Tinder's Demise and the Future of Dating Apps
10/17/2022
Last month I received a lifetime ban from Tinder.
Like, WTF?! I was only five minutes into (re) creating my profile. Hadn’t even messaged anyone. No warnings, no appeal process, nothing.
Though my story has—pardon the suggestive pun—a happy ending (shoutout to the Better Business Bureau for getting my profile reinstated to its former glory), the fiasco crystalized Tinder’s declining user experience. Near the peak of parent company Match Group’s MTCH 0.00%↑ stock price last year, I tweeted about some of these issues as I sold my shares.
Now it’s official: the data indeed shows that Tinder is slipping (and Match’s stock price has cratered).
This week we’ll revisit my 2020 article “The Tinder Effect,” and discuss why Tinder’s death is inevitable—and what could eventually supersede it.
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Tinder's Demise and the Future of Dating Apps
Just before the pandemic, a well-publicized Stanford study found that an astonishing 40% of American couples met online. We can reasonably assume that today’s figure is even higher. The old ways of meeting through family, friends, and school are dead.
The cause? Tinder.
Two years ago, we explored how the “Tinder effect” has not only disrupted dating, but demographics and socioeconomics. In just a single decade, the average age of first marriage in the U.S. has shot up by several years. Simultaneously, sexlessness has climbed to levels unseen in modern times. It’s no exaggeration to say—for better or for worse—that we’re living through unprecedented developments in human history.
One might think that Tinder would be killing it in today’s environment, but early signs show that the OG dating app is actually slipping.
The Beginning of the End
Last summer, an article from the British Financial Times reported on Tinder’s decelerating user growth. Downloads for the app fell 5% in 2021 over the prior year. The CEO of parent company Match Group MTCH 0.00%↑ wrote in a recent letter to shareholders that “we are still seeing higher engagement from pre-existing users compared to before the pandemic.”
In other words, Tinder’s core Millennial user base is aging (yes, we’re getting old).
For a dating app, that’s an existential problem. The average American marries at age 28, and spends approximately five years in a relationship prior to getting hitched. That gives dating apps just a few short years to extract some cash from desperate singles before moving on to the next cohort.
Unlike many businesses, there is no steady state for Tinder. If a dating app isn’t growing, then it’s dying.
Whether through technological obsolescence, cultural shifts, or just the fact that kids don’t wanna hook up on an ‘old people’ app, technology-enabled dating services tend to perish within a generation. Wikipedia’s timeline of online dating services lists dozens of defunct brands from as far back as the 1950s, when companies such as Happy Families Planning Services ran on IBM punch card computers.
In more recent decades, dating tech products have maintained supremacy for a period of around ten years. The OG Match.com dominated the desktop era in the 1990s before OkCupid arrived on the scene in the early-2000s. Tinder itself launched in 2012 and quickly attained dominance of the mobile era, along with upstarts such as Hinge (2013) and Bumble (2014).
But now we’re again at that critical ten year mark, and the clock is ticking.
Meanwhile, Match Group’s stock price has collapsed nearly 80% from the peak amid slowing growth and the bursting of the tech bubble (a good time to sell was when former Tinder owner IAC IAC 0.00%↑ bailed near the top).
Match also attempted to diversify its business (or, as Peter Lynch would say, di-worsify) with a signature Big Dumb Acquisition™. The $1.7B purchase of South Korean social network Hyperconnect has predictably failed to meet expectations; Match recently wrote down the value of the asset by over $200M. Like the perennial dater who can’t ever settle, the company is also on its fourth CEO since 2017.
Match has often banked on acquiring the next big thing to stay relevant, which is not exactly a sustainable strategy (and if you’re basically capitalizing R&D costs, then how profitable are you, really?).
Something to think about.
What’s Next?
All of this begs the question: what’s the next big thing?
It seems that everything has been done already, which is why marketers are pushing increasingly niche and gimmicky products. A slew of dating apps now cater toward various races, religions, hobbies and relationship goals. One newcomer called Thursday is only available for one night of the week; as of May, the app had been downloaded 750,000 times.
Even so, those numbers amount to little more than a rounding error for Tinder. Despite the slowdown, the app was still downloaded 70M times in 2021. Perhaps nothing can actually topple Tinder. Are we really at the ‘end of history’?
Maybe this entire article is wrong, and Tinder can defy 60 years of dating tech to achieve intergenerational appeal. Or maybe a few nerds are inventing the next big dating app right now so they can get laid—whether in the metaverse, video-focused, or something else entirely.
Either way, the “dating app fatigue” played up by the media is about as real as sex fatigue (that is to say, it doesn’t exist, and it never will). While individual companies and brands will certainly fade. dating tech itself isn’t going away.
One thing’s for certain: we aren’t going back to the good old days before dating apps existed…or the bad old days, depending on your point of view.
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