online update. online updating. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. copyright1}} {{randomImageQuizHook. Image credits. Word of the Day hope springs eternal. said when you continue to hope that something will happen, although it seems unlikely About this. Blog Thinking outside the box: talking about creativity. September 14, Read More. New Words quiet quitting. September 12, has been added to list. To top. English Examples Translations.

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Bilingual Dictionaries. English—French French—English. English—German German—English. English—Indonesian Indonesian—English. English—Italian Italian—English. English—Japanese Japanese—English. English—Polish Polish—English. English—Portuguese Portuguese—English. Since advertising revenues are modest compared to membership fees, this model requires numerous page views to achieve profitability.

However, Sam Yagan describes dating sites as ideal advertising platforms because of the wealth of demographic data made available by users. In , a variation of the online dating model emerged in the form of introduction sites, where members have to search and contact other members, who introduce them to other members whom they deem compatible.

Introduction sites differ from the traditional online dating model, and attracted many users and significant investor interest. In China, the number of separations per a thousand couples doubled, from 1. Demand for online dating services among divorcees keeps growing, especially in the large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. In addition, more and more people are expected to use online dating and matchmaking services as China continues to urbanize in the late s and s.

As online dating services are not required to routinely conduct background checks on members, it is possible for profile information to be misrepresented or falsified. date rape, procurement , OKCupid once introduced a real name policy, but that was later taken removed due to unpopularity with its users. Only some online dating services are providing important safety information such as STD status of its users [62] [63] [64] [65] or other infectious diseases, but many do not.

Some online dating services which are popular amongst members of queer communities are sometimes used by people as a means of meeting these audiences for the purpose of gaybashing or trans bashing.

A form of misrepresentation is that members may lie about their height, weight, age, or marital status in an attempt to market or brand themselves in a particular way. Ghosting appears to be becoming more common. Online dating site members may try to balance an accurate representation with maintaining their image in a desirable way. Some profiles may not even represent real humans but rather they may be fake "bait profiles" placed online by site owners to attract new paying members, or "spam profiles" created by advertisers to market services and products.

Opinions on regarding the safety of online dating are mixed. Online subscription-based services can suffer from complaints about billing practices. Some online dating service providers may have fraudulent membership fees or credit card charges. Furthermore, different functionalities may be offered to members who have paid or not paid for subscriptions, resulting in some confusion around who can view or contact whom.

Consolidation within the online dating industry has led to different newspapers and magazines now advertising the same website database under different names. In the UK, for example, Time Out "London Dating" , The Times "Encounters" , and The Daily Telegraph "Kindred Spirits" , all offer differently named portals to the same service—meaning that a person who subscribes through more than one publication has unwittingly paid more than once for access to the same service.

Little is known about the sex ratio controlled for age. com is about the reverse of that. When one gets into the specialty niche websites where the primary demographic is male, one typically gets a very unbalanced ratio of male to female or female to male. Studies have suggested that men are far more likely to send messages on dating sites than women.

There is some evidence that there may be differences in how women online rate male attractiveness as opposed to how men rate female attractiveness. Gay rights groups have complained that certain websites that restrict their dating services to heterosexual couples are discriminating against homosexuals.

Homosexual customers of the popular eHarmony dating website have made many attempts to litigate discriminatory practices. net and Chemistry. com cater more to homosexual dating. A class action lawsuit alleged Match. com failed to remove inactive profiles, did not accurately disclose the number of active members, and does not police its site for fake profiles; [88] the inclusion of expired and spam profiles as valid served to both artificially inflate the total number of profiles and camouflage a skewed gender ratio in which active users were disproportionately single males.

com, AIDSDate. com, HerpesInMouth. com, ChristianSafeHaven. com, MeetBlackPOZ. com, HIVGayMen. com, STDHookup. com, BlackPoz. com, and PositivelyKinky. In , a former employee sued adultery website Ashley Madison claiming repetitive strain injuries as creating fake profiles in one three week span "required an enormous amount of keyboarding" which caused the worker to develop severe pain in her wrists and forearms. In January , an already-married Facebook user attempting to close a pop-up advertisement for Zoosk.

com found that one click instead copied personal info from her Facebook profile to create an unwanted online profile seeking a mate, leading to a flood of unexpected responses from amorous single males. In , It's Just Lunch International was the target of a New York class action alleging unjust enrichment as IJL staff relied on a uniform, misleading script which informed prospective customers during initial interviews that IJL already had at least two matches in mind for those customers' first dates regardless of whether or not that was true.

