BUSINESS WIRE – Apr 14 - eHarmony has introduced its mobile app with smartwatch support for Android Wear and Samsung Gear S devices. The smartwatches will display enhanced notifications that are synced with the users’ phone.
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WASHINGTON POST – Apr 6 – Tinder and eHarmony are both dominant forces in USA. The companies have staggeringly different ideas of how American daters can find their match and how to best serve different generations. Analysts say the dating game is increasingly becoming a battle of the ages. Two-thirds of the singles and fling-seekers are 34+, IBISWorld data show. Pew Research surveys show 45-54-year-olds are just as likely to date online as 18-24 year olds. “Tinder is exciting, because they’ve caught the attention of young people. They put all their money on one variable: looks,” said eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren. Many market-watchers have questioned the basic premise of eHarmony and other sites, which depend on long detailed profiles and dedicated algorithms. Eli J. Finkel, a Northwestern University psychology professor, is arguing that Tinder is actually closer than profile matchmaking to that old style of dating: catching someone’s eye and, knowing nothing about their background, feeling a sense of attraction from across the room.
by Drew Harwell
See full article at Washington Post
OPW – Mar 26 – Here is the review and highlights from the last iDate that took place in January in Las Vegas. Executives from Match.com (including Tinder), eHarmony, Zoosk, JDate (Osmium Partners) and POF attended this year.
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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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.
ADNEWS – Mar 12 - eHarmony has 61M members and 14 years of data that can be used beyond dating such as HR. eHarmony's Elevated Careers is currently in beta in US but it will shortly make its way to Australia. It seems obvious why eHarmony would be eyeing off a different vertical. Even before Tinder, online dating was a crowded market. But global COO Armen Avedissian says eHarmony’s moves into other verticals is based on three things: a need in society, the creation of more revenue and a “very underutilised product” in the form of its matchmaking capability. eHarmony has also recently overhauled its infrastructure, allowing for its 125 terabytes of data to be processed. It also implemented an in-house attribution measurement system to improve the way it spends on marketing. eHarmony saw a reduction in marketing spend from $100M to $80M.
BUSINESS WIRE – Feb 19 - eHarmony wants to launch in one new country per quarter. Singapore's site will be the first one in this new initiative. Throughout 2014, eHarmony accomplished significant milestones which included:
ADAGE – Feb 18 – eHarmony said it will embark on an ambitious international expansion, aiming to add one new country to its roster each quarter. The company spends $80M a year on marketing, and that's down from the $100M eHarmony spent before it invested in its own custom attribution measurement system which helped the company spend more efficiently, according to CMO/COO Armen Avedissian. eHarmony built its own attribution system in-house, evaluating the 125 terrabytes of data it has stored in order to optimize media buys, how it communicates with people when the ads convert, and even what types of matches they see. eHarmony uses that system to measure ROI of TV ads, for instance. Matchmaking algorithms themselves change, too, resulting in different pools of potential matches based on whether people arrived on the site via a mobile device, online, or after watching a TV ad.
NATIONAL POST – Feb 18 – LA PhD student Chris McKinley applied his mathematical skills to OkCupid to “hack” their algorithms, transforming his empty inbox into a treasure trove of compatible mates and, 88 dates later, a marriage proposal. Then tech CEO Amy Webb, similarly luckless on JDate, created her own algorithm using 72 traits to land a husband. “Algorithms can mathematically continue to become more precise in terms of connecting like-minded and similar people,” says Amarnath Thombre, president of Match.com, “but there will always be magic to love.” Match uses 1,500 parameters in a “love equation” with a feedback mechanism. So “the more users rate, the better they date,” he says. In a new commercial, eHarmony asks: “Do you want fast or forever?” As it turns out, lots of people prefer fast, like Tinder.
by Rosemary Counter
See full article at National Post
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SMH.COM.AU – Feb 14 – OkCupid's pitch says: "We use math to get you dates." Co-founder Christian Rudder is crunching data from millions of users to come up with insights such as women are most attracted to men their own age, and men are most attracted to women aged 20-22. "What people say they want, and what they really want, are very different in practice," says Kari Taylor, from RSVP. RSVP switched from profile-based matching to behaviour-based matching a few years back and saw an 80% surge in users saying yes to conversation requests. eHarmony's predictive model for attraction has improved up to 400% in the past couple of years. An algorithm for attraction is possible given how much data is available. But the real question is whether that's the direction the industry is heading. The biggest thing in the online dating is Tinder, an app that doesn't use any info except a photo.
by Inga Ting
See full article at SMH.com.au
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