Online Dating, How the Game Was Changed

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Realtalk App

5 min readJul 24, 2020

How it all Began

Many people credit Match.com for popularizing online dating, and to a certain extent this is true. Match.com brought readily available dating services to anyone who was on the internet thus making it easier than ever before to meet people. While Match.com was the first major online dating service, they certainly were not the first to use computers to augment a dating service. That title would be given to Stanford University way back in 1959.

Philip Fialer and James Harvey, students in a “Theory and Operation of Computing Machines” course at Stanford, had to develop a project for their final. They eventually came up with the “Happy Families Planning Service”, the first ever dating service that runs through computers. For this assignment they had access to a new IBM 650 computer through Stanford University. They chose to build a program that would record attributes from 49 men and 49 women, acquired through a questionnaire, and then compare the given attributes and find who had the least amount of differences and pair them accordingly. Though this was a primitive, early stage version of computer based dating, this was the first step taken towards creating the massive industry that is now online dating.

Bringing it Online

Between the Happy Families Planning Service and the next checkpoint on this journey in 1995, it’s important to note that there were many other services and attempts at online dating. The main difference between these attempts and the success of Match.com is that when Match.com launched in 1995 under the Electric Classifies, Inc.(ECI) name they did it in a way that made it widely available to consumers, and thus became the first true online dating service.

When Match.com was originally launched it was designed to be just the first of many database-matching services that the founder, Gary Kremen, would build. Along with Match.com, he acquired other domains such as Jobs.com and Housing.com, and he planned on creating all of these sites following the Match.com blueprint. Though Kremen was eventually removed from his position as CEO in mid-1995 due to conflict with the board, he had successfully launched Match.com as a platform that was growing at unprecedented speeds. In 1997 Match was eventually sold away from ECI for seven million dollars, and has continued to grow into the empire that we recognize today. As the first prominent online dating system, it had set the stage for all future advancements that would happen in the industry.

The Swiping Revolution

Between 1995 and our next development, in 2012, many other online dating services were launched, including some extremely prominent sites such as eHarmony. While there were formidable competitors, the platform that changed the online dating scene is one that young people are likely very familiar with: Tinder.

Tinder, being the first of the dating platforms designed primarily for mobile devices, had a large problem to face. Up until 2012, online dating had a negative stigma surrounding it, but Tinder made it their mission to tackle this issue up front. Their main objective was to present Tinder in its own category, more like a game than a dating site. This proved to be an effective solution, as the negative stigma of the app disappeared when the game-like format was popularized. Coupling the success of the swipe and match format with how Tinder was quick to use, intuitive, and had both powerful geo-location filtering for your options and a smooth algorithm, Tinder was poised for great growth.

The next step for Tinder was growth. They focused specifically on college campuses, inviting attractive and well-connected students on campuses to parties, with an entry fee that consisted of downloading the app, and then relied on word of mouth to spread news of the application. This worked better than anyone could have hoped.

Tinder went on to inspire and provide a path to growth for the next generation of online dating platforms. They did the heavy lifting of breaking the negative stigma around online dating (and in the process eating up a heavy chunk of the market share), as well as break into the college student market. Many similar platforms have been built in the style of Tinder with their slight nuances: Bumble, Coffee Meets Bagel, Happn, Dil Mil and more.

The Next Generation

With this of all in mind, what is the next great evolution in dating app technology going to be? A lot of companies have begun to broaden their reach with branding efforts or redefining their platform, evident through Bumble’s efforts to expand their brand with Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz. Some companies are choosing to change what online dating fundamentally is, incorporating video into their platform.

GoatDate, is one of these platforms. It provides a platform for users that match to engage in five minute video dates to determine if they like their match or not. This is just one example of innovations that are being incorporated into the mobile dating platform industry. The future of online dating is still undecided, which company will be the one that creates the next great thing?

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