In early December, Match Group, the owner of more than 40 dating apps and by far the market leader in the world of online dating, held its first investor day since going public in 2015.
The major theme was that the next big shift in the business of romantic connections will be artificial intelligence — something the group is pushing hard. “AI is going to transform the dating experience. It’s going to enable us to make all aspects of the online dating journey better,” proclaimed chief executive Bernard Kim.
Behind those optimistic words, however, were some difficult realities. Although its brands now cater to tens of millions of users globally, Match’s market value — roughly $8bn — is just a fifth of what it was three years ago. Last month, Tinder, Match’s flagship brand and the app that arguably invented the modern dating industry, reported that paid user numbers had dropped on a year-on-year basis for the eighth consecutive quarter.
Nor is it just Match: the world’s biggest online dating companies are in crisis, as their target customers, particularly women and younger users, increasingly look elsewhere, towards niche apps or real-life meets — or even opt out of romantic relationships altogether. In a recent survey by Forbes, 78 per cent of respondents reported feeling “emotionally, mentally or physically exhausted” by dating apps.
The three largest dating brands globally — Tinder, Badoo (which is hugely popular outside the US) and Bumble — are all shedding users. And those that remain are increasingly unwilling to pay for access. Bumble, which owns both the eponymous app and Badoo, has seen its share price plummet nearly 90 per cent in the last five years.
At Match, activist investors, including Elliott Management and Starboard Value, have started to make their presence felt. In a public letter sent in July, Starboard suggested that the group needed to trim its costs, attract new users and step up innovation. If it fails to deliver, wrote Starboard’s managing member Jeffrey Smith, “we believe changes must be considered” — including for Match itself to go private once again.
Kathryn Coduto, a researcher at Boston University who has been studying the sector for the past decade, believes it is long overdue a shake-up. The stigma around online dating is “largely gone”, she says, but it has been replaced by a sense of frustration and burnout. “People were really excited. Now, just ten years later, they’re tired.”
“Customer preferences and needs have evolved,” admits Bumble chief executive Lidiane Jones. “That means our category needs to change.”
When Tinder first appeared in 2012, it was heralded as a relationship revolution — the app that would change everything in the dating world.
While web-based dating portals had existed since the birth of the internet (Match.com, Match’s original platform, was founded in 1995), Tinder which launched to the public in 2013, had a clever, smartphone-led innovation: the swipe. Users could simply swipe left or right on people’s profiles to reject or accept them. If both users swiped right, they could chat. If just one swiped left, they would probably never connect.
Many commentators were horrified — soon after its launch the Guardian described Tinder as “the shallowest dating app ever” — but singles signed up in their droves. Tinder had more than 50mn monthly active users by 2017, when it was acquired by Match Group and parent company IAC at an estimated value of $3bn. The swipe was replicated by nearly every rival, and the app’s viral popularity helped to destigmatise online dating.
Tinder reached a peak of more than 73mn monthly active users in 2020. Since then, however, the romance has faded. Although Tinder remains by far the world’s dominant dating app, monthly active users have dropped more than a third since 2020, according to figures from analytics company Sensor Tower.
Sales have also slipped. The brand made $503mn in direct revenue in the three months to September, down from $508mn in the same period in 2023, despite increases in subscription costs.
One former employee who did not want to be named blamed the company’s struggles on “directionless” leadership. Another said that, after years of viral growth, Tinder had not found “a long-term goal”. The return of in-person events as the pandemic receded — and fatigue about digital-only interactions — may also have had a part to play, suggests Boston University’s Coduto.
The role of chief executive had been vacant for more than a year when Match insider Faye Iosotaluno was appointed in January, becoming Tinder’s eighth leader since its launch.
Speaking at the investor day, Iosotaluno said she was “clear-eyed” about the challenges: “Tinder must create excitement again. Spending time on Tinder must be worth people’s time and not feel like a chore.”
In an attempt to “[improve] user outcomes”, Tinder has begun trialling a requirement for users to upload photos of their face (currently optional in most regions), as well as a “liveness check” that uses biometric scanning to verify that profile pictures have not been faked.
