MASHABLE – July 12 - OKCupid has added a handful of location-based features.
1. Broadcasts – This allows you to let your best matches know that you’re free now and suggest activities.
2. Locals – This shows you matches nearby.
3. Notifications – OKCupid will let you know when a good match is nearby.
Category: OkCupid
Sex, Love, and Loneliness on the Internet
THE NEW YORKER – July 4 – In 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest, came upon an open-air display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer was selecting foreign pen pals for pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire and received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant. Altfest and his friend Robert Ross heard about a program called Operation Match, which used a computer to find dates for people. A year later, they had a prototype, which they called Project TACT (Technical Automated Compatibility Testing). Each client paid $5 and answered ~100 questions. TACT transferred the answers onto a computer that spit out your matches.
Online dating sites draw on the premise that there has got to be a better way. They rely on algorithms, some add an extra layer of projection and interpretation. There are thousands of dating sites; the big ones, such as Match.com and eHarmony and PlentyOfFish and OK Cupid (among the free ones). Mark Brooks, the editor of Online Personals Watch, said, “Starting a site is like starting a restaurant. It’s a sexy business, looks like fun, yet it’s hard to make money.”
The dating sites are themselves a little like online-dating-site suitors. They want you. They exaggerate their height and salary. Each has a distinct personality and a carefully curated profile. Nothing determines the atmosphere and experience of an Internet dating service more than the people who use it, but sometimes the sites reflect the personalities or predilections of their founders. If the dating sites had a mixer, you might find OK Cupid by the bar, muttering factoids and jokes, and Match.com in the middle of the room, conspicuously dropping everyone’s first names into his sentences. The clean-shaven gentleman on the couch, with the excellent posture would be eHarmony.
Match.com went live in 1995. It is now the biggest dating site in the world. eHarmony is the one most overtly geared toward finding you a spouse. It was launched, in 2000, by Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist who had spent three decades treating and studying married couples and working out theories about what made their marriages succeed or fail. By reputation, OKCupid is where you go if you want to hook up. OK Cupid was also perhaps the most desirable eligible bachelor out there, until February, when it was bought for $50M by Match.
by Nick Paumgarten
See full article at The New Yorker
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Better Dating Through Data
O'REILLY MEDIA – June 13 – OkCupid is a free dating site with 7M users. The site’s blog, OkTrends, mines data from those users to tackle important subjects like “The REAL ‘stuff white people like’.” OKCupid was founded by four Harvard-educated mathematicians. “A lot of other dating sites are based on psychology,” said CEO Sam Yagan. "We think that dating is a problem to be solved using data and analytics. There is no magic formula that can help everyone to find love.” OkCupid works by having users state basic preferences and answering questions like “Is it wrong to spank a child who’s been bad?” Users are matched based on the overlap of their answers and how important each question is to both users.
by Ciara Byrne
See full article at Forbes
Mark Brooks: Psychology works it way into those equations. eHarmony is taking the high road, while OKCupid takes the low road. Shrink-rappers vs Quant-tappers.
The Big Business Of Online Dating
AD AGE – Feb 14 – Online Dating is clearly big business: In the U.S. alone, internet dating is a $1.3 billion market, and PlentyofFish alone had 122M visits in January, according to Experian. The number of people scrambling for romance via online dating starts growing in November and peaks at Valentine's Day. "People realize sitting around the Thanksgiving table with their family and think, 'Hey, I don't have my other half' or 'My sister's married and I'm not,' so it's a cyclical event," said Mark Brooks, dating industry consultant at OnlinePersonalsWatch.com. The sector has also seen some matchmaking of its own: Just a few weeks ago, Match.com purchased OKCupid. Mr. Brooks said that Match.com has been acting like the Google of the dating world and gobbling up smaller dating sites at a quick pace.
by Irina Slutsky
See full article at Ad Age
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Digital Romance: The Business Of Online Dating
ATLANTA POST – May 3 – Online dating is now the third most popular way for singles to meet, ranking behind the workplace and school (#1) and friends and family (#2), but ahead of bars (#4), according to an eHarmony study. ~113M people visit dating sites each month. 6 out of 10 African Americans are unmarried, according to Packaged Facts, while according to the 2004 U.S. census, 42% of all black women have never been married. Such statistics make the black community a prime target for the online dating industry. BlackPeopleMeet.com, was the 11th most visited dating site in March, reaching 4% of the total U.S. black population, according to Experian Hitwise. Other sites targeting African Americans include BlackSingles.com, AfricaSingles.net, BlackPeopleLove.com and SoulSingles.com. ~90% of online daters stick to the top 100 dating sites though, according to industry consultant Mark Brooks. Among the world's top sites are PlentyofFish, Zoosk, Manhunt, eHarmony. These sites offer relationship services that social networks do not, Brooks pointed out. "Dating sites protect the name and identity of people until they're ready to give it up. Facebook is a handy tool for researching people. You can look them up on Facebook and see what kind of company they keep. So the two work hand in hand."
