PC WORLD – Feb 12 – OkCupid's fans were not reassured by the immediate disappearance of an OkTrends blog entry from last April. OkCupid's CEO, Sam Yagan, says that he decided to remove the blog post on his own, deeming it to contain inaccurate assumptions about the other sites' data. He also maintains that OkCupid will continue to operate separately from Match.com and be free for most users. OkCupid is extremely data driven. The site's OkTrends blog employs sophisticated statistical analysis. Now all of that data is in the hands of Match.com's parent company, InterActive Corp (IAC). According to Match.com's privacy policy, the company reserves the right to share personally identifiable information with "other IAC businesses". However, Yagan insists that OkCupid's privacy policy–which limits the amount of data it shares with third parties–will continue to govern the data that the site collects. "We are not planning to share any personally identifiable information with anyone," he says. "Just because we were acquired doesn't mean we're handing over any user data." FULL ARTICLE @ PC WORLD
Category: OkCupid
San Francisco Home To Online Dating
NBC BAY AREA – Feb 10 – When it comes to online dating, San Francisco is at the center of the action. “We have the most fans in San Francisco, as a percentage of the population, and probably our biggest penetration of any market,” says Sam Yagan from OK Cupid. Industry leaders Match.com and eHarmony maintain a high profile in Northern California as well, but the Bay Area is also home to the next generation of dating services, like DateBuzz and Skout. DateBuzz, which launched in December, positions itself as a place where busy young professionals can meet. Skout works on on smartphones with GPS to help people flirt with each other based on proximity. The advantage of this approach is that it is quicker – people can meet on impulse. FULL ARTICLE @ NBC BAY AREA
See all posts on OkCupid See all posts on Match.com
See all posts on eHarmony See all posts on DateBuzz
See all posts on Skout
Online Dating For Nerds
PC WORLD – Feb 11 – Geek 2 Geek calls itself "the best place on the net to meet geeks." It boasts ~200K members, growing by 6K members each month. OtakuBooty is for fans of anime, manga, gaming, and cosplay. OtakuBooty is part online dating and part social networking. The name comes from a Japanese slang term for "nerd". Cupidtino describes itself as the first (and only) "Mac-inspired" dating site. That's right–if you love Apple products and the people who love Apple products, this site is for you. On Sweet on Geeks you can expect to find geeks, especially girl geeks. The 27K-member site is particularly balanced in the male-to-female ratio, unlike a lot of places on the Internet. OKCupid, a completely free dating site, is full of young singles–~70% of its users are between the ages of 18 and 35. On OKCupid, 55% of the users are men. FULL ARTICLE @ PC WORLD
Going On A First Date? Here Are The Questions To Ask
ABC NEWS – Feb 10 – OkCupid mines database to uncover most revealing first date questions. The site found that whether someone likes the taste of beer is the best predictor of if he or she will have sex on the first date. Beer-lovers are 60% are more likely to be OK with sleeping with someone they've just met. Sam Yagan, OkCupid's co-founder and CEO, said that the trick to the project was to find "the low-stress question you can ask that reveals a sort of more intimate question that you can't ask on a first date." Relationship experts say that on a first date, it's not necessarily the content of a conversation that matters but the chemistry generated by the couple. "The chemistry happens more often in your brain than in your language," said Dorree Lynn, a psychologist and author of "Sex for Grownups." "You're either attracted or you're not attracted." FULL ARTICLE @ ABC NEWS
OkCupid CEO: We Will Not Charge Users Following Match.com Acquisition
MASHABLE – Feb 2 – Match.com had acquired OkCupid for $50M in cash. "Our goal is that the acquisition will have no effect whatsoever,” CEO Sam Yagan said, saying that no positions will change within the company, and that it will continue full-steam ahead as usual — sans censorship or fees. Yagan says it will be releasing a location-aware app in the coming months, as well as a new OkTrends piece. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE
IAC’s Match.com Acquires OkCupid For $50M In Cash
