers at Cornell, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and Facebook analyzed the average across 721 million people using the site then, and found that the degree of connection between people was 3.74. Now, with twice as many people using Facebook, we've grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world.

One problem with Facebook’s figures is that in real life, the majority of people only consider a portion of their Facebook friends as “real” friends. The typical Facebook user has 155 friends, but only describes 50 of them as friends in real life, according to a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center. Thirty-five percent of people have Facebook friends they've never met in person.

What does this mean? For one, social media and the Internet have drawn us all closer to each other – in a way. Maybe we aren’t any closer to each other in terms of real life interactions, but in a virtual world, we find connection.

Found if this social network makes a good dating service substitute, read our Facebook review.