September 2020 – Online Personals Watch

IDEA Webinar – Productivity & Collaboration Tips

Posted on September 29, 2020

OPW – Sep 29 – This Friday at 11am EST join us for another IDEA webinar covering tools & techniques to improve productivity & collaboration as your teams work-from-home

What's your productivity stack? How do you help your team be as productive and communicative as possible?

In this IDEA webinar we will share ideas that we've used to improve work-from-home effectiveness, and improve wellness, collaboration & teamwork, and overall productivity.

PANEL
Geoff Cook – CEO/Co-Founder, The Meet Group
Murugavel Janakiraman – CEO/Founder, Matrimony.com
Jens Kammerer – CEO/Co-Founder, Jaumo

HOST/PRESENTER
Mark Brooks – President, IDEA & CEO, Courtland Brooks

Expect a fast-paced outpouring of ideas from speakers. Discuss and add your ideas in the comments.

Webinar kindly sponsored by RealMe – https://www.therealme.com/dating & vPaaS by The Meet Group – https://www.themeetgroup.com/vpaas/

100 spots only. Reserve your spot here for Friday 2nd October at 11am EST.

Top Grossing Dating Apps for August 2020

Posted on September 29, 2020

SENSOR TOWER – Sep 29 – The top grossing dating app worldwide for August 2020 was Tinder with~$83.5M in user spending, which represented 7.8% growth from August 2019. ~43 percent of Tinder's revenue was from the US, followed by 6% from the UK and 6% from Germany. Bumble was #2 with ~$22.7M in gross revenue, up16.8% YOY. The next top grossing app was Pairs, followed by Badoo and MeetMe.

by Julia Chan
See full article at SensorTower

Matchmaker.com Acquired – History

Posted on September 29, 2020

OPW EXCLUSIVE by Mark Brooks – Sep 29 – The Matchmaker.com, .net & .co domains have been acquired for $150k to an undisclosed party. Estibot estimates Matchmaker.com is worth $275k, with the .net coming in at $14k. Domains aren't worth what they used to be worth, but this appears to be a good buy of a hallmark and historical dating domain.

Matchmaker dates back to 1983 when it was an early dating bulletin board on the BBS. Matchmaker.com was started in 1995 (per the copyright note) and first appeared on Wayback Engine (WBE) in Jan 1998 when it was a 'Pen-pal network' with 419k visits to the site. One year later it had 2m members and was getting 31k new members a week.

Back then I remember that Internet dating was really a two horse race between Match.com and Matchmaker.com.

In July 2000 NY Times reported the search engine Lycos bought it for $44m. By Oct 2000 Matchmaker.com had a facelift and had '2.6 million registered users.'

NY Times reported that "Matchmaker was founded in 1984 as a telephone dating service, evolved into a bulletin board system and went online in 1996."

It mired under Lycos as Match.com continued to pull into the lead. I remember while I was VP at Cupid.com in 2004 talking to Lycos about creating "Lycos Dating Search" a central dating search database. (see news). A few early dating sites signed up including LoveAccess, Tickle and TRUE. Cupid did not. I remember the CPA's seemed onerous, the strategy not a good fit for Cupid, and I didn't like the idea of sending a flat file of user profiles over to Lycos every couple of weeks.

Matchmaker.com fell further behind Match.com as Lycos faultered against the rise of Yahoo and Google. It sold in Feb 2006 to Avalanche Media, which also owned Date.com, and in March 2006 was relaunched as a white label of date.com.

Alas, Avalanche Media missed the mobile wave, the owners had a spat, and Matchmaker.com was shuttered in 2016. Now it has found a new home. Watch this space.

Mark Brooks: This post was updated 12/15/20 upon clarification with Kris Covino, the former CTO of Matchmaker.com. The prior version of this post listed the text…

Matchmaker.com was shuttered in 2016 when the CTO/Co-founder pulled the plug on it.

This, I'm informed by Kris, is an inaccuracy. The CTO/Co-founder clarified that he did a security update, and the CEO, Meir Strahlberg, appealed to the data center and locked him from the data center, effectively blocking Kris Covino, the former CTO/Co-founder from being able to bring Matchmaker.com live again. At that point, Matchmaker.com was still a profitable business.