TECH CRUNCH – Feb 2 – IAC’s Match.com is continuing its acquisition strategy today with the purchase of OkCupid for $50M in cash. The deal also includes future earnouts contingent upon performance. While Match.com has a significant userbase, OkCupid singles tend to be younger, which is why Match found it to be a useful acquisition. OkCupid, which has raised $6M, was co founded by Max Krohn, Sam Yagan, Chris Coyne and Christian Rudder. Match has previously acquired dating site People Media for $80M and most recently Singlesnet. Yagan will continue to operate OkCupid. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
OKCupid Tweaks Privacy Controls
WASHINGTON POST – Jan 13 - Internet privacy is still a major obstacle for some of those who use dating sites. Last week, OKCupid launched new features giving its users more control. Sam Yagan, a spokesperson for OKCupid said the new settings address a lot of issues users have raised over the years. "Something that we have noticed for a while is that there are various people who say part of their apprehension with online dating is that elements of their personal life will be discovered," he said. In addition to members of the gay community who may want their information hidden from straight users, Yagan offered the examples of teachers wishing to hide their profiles from students or younger women who don't want to deal with advances from older men. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST
OKCupid Investigated Female Attractiveness
OK TRENDS – Jan 10 – A hot woman receives ~4x more messages an average-looking woman gets, and 25x as many as an ugly one according to OKCupid study. Getting swamped with messages drives users, especially women, away. Among the remarkable things OKCupid discovered is:
– The more men as group disagree about a woman's looks, the more they end up liking her
– Guys tend to ignore girls who are merely cute
– Having some men think she's ugly actually works in woman's favor (Suppose you're a man who's really into someone. If you suspect other men are uninterested, it means less competition.)
FULL ARTICLE @ OK TRENDS
Dating Sites Have Made It Easier For People To Click With One Another
ECONOMIST – Dec 29 – The new year can be an unhappy time but it is a golden opportunity for dating sites, as singles are hoping to find romance—ideally before February 14th. “The period between New Year’s Day and Valentine’s Day is our busiest six weeks of the year,” explains Sam Yagan, from OkCupid. Once seen as the last resort for a bunch of lonely geeks, online-dating services have gradually shed much of the stigma formerly associated with them. ComScore says Match.com and Zoosk saw 4.6M and 4.8M unique visitors respectively in November 2010. Deepak Kamra of Canaan Partners, an American VC firm that has backed Zoosk and BharatMatrimony, estimates that the industry’s revenues now amount to $3 billion-4 billion a year. The online-dating world has also spawned thousands of niche ones. Then there is the fuss over sites such as Illicit Encounters and Ashley Madison, which match people seeking partners for extramarital affairs. But to blame the service for infidelity is to confuse cause and effect. FULL ARTICLE @ ECONOMIST
See all posts on OkCupid See all posts on Match.com
See all posts on Zoosk See all posts on BharatMatrimony
See all posts on IllicitEncounters See all posts on AshleyMadison
Dating Sites Try Adaptive Matchmaking
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW – Dec 27 – ~40M Americans are members of dating sites and in China the number has grown to 140M. Matching up millions of members is a major technological challenge. Joseph Essas, VP of technology for eHarmony, has developed a new matching algorithms based on Yahoo's system for targeting ads to specific users who have revealed preferences and behaviors over time. Adaptive algorithms are a powerful tool because what people say they want and how they actually behave are different things. "We can piece things together without having to ask you," says Sam Yagan, CEO of OKCupid, a free online dating site. New techniques are based not on questionnaires but on other kinds of "recommendation engines," like those used by Netflix and Amazon, says Gavin Potter, CTO of IntroAnalytics, a company that develops software for both e-commerce and dating sites. PlentyofFish is asking members who leave the site whether they entered a relationship with another member. This information is added to the company's predictive model, which also includes information from personality tests and user behavior. FULL ARTICLE @ TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
See all posts on eHarmony
See all posts on OkCupid
See all posts on Plentyoffish