Now, Everyone Can be the Star of Their Own Dating Game
October 29, 2019 -- /BUSINESSWIRE/ -- The Meet Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: MEET), a leading provider of interactive livestreaming solutions, today announced the launch of NextDate™, a new livestreaming dating game, to users of its popular MeetMe and Skout mobile applications.
NextDate allows users to star in their own dating game. “NextDate is like speed dating, except that there’s an audience and the contestant gets to choose the specific people they’d like to connect with,” said Geoff Cook, CEO of The Meet Group. “We’ve gamified speed dating to add comments and a rating system called the Love-o-meter, while also enabling viewers to take their chances to date any streamer who is currently playing NextDate.”
In NextDate a streamer has 90 seconds to tap “Next,” which ends the current pairing and skips to the next contestant in the queue, or “Date,” which reciprocates the contestant’s interest and enables the two users to connect by 1:1 video chat in the future. NextDate provides hundreds of prompts to help the streamer get to know the contestant and evaluate their compatibility. The launch also includes a new “Date” tab within the Live section to make it easy to find nearby and trending people playing the game, and to filter by age, gender, and location. The game is monetized today via the same virtual gifting engine that has enabled The Meet Group to grow Live to an $80+ million annualized video business within two years.
The patent-pending dating game provides a livestreaming twist on a common format: the television dating game. Added Cook, “We believe more and more linear programming experiences will have a livestreaming analog, and we don’t believe anyone has yet cracked the code on the livestreaming dating game. We see NextDate as a way to further grow our video audience with a new type of content that resonates with our biggest segment: users interested in dating.
"As we conducted user research prior to building the game, we found that 95% of surveyed users would be willing to meet in real life with someone they first met through a livestreaming dating game. We also found that many of our users are interested in dating a streamer. We believe NextDate will help us expand the reach of our video products to our most dating-oriented users.
"We remain committed to achieving our goal of increasing our video audience by 20% by the first quarter of next year. While early, we are heartened that in the UK, where NextDate has been in beta-test mode, daily video viewers expanded by 20% when comparing the 21-day beta period to the average of the month of September.
"We have activated multiple initiatives designed to drive video usage, and to further that, we expect to launch NextDate on our other apps, Tagged and LOVOO, in the coming months, while also improving the game with a ‘blind date’ function as well as a new method of monetization that enables contestants to pay to skip the line and try to date a popular streamer more quickly.”
NextDate is available today on the MeetMe and Skout apps to English-language users to join as a contestant and to top streamers to join as the star. Within the coming weeks, the feature will be available to everyone to join as either the star or the contestant.
About The Meet Group
The Meet Group (NASDAQ: MEET) is a leading provider of interactive livestreaming solutions designed to meet the universal need for human connection. Our ecosystem of livestreaming apps enables users around the world to interact through one-to-many livestreaming broadcasts and text-based conversations. Our top apps, MeetMe®, LOVOO®, Skout®, Tagged® and Growlr®, deliver live interactions and meaningful connections to millions of users daily. Headquartered in New Hope, PA, we have offices in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dresden, and Berlin. The Meet Group is committed to safety. You can find a description of current safety practices here: https://www.themeetgroup.com/safety-practices/. For more information, visit themeetgroup.com, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
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