In , the US Federal Trade Commission fined UK-based JDI Dating a group of 18 websites, including Cupidswand. com and FlirtCrowd. As soon as a new user set up a free profile, he or she began to receive messages that appeared to be from other members living nearby, expressing romantic interest or a desire to meet. However, users were unable to respond to these messages without upgrading to a paid membership On June 30, , co-founder and former marketing vice president of Tinder , Whitney Wolfe, filed a sexual harassment and sex discrimination suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against IAC -owned Match Group , the parent company of Tinder.

The lawsuit alleged that her fellow executives and co-founders Rad and Mateen had engaged in discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation against her, while Tinder's corporate supervisor, IAC's Sam Yagan, did nothing. government regulation of dating services began with the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act IMBRA [] which took effect in March after a federal judge in Georgia upheld a challenge from the dating site European Connections. The law requires dating services meeting specific criteria—including having as their primary business to connect U.

customers before contact details can be provided to the non-U. In , the state of New Jersey passed a law which requires the sites to disclose whether they perform background checks. In the People's Republic of China , using a transnational matchmaking agency involving a monetary transaction is illegal.

Singapore's Social Development Network is the governmental organization facilitating dating activities in the country. In December , a New York State Law called the "Internet Dating Safety Act" SA went into effect that requires online dating sites with customers in New York State to warn users not to disclose personal information to people they do not know.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Internet service providing potential relationship contacts. See also: Sexually transmitted infection , Date rape , and Procuring prostitution. Internet portal Human sexuality portal Society portal. Retrieved July 17, Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

SAGE Publishing. doi : PMID S2CID Retrieved February 20, Scientific American. Springer Nature. South China Morning Post. Alibaba Group. Retrieved December 19, AI Magazine. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved February 22, University of Massachusetts Lowell. Carnegie Mellon University. Condé Nast. Massive Science. It will get your data". Vox Media. The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. BBC News.

The Guardian. Consumer Reports. January 1, Retrieved October 13, Hoffman Factors That Lead to Online Dating". Communication Research Reports. Ellison; J. Gibbs Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Fact Tank. Pew Research Center. Retrieved November 28, Pew Research Center Internet and Tech. Retrieved December 8, Online daters tend to identify with more liberal social attitudes, compared with all Americans or all internet users.

Computer and Internet Use in the United States PDF Report. Current Population Survey Reports. Washington, D. Census Bureau. Retrieved February 11, Adults Are Married — A Record Low".

Retrieved February 15, United States Census Bureau. The Atlantic. Emerson Collective. Retrieved November 17, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. SAGE Publications.

Retrieved December 29, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating 3rd ed. New York: Basic Books. ISBN Retrieved April 25, com shows money still driver in politically incorrect matchmaking world". Retrieved December 1, Tech Policy. MIT Technology Review. July 15, The Sociological Quarterly. Social Science Research. Social Forces. ISSN See, not responding is an acceptable move in online dating. It's worth noting that, at least relative to online gaming sites or comment boards, harassment in online dating seems to be relatively rare.

From The Atlantic. But not all experts believe that online dating translates into instant bliss. From New York Daily News. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- the economic downturn, the billion-dollar online dating industry has been booming. It's well-known that women consistently complain that when they're online dating , they receive hundreds of messages propositioning them from the very beginning.

From CNET. By now, online dating has lost a lot of its creep-factor. It could be more like filling out an online dating profile. From Slate Magazine. Both of us were divorced and had decided online dating was our best option. In general, mobile apps are a pretty big improvement over websites when it comes to online dating. From Business Insider. Especially because online dating is popular with the middle-aged population right now -- and they don't seem to be as open to apps.

Online dating can really work, with as many as one in six marriages today between people who met online. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Translations of online dating in Chinese Traditional. See more. in Chinese Simplified. Need a translator? Translator tool. What is the pronunciation of online dating? Browse online banking. online brokerage. online catalogue. online community. online update. online updating. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. copyright1}} {{randomImageQuizHook. Image credits.

Word of the Day hope springs eternal.

Online dating, also known as Internet dating , Virtual dating , or Mobile app dating , is a relatively recent method used by people with a goal of searching for and interacting with potential romantic or sexual partners, via the internet. An online dating service is a company that promotes and provides specific mechanisms for the practice of online dating, generally in the form of dedicated websites or software applications accessible on personal computers or mobile devices connected to the internet.

A wide variety of unmoderated matchmaking services, most of which are profile-based with various communication functionalities, is offered by such companies. Online dating services allow users to become "members" by creating a profile and uploading personal information including but not limited to age, gender, sexual orientation, location, and appearance. Most services also encourage members to add photos or videos to their profile.

