Match.com 'Made' 1 Million Babies and Wants to Send Some to College

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Image: Mashable composite. Match; iStockphoto, KimsCreativeHub; Dee-jay

By Samantha Murphy Kelly2014-05-05 15:42:18 UTC

If your parents met on Match.com, the dating site may help defray the cost of your college education.

It sounds hard to believe, but Match.com's earliest couples — who met nearly 20 years ago on what was then the first-ever dating website — now have children graduating high school. To celebrate the anniversary (and the fact that more than 1 million babies have been "made" by Match connections over the years), the company is launching an annual scholarship program called MatchMade.

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"When Match turned 18, it hit us that our first MatchMade kids are starting to go off to college," Sam Yagan, CEO of Match, told Mashable. "We’ve played a small role in these kids being born; now we’d like to play a small role in sending them off to college — and hopefully for years to come."

MatchMade will award $50,000 in college tuition to a student between the ages of 13 and 20. Parents get a nice little prize, too: $5,000 for a getaway.

To enter, kids must submit a video explaining how their parents met on the site in a "creative way" by detailing their first exchanged messages to the time they met. Submissions will be accepted through June 30, 2014.

Match will narrow down the pool of applicants and eventually post the finalists to Facebook and Twitter, where the public will choose their favorite submission.

"We want to know how Match played a part in your parent’s relationship," Yagan said. "We want to laugh and cry in a 1-to-2 minute video. We're looking for something creative that incorporates a parent's Match story and includes a human interest angle too."

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Topics: Apps and Software, college, Conversations, dating sites, Family & Parenting, Marketing, Match.com, online dating, Tech, Work & Play