Online Personals Watch: News on the Online Dating Industry and Business

Momo Shares Fell 5% After A Short Seller Accusations

CAIXIN GLOBAL - June 28 - Shares of dating app operator Momo fell by ~5% in the latest trading session on Wall Street, after a short seller accused the company of selectively disclosing and concealing important news for investors. Spruce Point said Momo "selectively reveals/conceals material disclosures from investors and is diverting attention from new challenges in live video," referring to a livestreaming format that has become highly popular in China. The format's rapid rise has attracted attention from regulators worried about problematic broadcasts that include material like pornography and false claims by sellers of products and services.

by Yang Ge
See full article at Caixin Global

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MeetMindful Raises $5.5M

BUSINESDEN - June 27 - MeetMindful, an app that pairs people who share interests in yoga, meditation, green living and other "mindful" hobbies, has raised $5.5M. Founder Amy Baglan, who launched the startup in 2015 and went through the Techstars incubator in Boulder, said the new capital will go toward MeetMindful's new app, hiring and future products. The startup has raised $8M since 2015.

by Kate Tracy
See full article at BusinessDen

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This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.

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The Story Of Raya, An Exclusive Social Network

NEW YORK TIMES - June 27 - Raya first appeared several years ago as a dating app aimed at people in creative industries. It has expanded into an invitation-only social network populated by movie stars, fashion designers, pro athletes, tech executives and too many Instagram models to count. The app costs $7.99 a month, but joining is no small ordeal. Prospective members are evaluated by an algorithm and human gatekeepers. ~8% of applicants are accepted. There are other elite dating apps, such as the League, which reportedly has 300K active users. But Raya may be the first app that has successfully created an atmosphere of intimacy and trust while revealing almost nothing about itself. Its website contains no mention of investors, founders or staff members, and the company has never spoken about its origins. Keeping up Raya's values and mystique is partly why Mr. Gendelman, a self-described introvert, has chosen to stay quiet. For years, he avoided publicly identifying himself, even hiding his job from some friends and family. He has kept the company small - Raya has just 13 full-time employees - and has raised only a few small investment rounds. But slowly, Raya is beginning to step out. The company recently acquired Chime, a video messaging app started by Jared Morgenstern, an early Facebook employee who is now Raya's COO. It introduced a real-time map feature that allows users to opt in to sharing their locations with other members. Mr. Gendelman would not share financial information but said that he expects Raya to become profitable this year.

by Kevin Roose
See full article at New York Times

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Can Match Fend Off Facebook And Bumble?

FORTUNE - June 27 - Globally, there are 600M singles online - a number that's expected to jump to 700M by 2020 - yet the industry's biggest player by far, Match Group, is estimated to claim just 10% of that. If Match Group wants to stay No. 1, it will need to defend its turf. Those who know Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg say she is likely to be up to the task. She knows the industry inside and out, and she takes Match's mission almost as a personal responsibility. The company's biggest competitors include eHarmony, Spark Networks, Badoo and Bumble. Bumble claims 34M total registered users. Of its active users, roughly 10% are paid; last year the company is said to have pulled in $100M in subscription revenue. It has a Goliath-size backer: Wolfe Herd created Bumble with the help of Andrey Andreev, the founder of Badoo. Andreev owns 79%, Wolfe Herd 20% (the remaining 1% is split between two additional employees). For a few years, Tinder and Bumble coexisted but things recently turned testy. In March, Match filed its suit against Bumble, accusing it of patent infringement and stealing trade secrets. Four days later, Bumble fired back with an angry letter. A few days after that, it filed its own suit against Match, claiming Match had fraudulently obtained sensitive information during acquisition talks. But both companies were hit with a much bigger tsunami of news on May 8, when Zuckerberg made his announcement. Match Group is working on new female-friendly features, like a Gentleman's Badge, a designation recently added into its European Meetic brand that men earn through certain behaviors, such as filling out an entire profile or engaging in lengthy email correspondence; men with the badge get 33% more attention from women.

by Leigh Gallagher
The full article was originally published at Fortune Magazine, but is no longer available.

