Match

Summer: the season of swimsuits, sunscreen, ice cream, state fairs, outdoor movies, park picnics, umbrella drinks, bonfires, BBQ, trashy beach reads, and road trips.

This year, Match.com celebrated summer by teaming up with travel planning platform Roadtrippers for a one-of-a-kind survey on the perks, perils, and pet peeves of road tripping with a romantic partner. Over 1,500 singles shared their insights on making it work (and the turn-offs that guarantee your automotive adventure will be a wreck).

Nearly a third of singles (33%) agree that a road trip is a very significant milestone in a new relationship. But not all singles take it so seriously - an impressive 60% think it’s ok to attempt a road trip after just one month of dating a new partner.

Following a successful launch on Facebook Messenger last year, Match is bringing its dating chatbot Lara to Google Assistant.

The AI matchmaker uses contextual understanding and speech recognition to provide advice and guidance for dating in the digital age. Lara first launched in France in 2016, then rolled out to users in the UK in 2017.

Match's vice-president of Northern Europe, Abbie Oguntade, spoke to The Drum earlier this year about the bot’s success and future trajectory. Lara has driven a 30% increase in visitors to Match’s landing page in Europe, she said, and subscriptions have “heavily improved” as a result. A team of around 15 engineers and tech experts are working out of Match’s innovation hub to improve the assistant’s AI features.

It’s been a tumultuous month for Match Group. The company’s share price dropped over 25% in the wake of Facebook's announcement that it was entering the online dating space, prompting CEO Mandy Ginsberg to assure users and investors that Match Group had little to fear from its new competitor.

“People don’t want to mix Facebook and their dating lives,” she said in an interview with Bloomberg.

She may be right. Looking at Match Group’s Q1 2018 Earning Results, also released this month, the company appears to be in a strong position despite the recent hit.

Halloween has come early for Match.com. The venerable dating site made headlines last week for an outbreak of zombies -- zombie profiles, that is.

A report from The Verge revealed that a glitch has resurrected an unknown number of deleted Match profiles from the dead. In an interview, former Match user Jason Debiak explained his surprise when, over breakfast with his wife and daughter, an email announcing 10 new matches on a decade-old, deactivated account appeared in his inbox.

“I log in, and there I am, from 15 years prior, with less gray hair,” he said. “And my whole profile is there, everything.”

It wasn’t long ago that dating services were seen as the last refuge of the lovelorn and desperate. Today online dating hasn’t merely shed its stigma, it’s a bona fide phenomenon and business appears to be booming.

According to a report from IBISWorld, annual revenue in the online dating industry has surpassed $3 billion. Dating services employed over 9,000 people worldwide in 2017 and have collectively seen an annual growth rate of +5.3% over the past five years.

Yet hardly a week goes by without someone publishing an article condemning digital dating for butchering our ability to have real relationships, and even major players like Match Group have fallen short of analysts’ expectations.

Match Group has a new CEO, and she’s determined to provide a better online dating experience for women. In a recent interview with Marketwatch, Mandy Ginsberg revealed that Tinder will be debuting a new feature that lets women choose whether or not they want to make the first move. She has female-friendly plans for their other properties as well, including Match and OkCupid.

Tinder’s new feature competes directly with dating app Bumble, which has seen incredible growth since its debut. Bumble differs slightly in that women automatically get to make the first move, rather than choosing.

Ginsberg has also launched a new campaign for OkCupid that “emphasizes shared hobbies over hookups.”