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

Are Black Dating Apps Necessary?

FUSION - Oct 1 - Bae, a dating app which stands for Before Anyone Else, is aimed at black singles. Bae is not the only one but with ~100,000 downloads since April, it may be the biggest. A competitor, Meld, intended for more serious-minded black professionals, doesn’t disclose its user base, but says it has matched 3K couples since its debut last year. There’s also Soul Swipe and The League. According to an experiment by Anne Helen Petersen at Buzzfeed last year, the "more" black a user registers as, the less likely he or she will get a right swipe. Education and wealth help, but users of color still appear to be at a disadvantage.

by Collier Meyerson
See full article at Fusion

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Rise Of Niche Tinders

TECH CRUNCH - Feb 17 - Tinder-like app keep popping up. There is Hinge for yuppies, The League for elitists, Bumble for shy guys, The Catch for wordsmiths, Meld for black professionals, Willow for those who care about personality not looks, HeavenlySinful for those who want to get laid, etc. Right now, Tinder seems to be sticking with its one-app-fits-all approach with no plans on catering to niches. It’d be wise for IAC to at least explore the idea of building its own Micro-Tinders, adding some more segmentation into its main app. There are a lot of hot people to swipe right, but finding someone who is a good match can take plenty of train wreck dates. Better sorting preferences could connect people who are actually compatible.

by Josh Constine
See full article at Tech Crunch

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Is Online Dating Revealing Our Biases, Or Reinforcing Them?

NY TIMES - Oct 17 - In recent weeks, two new mobile dating apps have been launched. One, called Meld, is marketed to black professionals seeking meaningful long-term relationships; the other, Luxy, invites wealthy individuals to find someone with whom to share their high-end lifestyles. Luxy is a mobile-based app by the same people who thought up MillionaireMatch.com. Luxy’s launch, however, provoked a lot of backlash. The news release called the service “Tinder minus the poor people.” Meld elicited some skepticism as well. At Ebony, Kirsten Magwood asks whether separating black people from a larger pool of singles is necessary: “Is racially based dating a dated concept in 2014?”

by Anna Altman
See full article at NY Times

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Meld: New App For Black Professionals

EBONY - Aug 14 - It may look like Tinder, and work like Tinder, but Meld founders Raïssa Tona and Wale Ayeni want to be clear that their new dating app is not the Black Tinder. “We are more than a hookup site,” explains Ayeni. “It is a platform for people looking to date and find somebody special.” Unlike Tinder, members must be vetted through their LinkedIn profiles, have a bachelor’s degree, and be Black. Instead of users explaining who they are, Meld shares their current job title from LinkedIn. Though the platform uses Facebook and LinkedIn info, it never shares activity with those platforms, so discretion is maintained.

by Kirsten Magwood
See full article at Ebony

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Dating Without Race

THE ROOT - Aug 8 - Matchmaker and dating coach Paul Carrick Brunson predicts that by 2017, blacks’ per capita usage of mobile dating apps will be higher than that of any other ethnic group. According to a 2010 Pew survey, millennials are very accepting of interracial marriage, with 93% of 18- to 29-year-olds agreeing with the statement, “It is all right for blacks and whites to date each other.” But unless they’re using Meld, a brand-new app meant “exclusively for the African-American professional”, the numbers for black users of online dating tools are relatively low compared with those of other groups. OkCupid’s study “How Race Affects the Messages You Get” found that black users received fewer responses to their overtures overall.

by Erin C.J. Robertson
The full article was originally published at The Root, but is no longer available.

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