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Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd has secured a 4 million pound dividend payout from parent company Magic Lab, who saw record earnings thanks to its star dating app.

According to The Telegraph, the Bumble windfall is the result of a dividend payout of 20 million pounds from its parent company, and Herd owns about 20% of Bumble. Magic Lab saw earnings skyrocket at the end of 2018 to about 270 million pounds, up 51 percent from the year before. This quarter, the company reported a loss of about 4.8 million pounds.

Bumble’s revenue made up about 48 percent of Magic Lab’s overall business.

Tinder's New Series is called Swipe Night

Tinder will be releasing an original six-episode video series over its app, according to an exclusive report in Variety Magazine.

The new series will be a “choose your own adventure” story available to users when they log into the app. It’s interactive content, so users are able to swipe left and right to continue to different versions of the story. The basic premise involves the apocalypse, and asks the question: “Who would you spend your last night alive with?”

Image: Facebook

Facebook Dating made its much-anticipated debut in the US on September 5th, but concerns about its privacy issues have overshadowed the excitement in media coverage of the app.

Facebook was recently ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to pay about $5 billion in fines for privacy lapses, including its maligned partnership with Cambridge Analytica leading up to the 2016 elections. And most recently, the Attorneys General of eight different states have launched an anti-trust investigation of the company, specifically concerning the company’s privacy practices and purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram.

Still, Facebook Dating is betting on its wealth of personal user data as a competitive advantage for creating better matches to directly compete with apps like Tinder. (Match Group saw its shares fall 5 percent on the day Facebook Dating was launched, a sign of investor concerns about the new competition.)

New dating app Hiki launched this month, and it is the first of its kind to cater specifically to the Autistic community.

Founder Jamil Karriem was inspired to create the app with help from his cousin with Autism, who expressed his loneliness and fear that he wouldn’t be able to find someone special. Karriem decided that he wanted to create a safe digital space that would allow those with special needs to connect, whether for friendship or dating. The word “hiki” itself means “able” in Hawaiian.

Karriem told Yahoo! Finance that he didn’t want to limit the app just to dating, but that often people in the Autistic community are interested in finding new friends, too. The Hiki app allows users to swipe left or right, depending upon what it is they’re looking for — friendship or romance.

Lauren Daigle

Grammy-winning Christian singer Lauren Daigle has partnered with Bumble BFF to help promote its “Asking for a Friend” campaign.

The star joins other celebrities such as Jameela Jamil and celebrity gamer Kristen Valnicek, who have joined forces with Bumble to encourage its users to build friendships and support networks to counter the growing problem of loneliness and isolation around the world, especially among young women. According to studies, social media is part of the problem, with one in five people saying browsing through their feeds makes them feel lonely.

“At its core, music is about connecting with others - whether sharing a favorite song or hanging at a concert (with a couple thousand friends),” Daigle told The Christian Beat. “Bumble BFF is similar in a way, in that people can find comfort and connect to others through conversation.”

China’s gay dating app Blued is making its next move – an IPO in the U.S. market.

According to Bloomberg, the largest app for the LGBTQ community in China is planning to raise about $200 million through the IPO. The sale will likely take place next year, and the company could be valued as high as 1 billion US dollars.

Blued was founded by a former policeman named Geng Le in 2012, and now has more than 40 million users and garnered more than $130 million in venture capital as of March of this year, according to Bloomberg. The app offers live streaming and gaming in addition to online dating, and also connects men who want to become parents with surrogates overseas. These types of services are also part of Blued’s strategy to generate additional revenue outside of the traditional dating app.