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

How Female Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Online Dating Landscape

FORBES - Mar 8 - Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd recently became the world's youngest self-made billionaire after her dating app's wildly successful IPO. Bumble's success serves as a wake-up call for an industry that has traditionally been dominated by male leadership. Kim Kaplan, who was also part of the founding team of Plenty of Fish, launched Snack, a dating app that blends video with communication features popularized by Tinder and Bumble. Wolfe Herd and Kaplan are not the only women founders and executives changing the dating app game for the better. Based in San Francisco, the three Kang sisters - Arum, Dawoon and Soo - cofounded the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel. Another female founder, Amanda Bradford saw the need for ambitious, working professionals. She launched The League, a dating app that draws member information from LinkedIn.

by Serenity Gibbons
See full article at Forbes

See the top news on Bumble                         See the top news on The League
See the top news on Coffee Meets Bagel       See the top news on Snack             

CEO of The League: "We'll Find More Connection Online"

QUARTZ - June 30 - To envision a future altered by coronavirus, Quartz asked dozens of experts for their best predictions on how the world will be different in five years. Below is an answer from Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO of online dating site The League. Covid-19 has certainly changed the way we interact and connect. In times of crisis, people are clearly looking for contact and support, and they're finding it on dating apps like The League. "We've updated our app to include a live video function. We've added an extra session of our video speed dating event, League Live, each week, giving users double the chance of connecting with a new face over video. Since March we've seen a huge increase in our League Live sessions and a 41% increase in video chat usage."

See full article at Quartz

See the top news on The League

Dating Apps Pivot to Video

WALL STREET JOURNAL - July 1 - With social distancing recommendations and laws in effect across the country, meeting people online and developing relationships virtually has never been more popular. Georgia Wells, WSJ's technology reporter and Mark Brooks, CEO of the Courtland Brooks consultancy-agency explore what this shift means for the future of online dating.

See full article at Wall Street Journal

The League Officially Launched in South Africa

ITWEB - May 22 - Founded in 2015, The League was created by Amanda Bradford, who also serves as CEO, and is modelled after private members-only clubs like Soho House. The members-only swiping app, aimed at professionals, uses data and social graphs from both Facebook and LinkedIn to fuel its proprietary algorithm. In South Africa, it joins other popular apps like Tinder, EliteSingles, Predict Dating App and SouthAfricanCupid, to name a few.

by Simnikiwe Mzekandaba
See full article at ITWeb

See the top news on The League

Can Coronavirus Make Online Dating Safer and Global - Permanently?

OZY - Mar 30 - Physical dates are out. This is love in the time of coronavirus. Dating and romance are adapting. A growing number of apps and websites are now advertising virtual dating services aimed at keeping you safe, while some are allowing you to find dates in other parts of the world. League Live, launched by The League in late 2019, added a feature that allows users to message "isoDate", and become a member for free for their quarantine period. JWed launched video dates. Loko facilitates virtual dates. Plenty of Fish introduced a livestreaming feature. Tinder announced it is making Passport free for all users. It allows users to search for potential dating partners in faraway countries.

"Once the virus situation abates, virtual dating with video chat can still provide value as an initial step before meeting in person," Ben Rabizadeh of JWed says. Jeff Tinsley of RealMe, a platform dedicated to cultivating online safety, cautions "Don't expect people to be more honest just because it's a video date," he says, and that "as face-to-face meetups become less common, ...video dates have the potential to become the norm for now."

by Maroosha Muzaffar
See full article at OZY

See the top news on The League                See the top news on JWed
See the top news on POF                            See the top news on Tinder

The League App Rolls out Nationwide

PR NEWSWIRE - Mar 4 - The League is opening its doors to the rest of the U.S.' metro areas including Baton Rouge, LA, Knoxville, TN, Columbia, SC, Charlottesville, VA, and Roanoke, VA. Launched in 2015 and modeled after private members­-only clubs like Soho House, The League is known for its selective admissions-based model and high­-achieving community of users.

See full article at PR Newswire

See the top news on The League

The League to Launch in Singapore

E27.CO - Jan 30 - San Francisco-based dating app, The League, is set for an official launch in Singapore on February 2. Prior to this launch, The League has already been available in 59 cities in the US. Founded in 2014, the dating app was created to connect high-achieving individuals with one another, using a selective admissions-based model.

by Shagun Karki
See full article at E27.co

See all posts on The League

OPW Podcast - The Top Dating Industry News for Dec 17th

OPW - Dec 17 - Acquisition rumor?, Rankings Update, Hily growth, The League video dates.

For the top weekly dating industry news in ~2 minutes subscribe to OPW's Two Minute Tuesdays (TMT) podcast on Breaker, Google podcasts, Spotify, Anchor.

