Match.com Acquires Online Dating Site OkCupid

Dunno about anyone else but i'm disappointed to hear about this. One of the strongest points of OkCupid was that they were kind of the anti-match.com :(

There's a somewhat frightening quote from Greg Blatt, CEO of IAC in the press release at <a href="http://iac.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&#38;item=1882" rel="nofollow">http://iac.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&#38;item=1882</a><p><i>"We know that many people who start out on advertising-based sites ultimately develop an appetite for the broader feature set and more committed community, which subscription sites like Match.com and Chemistry.com offer, creating a true complimentary relationship between our various business models. 2010 saw record growth both for Match and OkCupid, and we believe coordinating the adjacent business models will help fuel continued growth for both. This acquisition therefore goes a long way toward our objectives of bringing new people into the online dating world, offering the ability to meet in whatever type of online setting, and at whatever commitment level, our members desire, and facilitating a seamless evolution of the online dating experience without ever having to leave our portfolio of sites."</i><p>Members of OkCupid, get ready to be upsold.

The culture change has already started.<p>Where did the fantastic "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating" article from OkTrends go?<p>A great exit, however. Congratulations to the team.

They'll either ruin it or shut it down. Match sucks just in general design as a site compared to OKC.<p>I do agree with those saying that this might be the best way for the OKC developers to cash out and get paid for their work. Perhaps it was inevitable.<p>For users of Match, the best outcome from this deal would be for Match to replace their whole engine with that of OKC. I doubt that will happen though.<p>For users of OKC, the worst outcome from this deal would be to be forcibly migrated to Match (as yahoo personals users were - which is what I think is most likely to happen here) and get buried in the far less interesting personal ads and less fun community of Match.

You know, I suppose had they put a Paypal button on okcupid's home page saying "donate now to prevent match.com from acquiring us" they would have easily garnered more than $50m.<p>As a user, I almost feel betrayed that they sold out to match.com.<p>Edit PS: Not betrayed because they sold out, but who they sold out to. I would have cheered an acquisition from a non competitor (ie like amazon as mentioned previously).

The perfect example of a fresh upstart being acquired by an incumbent dinosaur; I hope they can maintain their culture and spirit.<p>Congrats to the team, but I find this quite disappointing.

$50M cash is a fantastic exit for a company created only 4 years ago, with one round of funding ($6M).<p>Congratulations to the team! I hope the guys at IAC won't destroy the brand/product though... I hope their blog OkTrends will continue to publish fascinating articles too, it would be a great loss.

Congrats! I hope OKCupid still publishes those awesome posts about the statistics of dating, those are fascinating.

Congrats to the guys on their second exit (they previously sold SparkNotes to Barnes &#38; Noble).

Note to the wise: OKCupid still allows you to delete your entire account. They imply that this deletion is real deletion, and totally permanent, except that your user id won't be taken over by anyone else.<p>If you don't want IAC to have all your personal data, you should do this now before they merge systems.

Am I the only person thinking $50 million seems low?

I am so happy for Sam Yagan and team - they've been busting their butts on OKC since 2004 (seriously, the site's that old), and it's good that they can finally take a load off. Hopefully Sam will now become Chicago's #1 angel (it's a low bar, but <i>someone</i> needs to jump over it).

End of an era? I met my girlfriend of 17 months there. Even though I haven't visited since, it's sad to see it go. They're definitely a company I'd invest in if I was in the position to.

Having been a member of both match and okcupid, I am sad to hear this news. I went to go cancel my match account the other day and to my dismay saw that my credit card had been charged again without my direct consent. After looking over the terms I saw that Match took the liberty of auto-renewing for me. While it is clear in the service agreement, I feel like these sort of things are a shady way of operating. To avoid any auto-renew, you need to literally cancel your membership and while doing so, you are unsure of what is really going to happen.<p>I am hoping things remain split as they are or as other have mentioned, match gets a boost in its technology. Anyone that has used both knows that match seems to be far behind on the times. Their features are crap, platform crap and overall design is ugly. I often found myself thinking how I could replicate the site (design wise) in a night with all the boiler plate code I have. I am not optimistic, but hopefully something good will come out of it for match.<p>Congrats to the okcupid team. Great work.

I met my wife on OKC.<p>I doubt I would have met her on match.com.

sounds like its time to open up a free site that doesn't store passwords in plaintext and doesn't get sold to the terrible dinosaurs. one can only hope it doesn't turn out badly. intuit hasn't yet ruined mint, so its theoretically possible.

Good for them but I expect that the quality of the site will now disintegrate in favour of pushing more people towards match.com.

This is ver unfortunate, I'm happy for the founders, but OkCupid is a great service. I met my girlfriend of almost 2 years now there. I fear for what it will become. This is a very sad day on the Internet.

Good for the OkCupid team — this gives them a cushion to play again in this otherwise-desolate space before too long.<p>Brings back somewhat rueful memories of spending too much time browsing around sites like Match.com (meh) and eHarmony (zero. matches. ever.) Wasted several years and hundreds of dollars.<p>Met my fiancee on OkCupid. :)

If you haven't read the Dating DDOS article featured a few weeks ago you should: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065604" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065604</a>

Hearing about this deal makes me feel a little queezy. The only upside (other than congrats to their team) is that maybe now there will finally be some nice atheist / agnostic girls on Match. I realize many people have had success at OkCupid, but their users never really struck me as seriously looking for someone to date. Many are just there to take the quizzes.

I met my Girlfriend (of a year this Thursday) on OKCupid. I've always been impressed by the extremely high quality of the matching on OKC. They're by far the best online dating I've seen.

After Match.com shut down their own free online dating site called Down to Earth it was only a matter of time before they just bought an existing and successful site.

Ahh, there goes all those cool and really useful data and analyses from the site. These guys were the only people who published such results on a large scale.

I am neither a member of match.com or OKC but I just hope OKC guys continue their awesome analytics on user data in their blog.

This is disappointing. I can't see them pushing people toward a paid service without crippling OKCupid's features and culture. OKC was built around optimizing for fun and matchmaking - match.com was built around maximizing revenue and disappointment. And I'll miss the irreverent analysis in the blog.<p>$50M also seems like a low exit for one of the most successful, and probably the most sophisticated, dating site on the internet.<p>Definitely makes me wonder if the dating space has much money left in it.