BBC – Mar 18 – A dating site for married people is being accused of breaking the law. A court in France must now decide whether the company is illegally encouraging spouses to cheat. Fidelity in marriage is written into French civil law. In France, all law is based on written codes which can be amended by parliament. Judges are free to interpret the codes, but their room for manoeuvre is much more limited than in a common law system like the UK's. And in Article 212 of the Civil Code, it states: "Married partners owe each other the duty of respect, fidelity, help and assistance." The ads which caused such horror among conservatives and Catholics encourage wives to think that cheating is both permissible and fun. One poster displayed on buses and metros shows an attractive young woman in a bridal dress with her fingers crossed behind her back. The message is clear: vows are for suckers. Founded in 2009, the website says it has 2.3M members in Europe including one million in France. It has smaller operations in the US and other countries.
Month: March 2015
Lesbian Dating App Dattch Raises $1M And Rebrands To “Her”
TECH CITY NEWS – Mar 17 – Having found its users weren’t quite sure of the name, Robyn Exton has rebranded his lesbian dating app Dattch to Her. Robyn Exton has also revealed a seed round that will see the company expanding in the US market, while going increasingly global. The investors include Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, Michael Birch, founder of Bebo, and Andy McLoughlin from Huddle.
by Kirsty Styles
See full article at Tech City News
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
Friendsy Is Tinder For College Students Only
TECH CRUNCH – Mar 17 – Friendsy, an app that launched nationwide earlier this month, aims to connect college students, whether it’s to be friends, date or hook up. The app launched on 40 campuses before its national launch. In the two weeks since, its user base has doubled to ~45K. Users need a .edu email address to sign up. Friendsy is backed by a Princeton University accelerator and as of its launch had raised~$200K from New York angel investors.
White Label Dating To Power Netmums’ Single Parent Dating Site
PRESS RELEASE – Mar 13 – Netmums, UK’s online parenting community, has partnered with White Label Dating to launch Netmums Dating, a dating site for single parents. Founded in 2000, Netmums is a family of community-driven sites with 1.9M members.
PlentyOfFish Surpasses 100 Million Users
THE CANADIAN PRESS – Mar 16 – It's been a steady ascent for the homegrown startup which CEO and founder Markus Frind launched from his Vancouver apartment in 2003. By 2008, Frind had 15M signups, $10M in revenue and doubled his workforce – to two. The company has doubled its revenue since 2012. There are 4M users daily, and POF employs ~70 people now.
by Lauren La Rose
The full article was originally published at Edmonton Journal, but is no longer available.
JSwipe: A Tinder For Modern-Day Yentas
NY TIMES – Mar 13 - JSwipe is like JDate combined with Tinder. The app started last April. Instead of attributes like favorite movies, users indicate their degree of Jewishness (among them: Just Jewish, Orthodox and Willing to Convert). The app's founder, David Yarus (28), describes typical JSwipe users as “millennial Jews whose grandparents and mothers are saying, ‘When are you going to marry someone Jewish?’ ” The app has ~250K users in 70 countries. Much of the growth has been through word of mouth, with users acting like yentas.
eHarmony In The Age Of Tinder
WSJ – Mar 16 - eHarmony has reached record subscribers, 778k members and makes 15m matches a day, up from 5m a year ago. Revenues are now over $275m.
Dr. Warren: Under CEO Greg Waldorf users started seeing us like the other dating sites Match and Zoosk, when we’re really a social science site. We’re really, really interested in long-term relationships. Tinder is great for us. …it raises awareness that online dating and matchmaking exists.
Mr. Avedissian: We stopped offering some short-term subscription plans and introduced two-year and longer memberships, since it takes more than one to three months to find a soul mate. Users come to us when they’re willing to pay a lot more because they’re getting premium matchmaking. The average age of an eHarmony user has come down from the lower 40s and is ~4 years younger. 55% of new registrations are on mobile. …Sequoia Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures invested $110 million in eHarmony in 2004. Dr. Warren came back and bought it back for $153.2 million. Now eHarmony doesn’t borrow capital.
Dr. Warren: We also want to help people find the right job. Our site, Elevated Careers, will be available by the end of June. We’re working on matching people according to 4 criteria: First, there has to be cultural fit between a person and a company. …The second part is whether you have the skills for the particular job. …Then we have two personality matches: One involves how you will match with your boss, the other is how you will fit in relation to your colleagues. …We were failures in Europe after we invested $33m in eDarling which we sold back for virtually nothing. We didn’t have brand recognition in Europe. Now we’re going to run the whole thing from our current offices…and make sure our matching algorithm works in each country. We’ll translate our site, beginning with Spanish. We’ve also had a lot of interest from India, China, Korea. …I feel that being gay could have easily been true for me. We make pretty good income from ‘Compatible Partners,’ even though we don’t advertise it a lot.
by Georgia Wells
See full article at WSJ
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SXSW Interview With Grindr CEO
THENEXTWEB – Mar 16 – Bootstrapped with no VC funding and fueled by word-of-mouth growth, Grindr is a great example of an company that has made a big impact on its own terms. Grindr CEO Joel Simkhai was interviewed by Martin Bryant Editor-in-Chief at The Next Web at SXSW. You can listen to the conversation below.
eHarmony To Shift To TV Ads In Australia
THE AUSTRALIAN – Mar 15 - eHarmony will shift its advertising focus from digital back to television in Australia after realizing TV advertising brought more engaged and higher spending members. eHarmony spends ~15% cent of its global budget in Australia, which is eHarmony’s third-largest market.
Tinder Users At SXSW Are Falling For A Bot Promoting A Sci-fi Movie
ADWEEK – Mar 16 - Tinder users at SXSW were encountering an attractive 25-year-old woman named Ava on the dating app. It turned out to be a bot promoting Ex Machina, a sci-fi film that just happened to be premiering Saturday night in Austin. The woman in the photos is Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, who plays an artificial intelligence in the movie.