Latest news with #datingapps
South China Morning Post
3 hours ago
- Lifestyle
- South China Morning Post
1 Chinese auntie, 5 apps, 60 first dates
Just before the pandemic hit, I emerged from a 10-year relationship – newly single and stuck with half a mortgage, a Brompton bike bought on an impulse and a high-maintenance ginkgo tree. After giving myself four months to recover, I bounced back into the dating world, not necessarily looking for a husband (yeah, right) but to conduct what I told myself was an anthropological experiment. So yes, this is about dating. On Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, all while donning the armour of a Chinese diasporic auntie in sensible shoes and with 40-something hang-ups. Too old for bars, I launched a three-pronged plan: swing dance classes (fun, but everyone was already coupled up from primary school), community centre craft sessions (mudslinging with lovely people – all born before 1955), and the intervention of meddlesome friends. 'Divorce market is hot right now,' said meddlesome friend E. 'Asian women are ageless! Just redefine 'relationship'.' Her bold new suggestion? An agricultural economist who did Aikido. We met – I soon ran out of Aikido-related small talk. So I turned to dating apps. Five of them. Because I am nothing if not a pragmatic auntie maximising outcomes.
Daily Mail
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Single Charlize Theron reveals what men lie about on celebrity dating app Raya
Charlize Theron isn't having any luck on the dating apps, specifically, celebrity dating app Raya. And she blames the men on the apps for it as being a beautiful, successful, wealthy celebrity isn't enough to get past the guys with photos from Burning Man. The Old Guard actress, 49, appeared on the Thursday, June 26, episode of Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen and revealed that she is on Raya. 'Every guy has a Burning Man picture and they're a CEO, like of nothing, or like a fitness instructor. 'And then you meet with them and they're not, and they just say it up front! I'm like, "Well, why did you put that on your thing?"' Theron said. 'No, I don't like it.' 'I don't do anything with it,' Theron told Cohen, who said he's also a subscriber. 'Yes, I don't do anything with it.' She continued, 'A friend put me on it, I went on two dates, and then I just kind of stopped.' And Charlize has dated her fair share of celebs including actors Craig Bierko, Stuart Townsend and Sean Penn, as well as Train frontman Stephan Jenkins and model Gabriel Aubry. She was also reportedly dating Alex Dimitrijevic in 2023. Last week, Charlize revealed her children have 'zero respect' for her award-winning acting career. The actress appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live looking stunning in a glamorous black blazer dress and a sheer floor-length skirt as she discussed her children's thoughts on her career. Charlize's motherhood journey began when she adopted daughters Jackson, 11, and August, seven. But it seems her children are not phased by the fact she's a huge movie star or features on billboards, as she told Jimmy, 'my children have zero respect for me' when asked if they are impressed by her career. Laughing towards the audience, she said: 'My children have zero respect for me. I don't know how, it's just unbelievable. 'And then you meet with them and they're not, and they just say it up front! I'm like, "Well, why did you put that on your thing?"' Theron said. Seen here June 24, 2025 'I feel like I'm pretty humble, but every once in a while I'm like there's a f*****g Oscar right there.' The audience and Jimmy erupted into laughter as she added: 'No, they're so not impressed with me.' Charlize became the first South African to win an acting Oscar when she picked up the Best Actress gong for 2003 drama Monster. Recalling picking up her daughter the day before, she explained: 'I was picking up my youngest from dance yesterday and we drove past that new Mission Impossible poster, where Tom Cruise is hanging onto some like yellow plane. 'And he just looks really cool, and my kids were with me when I shot Old Guard 2, and I worked on this incredibly intricate sequence where we brought in this amazing helicopter pilot, Fred North, and we were gonna choreograph this incredible scene. 'Like me fighting helicopters and jumping on this real helicopter and hanging off and shooting like 99 per cent of it on a real helicopter, as it's like trying to shake me off like a ragdoll, and we took two weeks to shoot this sequence. 'And I was like, "Wow, I just did that" That's really amazing. And my child yesterday, just looked at this poster of Tom Cruise and went "That's weird, he looks so much cooler than you did when you were hanging off that helicopter" She laughed, adding: 'I was just like, "but I hung off the helicopter, like just some credit."' Theron reprised her role as 6,732-year-old warrior Andromache 'Andy' of Scythia in the Netflix superhero sequel. The Studio guest star also executive produced Victoria Mahoney's small-screen adaptation of Greg Rucka's 2017 graphic novel, which wrapped production way back in 2022. Old Guard 2 is set to launch globally on the streaming service Netflix on July 2, 2025.
