NEWNOWNEXT – Apr 10 – According to a study published in AIDS and Behavior, in 2001 only 14% gay met on dating sites/apps. In 2014 that number rose to 80%.
by Alexander Stevenson
See full article at NewNowNext
Category: All Gay
Channel 4 Documentary Features Robyn Exton, Founder Of Dattch
DAILYMAIL.CO.UK – Apr 7 – Robyn Exton has launched Dattch (now Her), a dating app for lesbians. She is abandoning life in the UK to travel to San Francisco to look for investment. In a new Channel 4 documentary, How To Be A Young Billionaire, Robyn admits: 'I want to raise a million dollars.' She managed to impress founder of Bebo – Michael Birch and raised $1M from him and other investors. He said: "She identified an area that we feel was being under served. The app has the potential to be the market leader. Good time to invest."
Happy 6th Birthday Grindr
GRINDR – Mar 25 - Grindr is celebrating its sixth birthday this week. The gay dating app launched in 2009, and has now ~1.6M active daily users exchanging 70M chat messages and 5M pictures.
The full article was originally published at Grindr blog, but is no longer available.
PlanetRomeo To Launch On Apple Watch
PR NEWSWIRE – Mar 23 – PlanetRomeo, a gay dating app, will be launching its smartwatch app in late April for the Apple watch.
See full article at PR Newswire
This post also appears on Wearable.ai.
Gay Hookup Apps Survey
WEHOVILLE – Mar 20 – GrabHim.net, a website created by gay relationship advice author Michael Alvear, interviewed ~4K men ages 18 to 65 in a recent survey.
The key findings:
- 83% of gay men send pictures of their penis to strangers.
- 57% of HIV negative men do not want to have sex with HIV positive men.
- 43% of gay men said they would be likely/highly likely to make contact with somebody who is HIV positive.
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.
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
See all posts on eHarmony
See all posts on Compatible Partners
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.
Lesbian Dating App Dattch Is Now Her
FORTUNE – Feb 26 – Robyn Exton wanted to help a gay girlfriend who had gone through a break-up get back on the market. She created Her, a free app for women looking to date other women. The idea is to create a community for lesbians looking to make friends, chat, and date. Dating apps specifically for gay women are limited. The most prominent is Brenda, an app similar to Grindr that was created by a man. Exton herself is gay, and says her San Francisco-based team is made up of four queer women and two straight guys. Exton originally named the service Dattch, a blend of the words “date” and “catch.”
Blued Gay App Explores Overseas Market
ECNS – Feb 9 – Chinese gay dating app Blued unveiled its international version in the Netherlands. Blued founder and CEO Geng Le said the decision to launch in the Netherlands was because it was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage and is a "paradise" for homosexuals. Geng Le launched the app in 2011, and it now has 15M subscribers with 3M daily active users. The app recently pulled in $30M in third-round financing.