Tag: cupid

3 Online dating revelations

TechCrunch Disrupt Europe: Berlin 2013 (Day 2)

A few things have come out in the open recently which I thought I’d share…

  1. Bill Dobbie is stepping down as chief executive of online dating company Cupid following a year which has seen its share price slump amid allegations it used fake messages to attract subscribers.
    Cupid is not OkCupid first up and being based in the UK, you can imagine the pressure which Cupid.com are under. No surprise the CEO stood down.
  2. A Florida woman has filed a $1.5 billion class-action lawsuit against online dating site Match.com, alleging the website allowed photos of her and thousands of others to be used illegally to create phony profiles intended to dupe romantic hopefuls out of money.
    The website “conspired with criminals operating from locations including Internet cafes in Nigeria, Ghana and Russia” who created fake profiles for romance “scams,” according to the lawsuit which was filed last week.The suit also says that Match.com, owned by media mogul Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, was aware of the fake profiles as the company approves, edits and posts each profile.
  3. The “hook-up” app market is booming. Tinder is ruling the roost while everyone tries to catch up and cash in on the hookup market. Maybe they should have a look at my presentation and dating idea from 2009! Rad, CEO of Tinder recently spoke at Techcrunch Distrupt conference.

    Rad said he couldn’t share user counts, but he did reveal that the app sees 3.5 million matches and 350 million swipes a day. (About 30 percent of those are the right swipes that indicate interest.) And the app has seen 30 billion swipes and 300 million matches total.

Why you should never pay for online dating 101

match.com - Make Love Happen

I have said it many times but never really wrote about it in detail…Why you should NEVER pay for online dating…

Check out BBC’s Adrian Goldberg’s show recently and the news item…

Customers of one of Britain’s largest online dating companies have voiced concerns that they may have been lured into paying subscriptions by potential dates who did not exist. Men who signed up to a number of sites owned by Cupid plc complained to the BBC’s 5 live Investigates programme that flirty messages they received as free members rapidly tailed off when they became paid-up subscribers. Cupid plc said it did create staff profiles, but only for “the express purpose of monitoring the site for quality assurance and moderation purposes”.

It categorically denied the company sent communications in order to tempt free members to pay subscriptions.

The messages are generic in nature, only appear when your not a subscriber or membership runs out and don’t reply when your signed up and a member? Not only that, many people have experienced this on many dating sites including cupid.com or in my case speedater.com. I say one thing not putting myself in a difficult position… Ockam’s razor.

From online dating insider…

But let’s get one thing straight, many dating sites have engaged in sketchy practices when it comes to growing their user databases. This is an industry-wide issue. Cupid LLC is just the latest to find themselves in the media’s crosshairs. Similar allegations have been made against Yahoo Personals, the Match fake profile lawsuit, Spark Networks and other sites over the years.

I’ve heard lots of stories over the years of how dating sites will do some pretty ridiculous things to achieve enough customer density to get people to stick around long enough to (re)monetize. Some choose to buy fake profiles during the launch process. I think most would agree that this is a terrible idea. Other use automated messaging of different sorts (email, IM, chat). This has been going on for a decade. The truth of the matter is that like any industry, there are always bad actors that will do anything to grow their businesses.

Its worth pointing out Cupid.com is Cupid.LLC which has nothing to do with OkCupid.com, which published many reasons why you should never pay for online dating a while back then removed it.

No matter if its fake profiles sending emails, fake users, fake whatever. The nature of the sending and receiving messages when a subscriber or not, works to keep you on the site and extract money…