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Momo Proposed To Offer $650M Convertible Senior Notes

PR NEWSWIRE - June 26 - Momo, a leading mobile social networking platform in China, announced that it proposes to offer $650M in aggregate principal amount of convertible senior notes due 2025. The Notes will mature on July 1, 2025. The Company intends to grant the initial purchasers in the Offering a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional $100M principal amount of the Notes. The Notes will be convertible into Momo's American depositary shares, at the option of the holders, in integral multiples of $1k principal amount, at any time prior to the close of business on the second business day immediately preceding the maturity date. Momo will not have the right to redeem the Notes prior to maturity, except in the event of certain changes to the tax laws or their application or interpretation. Holders of the Notes will have the right to require the Company to repurchase all or part of their Notes in cash on July 1, 2023, or in the event of certain fundamental changes. The Company plans to use the net proceeds of the Offering to repay the $300M bank loan facility it entered into in May 2018 to partially finance its acquisition of Tantan.

See full article at PR Newswire

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Women Are Pickier Than Men On Dating Sites, Study Finds

INDEPENDENT.CO.UK - June 27 - According to an Australian study of ~41K dating site users, women under 40 are more particular when seeking a partner online than men, who become more picky with age. The study, published in Psychological Science, saw researchers at Australia's Queensland University of Technology look at users of all ages, from 18 to 80. Women are more specific about what they're looking for between the ages of 18 and 30, their peak fertility years. Between these ages, women were found to be looking for partners with either the same level of education as themselves or higher. Meanwhile, men were found to be less likely to be as particular until they’re over the age of 40, at which age they were shown to become pickier than women.

by Olivia Petter
See full article at Independent.co.uk

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How HER Became The Queer Woman's Answer To Grindr

BRIT.CO - June 25 - Robyn Exton, founder and CEO of the dating app HER, names the year 2012 as a turning point in her professional life. Back then, Exton worked at a marketing agency, where she spent the year assigned to a client in the online dating business. She couldn't help but notice some serious holes in the industry: where was the dating service for women, trans, and gender non-conforming folks? Exton quit her job, moved home with her father, and started to learn how to code. In less than a year, she released her first dating app, Dattch (now HER) - a blend of "date" and "catch" - dedicated solely to lesbian, bisexual, and queer folks. The first version of Dattch came out in September 2013, but Exton reveals that it just didn't work the way she had hoped. She went back to the drawing board and started over. Exton and her team spent six months testing their product with users to understand what they really wanted in an app. With 3M users to date, HER is flourishing.

by Amanda Scriver
See full article at Brit.co

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CEO Of Bumble Travels With A Bodyguard

BUSINESS INSIDER - June 26 - Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd travels with a bodyguard and employs full-time security at the company's offices. This is after a cyber attack on Bumble last summer, when a neo-Nazi website published an article with photos and phone numbers of Bumble staff, encouraging people to harass them. The FBI stepped in to take down the website. "We're a feminist company so we came under attack," said Wolfe Herd.

by Isobel Asher Hamilton
See full article at Business Insider

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Is It Fair For A Politician To Use Tinder To Win Votes?

BBC - June 25 - Political campaigns are desperate to new find ways to reach voters. A Democratic candidate in New York City is trying Tinder and other dating apps to start conversations about his campaign. Suraj Patel, president of a hotel management company and Obama presidential campaign veteran, recently hosted a "Tinder banking" party, where he and his campaign aides logged into accounts on dating apps in an unconventional attempt at voter outreach. The accounts, and attractive photographs of would-be suitors, weren't always their own - Mr Patel's, for instance, used that of his brother. According to campaign spokesperson Lis Smith, the Tinder banking is part of a concerted effort to find voters "where they are". Tinder's terms of use prohibit the use of bots and "third-party applications" that interact with members and ban the unauthorised use of the service for "commercial purposes".

by Anthony Zurcher
See full article at BBC

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How Match Got Away With Buying 25 Dating Sites

YAHOO FINANCE - June 25 - Last week, Match Group announced it had purchased a 51% controlling stake in the dating app Hinge. Match Group has the right to acquire the remaining shares of Hinge within the next 12 months. Match Group's dominance in the online dating market and aggressive acquisition strategy raises the question: Why hasn't the company raised antitrust concerns? The company already owns ~45 dating businesses, with over 25 of those businesses acquired since 2009. "We're highly acquisitive, and we're always talking to companies," said Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg. "If you want to sell, you should be talking to us." Last year, Match Group generated ~$1.3B in revenues, accounting for roughly one-third of the dating market's $4B in global revenues in 2017, according to Aegis Capital Managing Director Victor Anthony. It's possible the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has deemed Match Group's spate of acquisitions over the years insufficient to warrant an antitrust case. Amazon, for example, accounted for ~44% of e-commerce sales in 2017 and has yet to face a lawsuit from federal antitrust regulators. Monopolization is just hard to prove.

