WALL STREET JOURNAL – For $4.99 a week Match dating experts will go through a user's answers to four questions and pair them. A 50-member team, trained as dating coaches, will select two profiles for participating members each week, drawing from the same algorithm-generated pool Match provides. Questions include, what a person would change about their dating life, and what sort of person a user gravitates toward. "The company created the feature because, for some singles, the pandemic has added a degree of urgency to finding a long-term relationship," said Amarnath Thombre, CEO of Match Group Americas. "People have had enough time to reflect," "Traditional matchmaking services are costly, starting in the thousands of dollars for just a few months. But these services are worth it to customers who don't have the time to sort through candidates on apps," said Tammy Shaklee, founder/matchmaker of H4M, an LGBTQ matchmaking service.
by Ann-Marie Alcántara
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Mark Brooks (owner of matchmaker.com): Fascinating stuff, but I think calling this matchmaking is an offense to the matchmaking industry. $5 a week may well be a scalable price-point, but I don't think this service does justice to the humanity of the service matchmakers provide. The whole point of (quality) matchmaking is to get deep into the person, council and coach them, and provide custom advice to the individuals, with occasional appropriately sugar-coated but tough feedback. Match's service appears to be a commitment vehicle. I don't quite see how this service quite passes muster as matchmaking, even as a minimum effective dose. Let's see. Looks like the opposite end of the spectrum to the matchmaking service eHarmony introduced and experimented with years ago.
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WALL STREET JOURNAL – Tinder is introducing a tool to let users run background checks on prospective dates, as the company continues to address concerns about the safety of dating apps. Match Group said it has been developing the tool since last March, when it announced an investment in Garbo Technology, a nonprofit background check organization. While some Tinder users may benefit from learning potentially important information about a date, false positives or lack of data in some results are also likely to make some people fearful, said Naomi F. Sugie, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California. Garbo said it has tried to address the pitfalls of background checks by adding its confidence indicators and limiting the information it provides.