Fast Company
14 hours ago
- Business
- Fast Company
Bumble is stumbling. Tinder is flagging. But this go-to gay dating app is thriving
Dating app Bumble continues to lose its footing. After subpar earnings, sluggish user growth, and internal stagnation, the company has laid off 30% of its staff. Meanwhile, its dating app competitor Grindr is soaring. Among dating apps, Match Group's properties— mostly Hinge, sometimes Tinder—lead the market. The duo's ubiquity frame apps like Bumble and Grindr as boutique alternatives, designed for their innovative features or specialty user bases. That's a difficult market to occupy, especially as dating app fatigue sets in and Gen Z seems to push for more in-person (and sexless) encounters. Those factors are just part of the reason why Bumble and its competitors are falling behind. But LGBTQ+ hookup app Grindr is flourishing—posting solid growth in both user acquisition and revenue. In May, Grindr CEO George Arison spoke with Fast Company about his efforts to build a broader offering on the foundation of its core location-based grid of users—including some popular new features and a foray into telemedicine. He isn't convinced that generational patterns entirely explain the struggles of dating apps. 'This whole 'Gen Z-avoiding-apps' thing makes no logical sense. Gen Z loves TikTok and loves Reels and thinks you can read something online and you're an expert in it, but they're not gonna do dating online?,' he says. 'What I do think and what makes logical sense, is that if you don't build a product that Gen Zers want, they're not going to use it. That's where I think some of our peers have fallen flat.' His vision is still in progress, but here's how the company's constant efforts to test and scale new ideas could serve as a guide to its competitors. Comparing Bumble and Grindr Bumble and Grindr both went public in the early 2020s, when the dating app market was still hot thanks to the pandemic's digital boom. Since their IPOs, both Bumble and Grindr have hit rough waters—though Grindr managed to right itself while Bumble continues to, well, bumble. Bumble's stock opened at $43 per share—a height it hasn't reached since late 2021. In 2025, Bumble's share price was hovering around $5 in early June, jumping above $6 only at the news of layoffs earlier this week. Meanwhile, Grindr—which debuted at $16.90 in 2022, initially dropped to $5, but has been above $15 since November 2024 and exceeded $20 per share since mid-April. Revenue figures have told a similar story. Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returned to Bumble in March on the eve of some sour news: Bumble's Q1 earnings showed an 8% decrease in revenue year-over-year. For the same quarter, Grindr's revenue grew 25% over the prior year. Arison told Fast Company he sees the company's performance as a reflection of the contributions that the LGBTQ+ community—he is gay himself—can make to the business world. 'Part of our mission has to be we do super well as a business and we force everybody to change,' he says. Neither app releases consistent and specific user counts. Grindr appears to be growing its user base as Bumble's gains are slow. In its Q1 earnings, Grindr reported 'more than 14.5 million' monthly active users, up from 'more than 13.5 million' the year prior. Bumble's earnings are split by paying users, a focus for former CEO Lidiane Jones. While the company grew its paying app users by 11% in 2024, it has since shed 100,000 of those subscribers in 2025. What should a dating app look like? Under Arison's leadership, Grindr has turned into an innovation powerhouse. In his May interview, Arison emphasized the creation of Albums—bundles of photos sent via chats and not directly displayed on a profile—which debuted in 2022. In 2024, Grindr users sent over two billion albums. He also pointed toward the app's new Right Now feature, which lets users search specifically for more immediate action. In D.C. and Sydney, two of the feature's trial markets, Arison said that '25 to 35% of our weekly active users were regularly going into the Right Now experience at least once a week.' Grindr's new features are available for all users, though paid subscribes receive additional uses. For example, free Grindr users get to post to the Right Now feed three times a week. Down the line, the company plans to make sessions available for purchase. That's part of Arison's strategy: Opening new features with limitations as a bridge to paid customer conversion. 'I don't want Grindr to end up like some of our competitors, who hollowed out their products focusing only on monetization and building nothing,' Arison told Fast Company. 'We are doing product-led processes—it's not just monetize, monetize, monetize. We're saying: Build new things, and those things will lead to revenue.' In contrast, Bumble has moved slowly with their feature rollouts. The 'Opening Moves' feature debuted in 2024, allowing users to list prompts for new matches to respond to. The feature undercut Bumble's initial mission that women should message first. Since then, they've also instituted ID verification and date-sharing safety features. Many of the app's most compelling features—like backtracking left swipes, Travel Mode, and Incognito Mode—are only available to paid users. With dating app fatigue on the rise, both Bumble and Grindr have also expanded into alternate markets. Both have emphasized the role of friendship and platonic encounters on their apps, with Arison promoting Grindr's ongoing effort to become the 'global gayborhood in your pocket,' noting 'Our younger, 18-plus cohort wants to be in an environment where there are older people as well. Friendships between younger and older people are much more common in our community.' Bumble launched its friend-focused Bumble B.F.F. in 2016, and broke it out into a stand-alone app, Bumble for Friends, in 2023. While Bumble for Friends doesn't release stand-alone user numbers, its million-plus Google Play downloads is dwarfed by Bumble's more than 50 million downloads. Grindr's 'gayborhood' model also flows easily with the original app; users have been employing Grindr for non-dating activities since its advent. By spinning their Friends function out into a separate app, Bumble must seek out an entirely separate user base. In this area, Grindr is making a similarly big bet on how it can show up in different ways for its users. The company recently launched Woodwork, a telemedicine company selling erectile dysfunction pills, in Illinois and Pennsylvania. Arison also predicted that Grindr would expand into 'haircare, skincare, and other things of that nature.' 'When I started talking to shareholders, part of the conversation was: What do we want Grindr to be? Just a dating app or something more?' Arison told Fast Company. 'Their view was very strong: We want to be a lot more.'