Once a profile has been created, members can view the profiles of other members of the service, using the visible profile information to decide whether or not to initiate contact. Most services offer digital messaging, while others provide additional services such as webcasts , online chat , telephone chat VOIP , and message boards.

Members can constrain their interactions to the online space, or they can arrange a date to meet in person. A great diversity of online dating services currently exists. Some have a broad membership base of diverse users looking for many different types of relationships. Other sites target highly specific demographics based on features like shared interests, location, religion, sexual orientation or relationship type.

Online dating services also differ widely in their revenue streams. Some sites are completely free and depend on advertising for revenue.

Others utilize the freemium revenue model, offering free registration and use, with optional, paid, premium services. In , social psychologists Benjamin Karney , Harry Reis , and others published an analysis of online dating in Psychological Science in the Public Interest that concluded that the matching algorithms of online dating services are only negligibly better at matching people than if they were matched at random.

Users' activities reflect their tastes and attractiveness, or the lack thereof, they reasoned. E-commerce firms also employ this " collaborative filtering " technique. Nevertheless, it is still not known what the algorithm for finding the perfect match would be. However, while collaborative filtering and recommender systems have been demonstrated to be more effective than matching systems based on similarity and complementarity, [5] [6] [7] they have also been demonstrated to be highly skewed to the preferences of early users and against racial minorities such as African Americans and Hispanic Americans which led to the rise of niche dating sites for those groups.

In , Consumer Reports surveyed approximately , online dating service subscribers across multiple platforms and found that while 44 percent of survey respondents stated that usage of online dating services led to a serious long-term intimate relationship or marriage, [14] a subset of approximately 9, subscribers that had used at least one online dating service within the previous two years rated satisfaction with the services they used lower than Consumer Reports surveys of technical support service consumers for those services and rated satisfaction with free online dating services as slightly more satisfactory than services with paid subscriptions.

Opinions and usage of online dating services also differ widely. That is, online dating sites use the conceptual framework of a "marketplace metaphor" to help people find potential matches, with layouts and functionalities that make it easy to quickly browse and select profiles in a manner similar to how one might browse an online store.

Under this metaphor, members of a given service can both "shop" for potential relationship partners and "sell" themselves in hopes of finding a successful match. Attitudes towards online dating improved visibly between and , the Pew Research Center found.

At the same time, usage among those between the ages of 55 and 64 doubled. People in their mids to mids all saw noticeable increases in usage, but people aged 25 to 34 saw no change. Nevertheless, only one in three had actually gone out on a date with someone they met online. Only five out of a hundred said they were married to or in a committed long-term relationship with someone they met online. Online daters may have more liberal social attitudes compared to the general population in the United States.

In all, there was little difference among the sexes with regards to their opinions on online dating. It is not clear that social networking websites and online dating services are leading to the formation of long-term intimate relationships more efficiently. In , a majority of U. households had personal computers , and in , a majority of U.

households had internet access. com was created, followed by eHarmony in , Myspace and Plenty of Fish in , Facebook and OkCupid in , Zoosk in , and Tinder in In , the percentage of all U.

adults who were married declined to a historic low at 51 percent, [23] while from to the percentage of U. adults living without spouses or partners rose to 42 percent including 61 percent of adults under the age of 35 because declines in marriage since when 72 percent of U.

adults were married have not been offset by increases in cohabitation. adults above the age of 25 who had never married rose to a record one-fifth with the rate of growth in the category accelerating since Psychologists Douglas T.

Kenrick , Sara E. Gutierres, Laurie L. Goldberg, Steven Neuberg , Kristin L. Zierk, and Jacquelyn M. Krones have demonstrated experimentally that following exposure to photographs or stories about desirable potential mates, human subjects decrease their ratings of commitment to their current partners, [28] [29] while social psychologist David Buss has estimated that approximately 30 percent of the men on Tinder are married, [30] and a significant criticism of Facebook has been its effect on its users' marriages.

In , Benjamin Karney, Harry Reis, and their co-authors suggested that the availability of a large pool of potential partners "may lead online daters to objectify potential partners and might even undermine their willingness to commit to one of them. adults showed that 54 percent of U. adults believed that relationships formed through dating sites or apps were just as successful as those that began in person, 38 percent believed these relationships were less successful, while only 5 percent believed them to be more successful.

Online dating services offer goldmines of information for social scientists studying human mating behavior. Data from the Chinese online dating giant Zhenai. com reveals that while men are most interested in how a woman looks, women care more about a man's income. Profession is also quite important.