See the top news on Matchmaker.com

HotOrNot Shaped the Social Web as We Know It

Posted on September 28, 2020

MASHABLE – Sep 28 – Created in 2000, HOTorNOT became an overnight viral hit by letting people upload pictures of themselves so total strangers could rate their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. Twenty years later, HOTorNOT's DNA is embedded into almost every major platform that defines how we interact online today. "Everything about HOTorNOT was about finding ways to connect people. We really saw ourselves as trying to build the ultimate people router," said one of HOTorNOT's two co-founders, James Hong. "It was a different internet at the time," said Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter. A good friend of Hong, he called him one of the smartest people he knows in Silicon Valley. "Most people hear HOTorNOT and think of the ranking feature, which is crude and sort of questionable in today's light," he said. "But there was always a deep caring and humaneness in how they did things." HOTorNOT made ~$4M by 2003 (with ~88% of revenue coming from auto-renewing subscriptions). The site's downfall began with the arrival of Web 2.0, when web platforms with "venture money started pouring back into startups again. HOTorNOT couldn't compete with services that were free and relying on cash from investors to pay their bills," Young said. He also cited the loss of their talented and ambitious employees who left to start their own companies, like Crunchyroll. HOTorNOT was sold to Avid Life Media for ~$20M in 2008. In 2012, it was sold to Badoo. Badoo only revived HOTorNOT to turn it into another Tinder app clone launching in 2014.

by Jess Joho
See full article at Mashable

See the top news on HotorNot

Match Group Names Ayni Raimondi as VP Of Brand

Posted on September 28, 2020

PULSE 2.0 – Sep 27 – Match Group has hired Ayni Raimondi as its VP of Brand. Ayni Raimondi previously worked as VP of Marketing at Everlane, and a Global Brand Relationships Lead at Airbnb.

by Annie Baker
See full article at Pulse 2.0

See the top news on Match Group

Matrimony.com Expects Double Digit Growth to Continue

Posted on September 28, 2020

DEVDISCOURSE – Sep 28 – Matchmaking service provider Matrimony.com saw its membership grow by 30% during the pandemic, Matrimony.com founder-CEO, Murugavel Janakiraman said. The company is expecting to record double-digit growth in revenues and will invest in products and marketing. According to the company statement, Matrimony.com holds a 60% market share and BharatMatrimony is the flagship brand. For the year ending March 31, 2020, the company reported revenues of Rs 372 crore ($50M) with 7 lakh (700K) subscribers.

See full article at Devdiscourse

See the top news on Matrimony

Match Group Hires Head of Safety and Advocacy

Posted on September 28, 2020

AXIOS – Sep 28 – Tracey Breeden has been hired as its first-ever head of safety and social advocacy, a newly-created role. Breeden will oversee Match Group's trust and safety policies and initiatives across all of its products. She will be responsible for helping the product teams invest in new safety features and technologies. Prior to joining Match, Breeden was head of Uber's women's safety and gender-based violence operations.

by Sara Fischer
See full article at Axios

See the top news on Match Group

Tinder’s New Goal: Get Users to Hang out, Not Just Hook up

Posted on September 28, 2020

FAST COMPANY – Sep 26 – The popular dating app is relaunching its choose-your-own-adventure dating experience, 'Swipe Night.' Back in April Tinder saw 52% more messages sent globally. With virtual concerts in Fortnite and dating in Animal Crossing, the challenge Tinder is trying to meet is how to factor into Gen Z's digital lives beyond the immediate scope of a dating service. Tinder rolled out its video chat feature Face to Face, and removed the paywall for Tinder Passport. During its initial run, Swipe Night led to 26% more matches compared to a regular weekend and a 12% increase in messages sent. Production on season two of Swipe Night was delayed. Its being adapted into 20 languages. Z Labs evolved from Tinder U, a feature that launched in 2018 geared only toward college students. Through college reps, the Z Team was able to start compiling a network of users who would invite their friends. Informal at first, but now formalized into Z Labs. Having that close relationship with Gen Z will help edge Tinder alongside other virtual hangouts.

by KC Ifeanyi
See full article at Fast Company

See the top news on Tinder

Dating App String Encourages Users to Date With Their Voices

Posted on September 25, 2020

MY929.IHEART – Sep 25 – String is a new dating app that encourages users to date using their voices instead of swiping left and right. Once users match with someone, they can send them a voice note and get the conversation going using their voice to help reveal more of their personalities.