Romance scams are among the most common type of online fraud, with losses in millions of dollars. Scammers prey on people’s need for love and connection, which can make them vulnerable to manipulation. “There’s no end to the lies romance scammers will tell to get your money,” warns the Federal Trade Commission.
I couldn’t help but think of this when I saw that Tinder has just announced it is moving ahead with plans to launch a new “high-end” membership for as much as $500 a month. Tentatively called Tinder Vault, representatives of the company have said that the new service will provide an “even more fun experience” and “quality matches” for “exclusive” users.
Make that users with money. This latest product seems to be part of Tinder’s plan to bring itself up from its recently flagging profits – the company posted its first-ever quarterly decline in the fourth quarter of 2022 – which became clear in the earnings call for Match Group, the dating giant that owns Tinder, that took place on 2 August.
When asked by an investment analyst how “impactful” Tinder’s new high-end service was going to be, Match CEO and Tinder interim CEO Bernard Kim said, “[I]f you actually take a small fraction of our payers at higher price points, you actually get a number that’s in the tens of millions of dollars on an annual basis.
“A small segment of users drive a high amount of monetization,” said Kim, who added that he had “a lot of experience” with this strategy, presumably referring to his work turning around the video game company Zynga. (He joined Match Group in 2022.) In other words, Tinder hopes Tinder Vault is a way to boost the company’s profits by appealing to the romantic longings of financial “whales”, in the words of an analyst on the call.
Companies want to make money; that’s no surprise. And online dating companies are no different. What is different with these companies, though, is that they charge users for services that don’t necessarily give them what they want and expect they’ll get by using them. For example, relationships.
Surveys of online daters say the majority are looking for long-term relationships. Tinder itself reports that long-term relationships are Tinder members’ number one goal. And yet neither Tinder nor other online dating companies ever release data on how many of their users actually find such relationships through their platforms.
The most reliable data available on this is from the Pew Research Center, which reported in 2022 that only 10% of “partnered adults – meaning those who are married, living with a partner or in a committed romantic relationship – met their current significant other through a dating site or app”.
That is a miserable success rate, if success is to be measured by paying customers getting what most of them actually want. Unsurprisingly, Tinder’s success, or lack of it in this regard, was never mentioned in the highly effective ad campaign it launched in February. Tinder’s first-ever global brand campaign, It Starts with A Swipe – which targeted gen Z users – has been credited with being part of the dating app’s incipient turnaround: it reported $475m in direct revenue in the second quarter, up 6% year-over-year.
The ad campaign – which was stylishly shot and Euphoria-esque, with images of groovy gen Z-ers seen in touching, intimate moments – was driven in part by research on gen Z and its shrinking away from hookup culture, which Tinder has long been accused of promoting. “The campaign aims to challenge everything people have thought about Tinder, including hook-up perception,” said Tinder.
With the campaign’s heavy emphasis on diversity and inclusivity, it would not be out of bounds to call it woke-washing, considering that Tinder actually did nothing to change its app while putting out marketing saying it was somehow different than how it has been perceived.
Tinder has announced that it will be rolling out an “important” product refresh later this year with a focus on better serving gen Z users, with new features such as quizzes and conversation starters, some of it generated by artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, according to Tinder’s own reporting, 40% of gen Z users globally say they want long-term, committed relationships. They want love and connection. Will they find it on a dating app? The available data says, sadly, probably not.
Nancy Jo Sales is the author, most recently, of Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