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Charlize Theron Talked About Being Deceived By Men On Raya, And I Can't Believe These Guys Have The Audacity
If you're single in 2025, you've likely experienced the highs and lows of dating apps. And if it makes you feel better, it sounds like celebs are right there in the trenches with us. Appearing on Watch What Happens Live this week, Charlize Theron was asked by host Andy Cohen if there's 'any truth to the rumors' that she uses Raya. If you don't know, Raya is probably the most 'exclusive' of all the dating platforms, and while plenty of non-famous people use it, the app has become a bit of a hot spot for single celeb sightings. So, if you've been swiping through Raya and think you've spotted Charlize, it turns out it probably was her. Speaking to Andy, the Oscar-winner confirmed that she is a user of the app — although not a very active or enthusiastic one. Related: You Have Excellent Facial Recognition If You Can Recognize These 12 Celebrities As Kids 'Yes, I don't do anything with it. A friend put me on it, I went on two dates,' Charlize said, giving a relatable sigh of dating app exhaustion. In turn, Andy said that he's on Raya, too, and the pair got into a chat about the kind of guys they've come across. (Content warning for any of my dating app users out there.) Related: Courtney Stodden Did A Face Reveal After Dissolving Her Fillers And She Looks Really Different Now 'Every guy has a Burning Man picture, and they're a CEO, like, of nothing,' Charlize said. 'Or like, a creative director of nothing,' Andy agreed. 'And then you meet with them and they're not [a CEO]. They just say it up front — 'Well, why did you put that on your thing?!'' Charlize asked in disbelief. 'No! I don't like it.' I don't like it either, Charlize. Who gave these men the audacity? You can watch the full clip from Watch What Happens Live here. In the meantime, good luck to all my dating app warriors out there. More on this Nobody Swiped Right On Zac Efron, And 13 Other Tales Of Celebs On Dating AppsChristopher Hudspeth · Jan. 30, 2022 Ben Affleck Had A Hilarious Response After A Woman Unmatched Him On A Celebrity Dating AppAlex Gurley · May 4, 2021 Chrissy Teigen Called Out Celebrity Men Sending "Desperate" Messages To Women On RayaMorgan Sloss · May 6, 2021 Also in Celebrity: "Overwhelmingly Untrue": Three Months After That Explosive Exposé, Jonathan Van Ness Addressed The Allegations Also in Celebrity: 21 Celebrity Facts That Are, Like, Really, Really, Really, Really, Really, Really, Really, Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Shocking Also in Celebrity: "He Growled At Me, Saying He Only Signs Autographs For 'Chicks With Huge Tits'": 19 Infuriating Times People Had First-Hand Experiences With Celebrities Behaving Badly
Globe and Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
New Website Helps Find People Using Face Photos
Ohio, USA - A new website called Mamba Panel lets people upload a photo and find where that face appears online. The service searches through billions of photos from social media and dating apps to help users figure out if someone is real. The site offers different search options. The main tool looks through 1.8 billion face photos from across the internet. Users can upload a picture and see if that same face shows up on other websites or apps. There's also a faster option that searches 5 million photos for quick results. The website works even with blurry photos or pictures taken from weird angles. Most searches finish in under a minute and show links to where matches were found. Many people use Mamba Panel to check dating profiles and avoid fake accounts. The service helps catch scammers who steal photos or pretend to be someone else online. The company only uses photos that are already public on the internet. When it finds a match, it saves a small copy along with where it came from. The site doesn't collect names or personal information about people. Mamba Panel promises that searches stay private. They don't keep copies of uploaded photos or track what people search for. The system also tries to avoid showing photos of children. The website has a free demo that searches celebrity photos and paid versions that access larger databases with regular people's photos from social media. As online dating and social media grow, tools like Mamba Panel give people a way to verify who they're really talking to online. For more information, visit Media details Company: MambaPanel Email: Eli@ Website: Media Contact Company Name: MambaPanel Contact Person: Media Team Email: Send Email Country: United States Website:
