OkCupid
The OkCupid homepage on April 3, 2014
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Type of site
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Online dating service |
|---|---|
| Owner | IAC |
| Created by | Chris Coyne, Sam Yagan, Christian Rudder and Max Krohn |
| Website | OkCupid.com |
| Alexa rank |
 425 (February 2015[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Required for membership |
| Launched | March 5, 2004 |
| Current status | active |
OkCupid (sometimes abbreviated as OKC) is an American-based international operating online dating, friendship, and social networking website that features member-created quizzes and multiple-choice questions. It is supported by advertisements and paying users who don't see ads.
The site supports multiple modes of communication, including instant messages and emails. OkCupid was listed in Time magazine's 2007 Top 10 dating websites. The website was acquired by IAC's Match.com division in 2011.
OkCupid was initially 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. The current OkCupid Dating Persona Test is still largely identical, in question and text blurb content and order, to the original Match Test. 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.
Since August 2009, an "A-list" account option is available to users of OkCupid and provides additional services for a monthly fee.
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.
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