by JP Mangalindan
See full article at Yahoo Finance

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India Has Lots Of Single Women, But Not On Tinder

WALL STREET JOURNAL - June 25 - Tinder's biggest challenge in India appears to be getting enough women to sign on. In many parts of India, arranged marriages remain the norm, and dating in any form still carries a stigma, particularly for women. Indian women who have dabbled with dating apps complain they get overwhelmed by all the attention that comes with the surplus of men. Tinder doesn't disclose a gender breakdown, but among the app's members in India, men far outnumber women. The dating app TrulyMadly, which says women make up ~20% of its users, is trying to introduce women to the concept of "boy browsing" through a YouTube video. Another competitor, Woo, allows women on its app free but charges men, and lets women use initials rather than full names.

by Georgia Wells & Eric Bellman
See full article at Wall Street Journal

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Hinge CEO On Online Dating Business

CNBC - June 25 - Justin McLeod, Hinge founder and CEO, discusses the Hinge app as well as his thoughts on the dating app landscape.

Q: How is Hinge different?
A: We have a product team that really focuses on helping our users get out on first dates. Users have to fill out a deeper profile. Because people use the app much more interactively, we can learn their taste much better and match them up with people they are really going to like.

Q: How much do you charge?
A: $8 per month for premium subscription, but there is a free option as well.

Q: What is the difference between free and paid?
A: Premium members can send unlimited number of likes and are able to filter by religion, etc.

Q: What is the % of free vs paid users?
A: Free 85%, 15% paid.

Q: What do you think about Facebook dating?
A: Our demographic (millennials) are using Facebook less and less so Facebook is not a thread to our business.

See full article at CNBC

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AI Matchmaker, CoupleNet, Could Mine Twitter To Find A Perfect Match

FAST COMPANY - June 25 - A new deep learning algorithm called CoupleNet analyzes the tweets of two users and estimates how compatible the duo would be. To train the algorithm, the team behind CoupleNet created a dataset of ~2M tweets pulled from ~4,600 likely couples. The "couples" were found by identifying public accounts who sent messages like "good night baby love you :-*" to each other. After training, CoupleNet could identify real couples in the testing data better than other recommendation tools that were given the same data. The algorithm was able to spot what mutual interests between users it thought suggested a good match, like tweets about K-pop bands. But it's more than just word matching. CoupleNet could find pairs correctly even when there are no obvious matching signals.

by Jackie Snow
See full article at Fast Company

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Tinder Takes On Coffee Meets Bagel With Test Of Tinder Picks

TECH CRUNCH - June 22 - Tinder will begin testing a new feature aimed at helping people find more matches who fit their particular interests across areas like education, job type, hobbies and other details. "Tinder Picks," as the new feature is being called, will be available only to Tinder Gold users. Tinder uses will organize users into groupings. For example, a "foodie" might earn that tag because they work in a restaurant, went to a top culinary school, or mentions food in their bio. Users will see their daily Picks by tapping the diamond on the top of the Discovery screen. Tinder Picks refresh every 24 hours, but Tinder Gold users can opt to buy more at any time, the company says. Tinder says Picks is live now in the U.K., Germany, Brazil, France, Canada, Turkey, Mexico, Sweden, Russia and the Netherlands. It will see how users respond over the next few days, then evaluate whether to roll out the feature more broadly.

by Sarah Perez
See full article at Tech Crunch

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Morad Adjaoud Joins Once From Tinder As CMO

NEW-BUSINESS.DE - June 22 - Slow dating app Once wants to expand its presence in Germany. The app has hired Morad Adjaoud, the former Head of International Growth of Tinder. Adjaoud joins Once as Chief Marketing Officer. Adjaoud will be responsible for worldwide marketing, but will pay special attention to the German market. Once launched in France in 2015; claims 2.1M French users and 1.5M German users.

See full article at New-Business.de

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Summarized by the IDEA team