OkCupid – Page 27 – Online Personals Watch

What We Learned From Sam Yagan’s Reddit AMA

Posted on January 6, 2015

CHICAGOINNO – Jan 6 – Here are some of his most interesting responses from yesterday's chat.

Q: Has the online dating business significantly boomed in the past few years?
A: Absolutely. In the last 5 years, the number of MAU of dating products is up ~3x.

Q: Everyone looks at Tinder as a hookup app. What do you view it as?
A: It's hard to get married without hooking up, no? I bet even people on eHarmony hook up. I look at Tinder right up there with Match and OkCupid as one of the three best ways to find a relationship.

Q: Is online dating "good" for society?
A: Dating apps truly make society better, in several ways:

Greater choice leads to the selection of higher quality spouses.
Technology makes it easier to meet people who are less similar (farther away, different socioeconomic levels, different ethnicity, etc.).
The ease of getting back in the dating market empowers people in bad relationships to leave them.

Q: What has been the biggest challenge of your career?
A: Turning OkCupid around.

Q: Does the free-ness of OKCupid attract a different group of people as compared to Match's subscription fee?
A: Yes. People who pay for Match likely have higher intent than people on OkCupid or Tinder.

Q: Any hints as to what the pay features may be on Tinder?
A: Not confirming any of this, but there's plenty of reporting on this topic: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/04/how-much-would-you-pay-for-an-undo-button-on-tinder/.

by Jim Dallke
See full article at ChicagoInno

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OkCupid Co-founder: The ‘Human Story’ Behind Big Data

Posted on January 5, 2015

GLOBE AND MAIL – Jan 2 – Christian Rudder recently took the wealth of information OkCupid has accumulated over its decade online and spun it from blog into book: Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), which outlines familiar insights about human behaviour. The book confirms that, men tend to find 22-year-old women the most attractive, women find men around their own age best-looking, and people routinely rate potential matches of their own ethnicity as more attractive than others. “If Big Data’s two running stories have been surveillance and money, for the last three years I’ve been working on a third: The human story,” he writes in the introduction to Dataclysm.

by Christine Dobby
See full article at The Globe and Mail

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Online Dating: A Less Stupid Cupid

Posted on November 25, 2014

NEWSWEEK – Nov 22 – Dating sites today are just marketplaces. Over the years, many have used algorithms to predict matches, but none have improved the odds much. OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder, is skeptical about algorithmic attraction. “One person doesn’t kick out enough data,” he said. “Someone will look great on paper and then have an annoying laugh.” Researchers are inventing a new generation of computers based on the way human brains work. Instead of processing data through algorithms, these machines can watch data streaming past and see patterns. Numenta watches activity for Amazon Web Services and looks for patterns that can give early warning about a hacker attack. “Our systems are like brains at birth,” says Numenta founder Jeff Hawkins. “They just learn from the stream. You don’t have to tell them anything.” Another step will be to apply machine vision to analyze Tinder-style swipes. Tinder doesn’t learn anything from users' swipes—it doesn’t come to understand what physical features they like. But with advances in machine vision, it could.

by Kevin Maney
See full article at Newsweek

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OKCupid Adds New Sexuality And Gender Options For Members

Posted on November 18, 2014

NEWNOWNEXT – Nov 16 – OkCupid has expanded the available options members can select for sexual orientation and gender identities. The list of sexual orientations now includes asexual, demisexual, heteroflexible, homoflexible, pansexual, queer, questioning and sapiosexual. Gender has now been extended to include agender, androgynous, cis man, cis woman, genderfluid, gender Nnononforming, hjra, intersex, trans man, trans woman and two spirit, among others. Facebook rolled out several new gender options earlier this year.

by Dan Avery
See full article at NewNowNext

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Christian Rudder On Leadership

Posted on November 4, 2014

WASHINGTON POST – Oct 31 – Christian Rudder, co-founder and current president of the online dating site OkCupid, speaks about the most interesting findings in his book, Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One's Looking, as well as trends in the online dating industry. He is skeptical about algorithms and the science of prediction. "There’s so much randomness in love", he said. "We try to really recognize the limits of what we can do as a dating site." People are now coming into online dating with different expectations. Apps like Tinder are very photo based, they are super fast, super light, super chatty.

