Dating apps struggle to compete in a saturated market
Dating apps struggle to compete in a saturated market
The dating app business isn’t doing so well these days. Take Bumble, for example. Its stock price started at around $70 a share when it went public in early 2021; now, it’s around $14. The company recently announced it’s getting a new CEO.
More generally, surveys show that Gen Z is less interested in app dating altogether too.
When Nathaly Sierra downloaded dating apps over a year ago, she was hoping to find a relationship. What she got was some confusing interactions.
“I once matched with a guy on Bumble. He never answered me and then he matched me on Hinge. And he was like super talkative and I was like, ‘Dude, I just matched you on the other app,'” she said.
I talked to Sierra a couple months ago at a speed dating event in Manhattan, where several people told me they were done with online dating. Sierra said that it’s harder to gauge peoples’ intentions when you meet online. It used to be that people would go to specific apps with different intentions.
Relationship-seekers might go on Bumble, “and then people who were just casually looking for something would go on Tinder,” she said. “But I think, like, now everybody goes on all the apps and they’re like, ‘Let’s see what happens.'”
That’s why the dating app world feels super saturated. There’s Bumble, Hinge, Tinder, Coffee Meets Bagel, The League, Feeld, Plenty of Fish — the list goes on and on. And daters are overwhelmed, said Liesel Sharabi, a professor of communication at Arizona State.
“For a lot of people, they’ve reached their burnout era,” she said. “They’re feeling very frustrated, they’re feeling swiped out.”
A decade ago, Sharabi said that dating apps were, yes, stigmatized — but also a new and interesting way to meet people. Over time though, users have lost trust in the industry. After all, these apps rely on people staying single.
“I think a lot of these apps, you know, they’ve gamified dating,” said Sharabi. “They’ve made it really fun to spend a lot of time on the apps, swiping on people, looking at your options.”
To generate revenue, some apps have added paid features like subscriptions that promise better matches and superswipes that help users connect faster.
Kathryn Coduto, a professor of media science at Boston University, thinks that, in general, people are oversubscribed. “Not just online dating,” she said, “but our streaming services, you know, and so I think from a business perspective, that also gets overwhelming for consumers.”
To cut through the noise and make money, Coduto said dating apps need to prove their value. Because, in her research, a lot of people use these apps passively.
“That comes up in interviews all the time, where people are like, ‘I just have my friends swipe for me,'” she said.
The friends doing the swiping? They’re usually coupled, think of online dating as a novelty and think that, somehow, the apps are going to have to find that spark with singles again, she said.
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