Iosotaluno also promised an “AI-enabled discovery feature” which would suggest matches based on data from user photos and quizzes.
The industry is scrambling to find “the next novel thing”, says Liesel Sharabi, director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at Arizona State University.
But analysts warn that it will be an uphill battle. “Tinder hit a roadblock because users’ perception of it deteriorated very quickly,” says Shweta Khajuria, a senior analyst at Wolfe Research. “It’s very difficult to change perceptions once they’re established.”
In its November earnings report, Match Group reported lower-than-expected revenue projections. The company also further lowered these projections at December’s investor day, and analysts have since downgraded their share-price expectations.
“We know we need to clean up the ecosystem and create better experiences, especially for younger users and women, and we’re working on it, but meaningful changes do take time,” chief executive Kim said during the earnings call.
Tinder is not alone in experiencing difficulties. Bumble, which was launched in 2014 by one of Tinder’s co-founders as a female-focused alternative, has also struggled to rekindle growth.
After slashing its revenue outlook in August, the company shed a quarter of its market value on a single day. A few months earlier, an advertising campaign pleading with women not to abandon romance — taglines included “a vow of celibacy is not the answer” — inspired a backlash after it was accused of shaming people who choose not to be sexually active.
Bumble has even scrapped its signature feature: only permitting women to initiate chats, not men (something designed to limit the potential for female users to be harassed or overwhelmed). Women can now add prompts to their profiles for potential suitors to answer, an echo of a feature popularised by rival Hinge.
The company has also been spreading its bets beyond romance. In an attempt to reach what it calls the “wider connection space”, last year it launched a friend-finding app called BFF. In May, it also acquired community building app Geneva, which helps users form groups or clubs.
At an investor event in September, chief executive Jones said that the opportunity for Bumble to monetise friendship was “limitless”.
“This moment is pivotal for Bumble because we have the opportunity to redefine what online dating can and should be,” Jones tells the FT.
Yet users have complained that, as mainstream products scramble to compete, they are becoming increasingly indistinguishable. “The apps all used to have their own ‘thing’ but I feel like they’re all becoming the same now,” says Mark, a 25-year-old based in London.
Even insiders admit that dating apps have a foundational problem: love and friendship are not easy for an algorithm to serve up. Humans have complex tastes; the data that many dating apps are built on only provides an approximation of what someone might find appealing — and harder still for the feeling to be mutual.
“Your [favourite] Spotify song doesn’t have to like you back,” says Justin McLeod, the chief executive of Hinge, which was released in 2012 before being rebranded to focus on longer-term relationships four years later. “It’s a complex, messy problem.”
Two major apps appear to be bucking the trend of losing users: Hinge itself, now owned by Match, and Grindr, which pioneered hyper-specific geolocation and was for years the go-to choice for gay men looking for casual relationships. Both have more than 10mn active users and are still growing — albeit more slowly than before, according to Sensor Tower.
McLeod credits Hinge’s success to “product innovation” and a “narrow focus on intentional dating”. He, too, sees the future being in AI. “I think the effectiveness of Hinge, in particular, is going to radically change over the next 6-12 months,” he suggests, saying that matching will be based on “much more nuanced information than we have today”.
Grindr is also trying to become what chief executive George Arison characterises as an “AI-first dating product”, which will mine user data to offer matches that are achieved more transparently and better tailored, as it tries to expand its remit, too, towards longer-term relationships.
“Most products are actually using very little data for their matches right now,” Arison says. “I think there’s a lot of really intimate and useful information in people’s chat conversations.”
The company has also said it will develop a chatbot assistant, dubbed the Grindr Wingman, to generate conversation prompts based on users’ profiles and chat histories.
But not everyone is convinced. Tristan, a 24-year-old from London, is worried about being “pigeonholed” by AI: “People struggle with understanding text messages already,” he says. “Why would we trust AI to read emotions any better?”
Tinder’s Iosotaluno says she doesn’t want AI integration to disrupt human-to-human connections. “We don’t want a future that looks like a Black Mirror episode,” she says.