by Lillian Cunningham
See full article at Washington Post

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Rise Of The Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante

Posted on October 31, 2014

THE ATLANTIC – Oct 27 – Many women say they've received harassing or offensive messages on dating sites. Many women feel overwhelmed and leave messages unreturned. One blogger recently ran an OkCupid experiment for which he set up five fake male and female profiles. After a week, all of the women had received at least one message, the most attractive women had received hundreds, but several of the men remained un-contacted. This kind of rejection can foment a kind of deep resentment among the male daters. A growing contingent of women are dedicated to exposing the shady, hostile, and crass entreaties they get from their digital suitors. There’s Straight White Boys Texting, Dudes of Tinder, a Tumblr collecting a combination of outlandish profile photos and gross messages, and ByeFelipe on Instagram.

by Olga Khazan
See full article at The Atlantic

Mark Brooks: The ByeFelipe Instagram is interesting. Why must the innocent suffer. Sigh.

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Q&A With Sam Yagan, CEO Of Match Group

Posted on October 13, 2014

THE ATLANTIC – Oct 13 – Last week, IAC launched Delightful, a dating site aimed at people who seek love and relationships, rather than just hookups. It will be headed in part by the comedian Steve Harvey, who will serve as the brand’s “Chief Love Officer.” “This is our first brand focused on the L word as opposed to other brands that focus on dates,” said Sam Yagan, the Match.com CEO who will run Delightful with Harvey.

Q: What is your role at Match?
A: We sold OkCupid to Match in Jan '11. In Sep '12, I became CEO of all of Match. We haven't slowed OkCupid down. I run all the brands like cousins. You want your cousins to do well, but you want to do better.

Q: Why did you decide to pursue dating?
A: Before we launched SparkNotes, everybody used CliffsNotes, which was sort of the Match of study guides. What really made it work is that SparkNotes was a better product than CliffsNotes, and it was free. We decided for online dating because it was one of the things people pay for, and we wanted to make it free.

by Olga Khazan
See full article at The Atlantic

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Online Matchmaking Is A Hit-and-miss Affair

Posted on September 29, 2014

STANDARD.CO.UK – Sep 26 – The co-founder of OkCupid, Christian Rudder, said his company ‘doesn’t really know what it’s doing’ when it comes to matchmaking. When we are introduced to someone at a party, we know pretty quickly whether we’re interested in them. We use our social radar. Most dating sites try to do precisely the opposite: engage the rational, analytical side of the brain. Eli Finkel, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, believes that real-life social interaction elicits something crucial that online profiles cannot. ‘Science hasn’t yet figured out exactly what that “something” is,’ he says. There is plenty of evidence that pictures can tell us very effectively what someone is like. It takes 100 milliseconds. London-based photographer Saskia Nelson runs Saturday Night’s Alright, producing images for online daters. She says the things to consider first in dating pictures are clothes, hair and accessories.

by Michael Bond
See full article at Standard.co.uk

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OKTrends: Race & Attraction 2014

Posted on September 15, 2014

NYMAG – Sep 12 – In 2009, OKCupid published their first post exploring how race factored into attraction on the site. Asian men and black men received fewer messages than white men, while black women received the fewest messages of all users. OKCupid has released another post, revisiting the data to see if anything had changed. A look at 2014 data suggests that there has been little improvement. Racial bias has intensified a bit.

by Allison P. Davis
See full article at NYMag

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OkCupid: Benefits Of Using Personal Data For Research

Posted on September 8, 2014

WSJ – Sep 4 – Social websites are remaking sociology—moving away from surveys, questionnaires and contrived laboratory setups and into real life. Once aggregated and anonymized, data, from controlled tests or shared directly by users, can tell us how we live our lives. The possibilities of this research are varied and is uniquely able to uncover hidden narratives because the data reveal what we're doing, not what we're saying or hoping we do. There are many ethical questions to address and communication between websites and their users needs to improve.

by Christian Rudder
See full article at WSJ

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