Elite Dating App The League Brings Back Speed Dating

INSIDEHOOK - Dec 16 - League Live is a new video speed-dating feature from The League, the elite dating app. Interested users can opt in to League Live once a week on Sunday nights, and The League will select three matches based on each user's preferences and past behavior on the app. The goal is to spare users the time and energy wasted on bad first dates by replicating that in-person experience in a micro-speed date that doesn't require users to leave their apartment.

by Kayla Kibbe
See full article at InsideHook

See all posts on The League

Swiping Meant Dating This Decade, and It's Time for a Change

THE VERGE - Dec 11 - As we close out the decade, it might be time to retire the swipe we once knew. The swipe was born only seven years ago, and in that time, it's conquered online dating and made it mainstream. Dating apps are expected to top 25M users in the US this year, and as of 2017, 39% of heterosexual couples in the US said they met online, up from 22% in 2009, according to a recent study. Tinder lowered the barriers to online dating and gamified it. As we enter 2020, the apps seem to be finding out that the swipe alone is no longer cutting it. They're differentiating themselves by creating slower experiences that result in real dates with real people, presumably picking up on daters' wants. Even Tinder is experimenting with ways to augment the swipe and give people more context than just a yes or no. It launched Swipe Night, an interactive video feature, this year that gives daters the option to swipe on people who made similar decisions to them during the experience. The League is using automated, two-minute video calls to help daters filter through matches. New dating app Bounce concentrate on the real-life part of dating by giving people no room to talk and instead focus on the meetup. The app is only live at specific times.

by Ashley Carman
See full article at The Verge

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Dating Apps Are Turning to Message-free Meetups

INSIDER - Dec 2 - Dating app creators are experimenting with old-school dating methods. Video "speed dating" features, text-only profiles, and apps that ban in-app messaging have emerged recently. The League, which launched in 2014, recently announced League Live, a feature where users can go on two-minute video "speed dates" with potential matches. People who use League Live are four times more likely to match with someone than people who use the non-"speed dating" version of The League, according to an emailed statement from the League. The new app Bounce also emphasizes face-to-face meetups. It allows users to "check-in" at specific locations as a way to say they're interested in going on a date around that geographic area. Lex, a new dating app for the queer community, takes another old-school approach by allowing people to scroll through a feed of personal ad-style call-outs. People who use Lex can't post photos, so the connections have to go beyond physical appearances.

by Julia Naftulin
See full article at Insider

See all posts on Lex
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Dating App The League Will Pair up Users for Two-minute Live Video Dates

THE VERGE - Nov 19 - The League, a dating app that requires LinkedIn verification to join, is launching its version of speed dating next month: two-minute video dates that take place within the app. It's called League Live, and the company will allow people to opt in to the video dates, which take place at 9PM local time on Sundays starting on December 1st. CEO Amanda Bradford says that, in initial beta testing, users between the ages of 35 and 40 liked the feature most, likely because their time is at more of a premium. Although the feature is available to both paying and free users, Bradford says only users who have a high "League Score" will have access. The League Score is measured by factors like how often they log on, whether they’ve been reported by other users, and how complete their profile is.

by Ashley Carman
See full article at The Verge

See all posts on The League

San Francisco Event: Modern Love

OPW - Oct 2 - HBS Alumni of Northern California are hosting an interesting evening event which includes Amanda Bradford, CEO of The League on October 16th. Amanda is an interesting speaker, and this looks like a good panel. See link.

This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley Podcast: The League Founder & CEO Amanda Bradford

TECH CRUNCH - Aug 20 - In this week's edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley features Amanda Bradford, founder/CEO of The League. Amanda talks about modern dating, its limitations, its flaws, why 'The League' will win. She talks about her days at Salesforce and how it influenced her decision to build a dating tech product that focused on data, and funnels. She goes in on all of the popular dating sites, including Bumble and others, providing her take on what's wrong with them.

by Sunil Rajamaran
See full article at Tech Crunch

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Amanda Bradford: Advice She Wished She'd Taken in Her 20s

FAST COMPANY - Feb 19 - We spoke to successful women about their own regrets in their 20s. Here's advice from Amanda Bradford, CEO of The League. "GO TRAVEL AND EXPERIENCE THE WORLD." In her 20s Amanda was busy. By the time she reached 29 in 2014, she was building her now uber-successful dating app to a 1.5M person waitlist across 60 cities. Now 34, Bradford is happy with her success but she wishes she would have taken the advice of her former boss at Google who urged her to go see the world. "For me, global work experience and travel are key contributors to business and personal fulfillment. I wish I had invested more in global exposure during my 20s," she says. Now it's just too hard. I'm devoted to The League as the app expands into international cities. It would be helpful to have firsthand knowledge of each market and a network of people on the ground.

by Lindsay Tigar
See full article at Fast Company

See all posts on The League

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