The behaviour of human beings themselves on dating apps has long been a concern — particularly men, who make up the majority of users on most platforms. Some suggest that because people are connecting in virtual space with limited repercussions, poor behaviour is rife: from sexual harassment and unsolicited pictures to “ghosting”, where one party simply disappears without explanation.
Hinge has been trying to combat these. The app’s latest feature, “Your Turn Limits”, prevents users from matching with more people if they have eight or more unanswered messages in their queue. Bumble, meanwhile, this year introduced a tool for users to report profiles they believe are using AI-generated images and videos.
For Renate Nyborg, who was Tinder’s chief executive until 2022, this trend towards safeguarding is long overdue. Nyborg, who has since founded AI-powered relationship coaching app Meeno, believes that the dating industry has failed to help users build strong relationships — leaving young people in particular “burned by growing up with ghosting”, she suggests.
Critics of the dating industry often have a more fundamental complaint: that the incentives for the corporations that make dating apps and people who use their products are inherently at war. Hinge markets itself as “designed to be deleted” — something that would seem to be in conflict with the need for ever-expanding revenue and growth.
The traditional dating-app business model relies on churn: attracting people to sign up, encouraging them to pay for extra swipes or features, then replacing those that leave (presumably once they’ve found love) with fresh users — meaning that companies, more so than in other sectors, always need to be replenishing their user base.
Dating apps already face allegations from users that they hide the best potential mates to keep people swiping — theories that have led to entire forums online devoted to “gaming” the apps. While these accusations are denied by dating companies, they are grounded in “the very real lack of transparency” about how matching algorithms work, says Sharabi of Arizona State University.
Hinge’s McLeod rejects the criticism that apps like Hinge are trying to prevent users from finding romance, and insists there is a market here: “As long as there are single people in the world, we will have a good business.”
While the dating industry’s major players are betting big on AI, perhaps their biggest challenge is a demographic one: attracting younger users.
A 2023 survey by Statista found that Gen Z was less interested in online dating than millennials were at their age — in part, suggests UK communications regulator Ofcom, which made similar findings in 2024, because the novelty of dating apps is wearing off.
“There’s a lot of nostalgia for traditional ways of meeting [because] Gen Z has never existed in a world where online dating didn’t exist,” says Sharabi. Cory Carpenter, an analyst at JPMorgan, agrees: “The issue is that the product-market fit is just not great [for Gen Z].”
In the battle for younger customers in a tighter-than-ever marketplace, Match, Grindr and Bumble are now competing not just with each other, but also with a new generation of start-ups.
Feeld, founded a decade ago and headquartered in the UK, is aimed at “open-minded” and “curious” people seeking to experiment with specific sexual kinks, consensual non-monogamy or polyamory (the company’s original name was 3nder, until Tinder sued). Monthly active users reached an average of 1.6mn in the fourth quarter, according to Sensor Tower, up more than 10 per cent from the same period in 2023.
The app has so far shied away from developing AI features, says Feeld’s chief executive Ana Kirova. “It’s hard to see a way that works without tampering with the messiness of the personal journey,” she argues. Instead the company has branched into hosting in-person events and recently launched its own magazine.
Another emerging rival, called Breeze, is attempting something even more radical: trying to make sure that couples actually meet up. The Dutch dating brand, which launched in the UK in May, does not even allow users to message each other until they have arranged a date.
Couples who have matched share their availability for a date at one of Breeze’s partner bars or restaurants, and can only message in the hours beforehand — primarily so that they can find each other.
The company charges users a fee, currently set at £9.50 per person in the UK, for this first assignation. One drink is generally included — funded by the restaurant or bar, not by Breeze. There are no other subscription costs. “Our business model means that our intentions are aligned with the daters,” says co-founder Marsha Goei.
At least some consumers will be attracted, reckons Coduto of Boston University: “Paying for something tangible — an actual date rather than just access to a dating pool — can be more appealing.”
Meanwhile, offline meetups appear to be making a comeback. More than 476,000 people attended in-person singles and speed-dating events in the US in the year to November, up 69 per cent from the same period in 2023, according to ticketing platform Eventbrite.
There are lessons here about the importance of face-to-face connection, Nyborg suggests. “If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that it’s simply very difficult to understand who someone is from what you see online,” she says.
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