How are Internet dating sites changing society? In a number of significant ways.
People are able to weed out people with show-stopping attributes. Second, dating sites have leveled the playing field for men and women. Women are not penalized for making first moves. Third, as a research paper by Brooks points out, singles are becoming more picky because online dating allows them to be more selective.
Online dating has a well-known downside. People online tend to lie about themselves. According to a study by OKCupid, men fib about their height. Half of all daters lie about their weight, and most people inflate their salaries by ~20%. A danger to avoid is a tendency to mask faults by creating the perfect date in the mind's eye. "When you start talking to somebody and you really want them to be the perfect match, you might start projecting qualities onto them that you would most desire, and that's called the halo effect," said Brooks. "There's a huge fantasy element to this, which is one reason why the virtual world sites are big," he continued. "There's a mental need for this, for believing that virtual worlds are better than the real world. A lot of Internet daters are disappointed. And ultimately people need to get out on 20 dates before they ever make their choice. They need to go experience the real world first." Chemistry counts, and daters must meet in person to develop a close relationship. "Personally, I do not think we will ever take the mystery out of dating and intimate connection," said Dr. Thomas Bradbury, eHarmony advisor, professor of psychology and founder of the Marriage and Family Development Lab at UCLA. "We are hard-wired to connect, and the daily challenges of creating, maintaining, and improving that connection are likely to be always just outside our grasp."
by Steven Barboza
The full article was originally published at Atlanta Post, but is no longer available.
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What Effect Has The Internet Had On Finding Love?
GUARDIAN.CO.UK – May 1 – "Online dating used to be something that people turned to when they were giving up on offline dating," says Sam Yagan, CEO and co-founder of OKCupid, a site that has the largest registered user-base of 18- to 34-year-olds in the US. "It is now a tool that people are turning to, to complement their offline dating." Research from the Oxford Internet Institute's "Me, My Spouse and the Internet: Meeting, Dating and Marriage in the Digital Age" project corroborates Yagan's argument, reporting that 22.6% of current relationships in the UK began online. Yagan thinks relationships that come from online dating are more likely to stick: instead of settling for one person out of a pool of 200, he argues, you'll be assured that the one you've chosen out of two million is the best fit.
by Aleks Krotoski
See full article at Guardian.co.uk
IAC/Match.com Reports Q1 Results
PR NEWSWIRE – Apr 27 – Match.com core revenue increased 18% to $93.3M driven by a 22% increase in subscribers. Developing revenue increased 82% to $18.3M driven by the full quarter contribution of Singlesnet, as well as from the venture with Meetic in Latin America and the acquisition of OkCupid, neither of which were reflected in the year ago results. Subscribers logging in through mobile grew 135% YOY to 30% of total on Match.com U.S.
For more details visit the link on the side bar under 'FINANCIALS'
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Twitter Is Bad For Relationships
PEREZ HILTON – Apr 20 - A new survey from OkCupid has found that Twitter can be bad for relationships. Based on a pole of over 830,000 users that contrasted the length of relationships for those who use Twitter every day vs. "everyone else", the frequent tweeter's relationships last less time on average.
See full article at Perez Hilton
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
JDate Slaps Zoosk, OkCupid, And 2RedBeans With Patent Lawsuit Over Secret Admiring
TECH CRUNCH – Mar 13 – JDate has filed a patent lawsuit against 2RedBeans, Zoosk, and OKCupid. JDate alleges that all three companies are infringing the same patent, which states that Sparks Networks (JDate’s parent company) has invented a method or apparatus for automating the process of confidentially determining whether people feel mutual attraction or have mutual interests. JDate has a patent on detecting secret crushes. The suit calls out OkCupid’s QuickMatch, Zoosk’s Scientific Matching Service, and 2RedBean’s Secret Admire function as infringing JDate-owned patent # 5,950,200, titled “Method and Apparatus for Detection Of Reciprocal Interests or Feelings And Subsequent Notification.” Spark Networks wants the three companies to pay damages to JDate for the infringement.
by Leena Rao
See full article at Tech Crunch
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OKCupid’s Founders: “Computer Science Geeks”
PRESS HERALD – Mar 3 – In 1999 Chris Coyne and his friends Sam Yagan and Max Krohn began work on SparkNotes.com, a site providing free online study guides for students. The partners sold both websites to publicly traded iTurf in 2000. When iTurf's stock crashed shortly after, the partners helped the company sell the sites to Barnes & Noble, which eventually shut down TheSpark.com but maintained SparkNotes.com. In 2003, Coyne, Krohn and Yagan moved to the next project, a free online dating site OkCupid and launched in 2004. Today, the site has 1.3M monthly unique users and 500K daily users. Last month, Coyne and his partners sold OkCupid to Match.com for $50M. Coyne attributed OkCupid's success partly to complex mathematical algorithms that match members with like-minded singles. There are even math questions, such as, "What is next in this series? 1, 4, 10, 19, 31, _."
by Jonathan Hemmerdinger
See full article at The Portland Press Herald