Chinese men favor women working as primary school teachers and nurses while Chinese women prefer men in the IT or finance industry. Women in IT or finance are the least desired. Zhenai enables users to send each other digital "winks. Men typically prefer women three years younger than they are whereas women look for men who are three years older on average.

However, this changes if the man becomes exceptionally wealthy; the more money he makes the more likely he is to look for younger women. In general, people in their 20s employ the "self-service dating service" while women in their late 20s and up tend to use the matchmaking service. This is because of the social pressure in China on "leftover women," meaning those in their late 20s but still not married.

Women who prefer not to ask potentially embarrassing questions — such as whether both spouses will handle household finances, whether or not they will live with his parents, or how many children he wants to have, if any — will get a matchmaker to do it for them. Both sexes prefer matchmakers who are women. In a paper, sociologist George Yancey from the University of North Texas observed that prior research from the late s to the early s revealed that African-Americans were the least desired romantic partners compared to all other racial groups in the United States, a fact that is reflected in their relatively low interracial marriage rates.

They were also less likely to form interracial friendships than other groups. According to data from the U. Census, 5. in were between people of different races. For his research, Yancey downloaded anonymized data of almost a thousand heterosexual individuals from Yahoo! He discovered that Internet daters felt lukewarm towards racial exogamy in general.

In particular, Dating members of one's own racial group was the most popular option, at Those who were more willing to out-date than average tended to be younger men. Education was not a predictor of willingness to out-date. This means that the higher interracial marriage rates among the highly educated were due to the fact that higher education provided more opportunities to meet people of different races. There is, however, great variation along gender lines.

In , Cynthia Feliciano, Belinda Robnett, and Golnaz Komaie from the University of California, Irvine , investigated the preferences of online daters long gendered and racial lines by selecting profiles on Yahoo!

Personals — then one of the top Internet romance sites in the U. They found that consistent with prior research, including speed-dating studies, women tended to be pickier than men. In short, after opposite-sex members of their own group, white men were open to dating Asian women, and white women black men than members of other racial or ethnic groups. At the same time, Latinos were generally favored by both white men and women willing to out-date.

Feliciano, Robnett, and Komaie found that white women who described themselves as athletic, average, fit, or slim were more likely to exclude black men than those who considered themselves large, thick, or voluptuous.

Body type, however, was not a predictor for white women's avoidance of Asian men, nor was it for the white men's preferences. On the other hand, white men with a particular body type in mind were considerably more likely to exclude black women while women who preferred a particular height were slightly more likely to exclude Asian men. Women who deemed themselves very liberal or liberal were less likely than apolitical, moderate, or conservative women to exclude black men.

In contrast, left-leaning white women were slightly more likely to exclude Asian men. Being Jewish was the perfect predictor of black exclusion. All white men and women who identified as Jewish and who had a racial preference excluded blacks, and all white Jewish women also avoided Asian men.

White men with a religious preference were four times as likely to exclude black women, and white women with the same were twice as likely to exclude black men. However, religious preferences were not linked to avoiding Asians. Feliciano, Robnett, and Komaie found some support for this. In particular, white men's exclusion of black women was linked to the perception that black women deviate from Western idealized notions of femininity, for example by being bossy, while their favoring Asian women was likely due to the latter's portrayal in the media as "the embodiment of perfect womanhood" and "good wives.

Therefore, all groups except white women were willing to out-date, albeit with great variations. For blacks willing to out-date, Latinos were most preferred.

In , Elizabeth Bruch and M. Newman from the University of Michigan published in the journal Science Advances a study of approximately , heterosexual individuals living in New York City, Chicago, Boston and Seattle, who used a certain "popular, free online-dating service. For a man, his desirability increased till the age of 50; for a woman, her desirability declined steeply after the age of 18 till the age of In terms of educational attainment, the more educated a man was, the more desirable he became; for a woman, however, her desirability rose up to the bachelor's degree before declining.

Bruch suggested that besides individual preferences and partner availability, this pattern may be due to the fact that by the late s, women were more likely to attend and graduate from university. Developmental psychologist Michelle Drouin, who was not involved in the study, told The New York Times this finding is in accordance with theories in psychology and sociology based on biological evolution in that youth is a sign of fertility.

com, MeetBlackPOZ. Since advertising revenues are modest compared to membership fees, this model requires numerous page views to achieve profitability. To use online dating, a person creates a user account on an online dating site, then creates a profile with photos, descriptive information and match preferences. The law requires dating services meeting specific criteria—including having as their primary business to connect U. an online dating website. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

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