Description
OkCupid is a U.S.-based, internationally operating online dating, friendship, and formerly also a social networking website and application. It features multiple-choice questions to match members. Registration is free. OKCupid is owned by Match Group, which also owns Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, and many other popular dating apps and sites.
While the site and app once supported multiple modes of communication, this has been restricted to messaging. OkCupid was listed in Time magazine's 2007 Top 10 dating websites. The website was acquired by IAC's Match.com division in 2011.
History
OkCupid was originally owned by Humor Rainbow, Inc. OkCupid's founders (Chris Coyne, Christian Rudder, Sam Yagan, and Max Krohn) were students at Harvard University when they gained recognition for their creation of TheSpark and, later, SparkNotes. Among other things, TheSpark.com featured a number of humorous self-quizzes and personality tests, including the four-variable Myers-Briggs style Match Test. SparkMatch debuted as a beta experiment of allowing registered users who had taken the Match Test to search for and contact each other based on their Match Test types. The popularity of SparkMatch took off and it was launched as its own site, later renamed OkCupid. In 2001, they sold SparkNotes to Barnes & Noble, and began work on OkCupid.
In 2007, OkCupid launched Crazy Blind Date.
In 2008, OkCupid spun off its test-design portion under the name Hello Quizzy (HQ), while keeping it inextricably linked to OkCupid and reserving existent OkCupid users' names on HQ. However, the original Dating Persona Test has since been removed.
Since August 2009, an "A-list" account option is available to users of OkCupid and provides additional services for monthly fees.
In February 2011, OkCupid was acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp, operators of Match.com, for US$50 million. Editorial posts from 2010 by an OkCupid founder in which Match.com and pay-dating were criticized for exploiting users and being "fundamentally broken" were removed from the OkCupid blog at the time of the acquisition. In a press response, OkCupid's CEO explained that the removal was voluntary.
In November 2012, OkCupid launched the social discovery service Tallygram, but retired the service in April 2013.
On March 31, 2014, any user accessing OkCupid from Firefox was presented with a message asking users to boycott the internet browser due to Mozilla Corporation's new CEO Brendan Eich's support of Proposition 8. Users were asked instead to consider other browsers. On April 2, 2014, the dating site revoked the Firefox ban.
The website added a bevy of nontraditional profile options for users to express their gender identity and sexuality in late 2014. These options—which included asexual, genderfluid, pansexual, sapiosexual, and transgender categories—were added to make the website more inclusive. Through this addition, OkCupid popularized the concept of "sapiosexuality", meaning romance or sexual attraction based on intellectual, rather than physical, traits. OkCupid removed the Sapiosexual identity on February 11, 2019, following considerable negative feedback, specifically quoting an article on Vice Magazine.
Rudder updated the "OkTrends" blog, which consists of "original research and insights from OkCupid," for the first time in three years in July 2014. Entitled "We Experiment On Human Beings!," the post discusses three experiments run by the website without the knowledge of users. Rudder defends the involuntary experiment, claiming the practice is widespread: "... if you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That's how websites work."
In January 2018, OkCupid appointed Ariel Charytan, who was formerly senior vice president of audiobook and podcast company Audible, as CEO. In September 2018, OkCupid became the first dating app to create a dedicated space on profiles for LGBTQ daters to share their pronouns, and expanded that feature to all users in July 2020.
In June 2020, OkCupid released a feature “stacks” that allows app users to view and sort matches based on categories including nearby, online, questions pros, recommended and match percentage. Paid users can additionally sort by new or popular people.
In May 2021, the company launched a monthly blog series, called Dating Data Center, which shared data from OkCupid matching questions and responses. In that same month, OkCupid found that daters, coming out of the 2019 Coronavirus Pandemic, were looking for long-term relationships, negating the commonly-held theories of a “hot vaxxed summer” (a play on Megan Thee Stallion single Hot Girl Summer) in which daters were looking exclusively for causal relationships. In June 2021, OkCupid expanded identity options for LGBTQ+ users, with more 60 identity options, including 20 sexual orientations and 22 gender options.
