Something is changing on the Internet, even if Tinder is losing popularity. It has stopped growing and fewer and fewer people are paying for it.

There are not many applications that have achieved penetration. (no pun intended)the relevance and importance in popular culture that Tinder has achieved over the last decade. This is a metonymy for online flirting.along with WhatsApp or Twitter, is synonymous with a certain online activity.

But its best moment in business has passed, and while it can always recover lost ground, neither Tinder itself nor its backing giant Match Group appear to have a better moment ahead.

Users paying upfront

Here’s a telling fact: Tinder’s number of subscribers, or paid users, is declining. After growing steadily in the first half of the last decade, it surged in 2019, just before the pandemic, when it grew by 50% quarter-on-quarter.

While lockdown brought that number down a bit, the first summer of the pandemic greened laurels and killed off dislikes, putting Tinder back on track for growth. Until the summer of 2022, when Tinder peaked at over 11 million paying usersa figure that was never exceeded.

There were no longer as many of them as then, and she had actually lost the psychological barrier of 10 million. It not only stopped growing, but also began to decline, according to company data collected Business applications.

Something that meant a slowdown in its revenue growth, which is now approaching $500 million quarterly.

Tinder is a particularly popular app among people under twenty-five. From there to Over the years, its popularity has declined.in favor of other applications besides reaching an age where it becomes more common to find a stable partner.

Once you turn 35, the choice of dating apps becomes much more open and their distribution less concentrated than when you were younger. In the following table we can see this distribution broken down by age group.

Curiosity: Bumble was founded by Whitney Wolfe, a former vice president of Tinder. One more interesting tidbit: Of the six apps in this ranking, four are controlled by Match Group, a large matrix of dating apps. eHarmony is another one that is out of his control.

The range of applications implemented by Match Group is as extensive as it is detailed. Everyone has their own focus. Although they sometimes overlap, they all have a reason: to prioritize stable relationships, to target specific ethnic communities, to adapt to a distinct regional culture different from the West, or to prioritize oral and gestural interactivity over written ones.

There are twelve apps in total, and therefore twelve different brands, but that’s not enough to make one think that if Tinder goes down, other native apps will pick up the baton, certainly not counting on competitors like Grindr. , Happn or the aforementioned Bumble, which has been part of Tinder’s strategy to contain it for a year.

On the one side, The group’s income has been stagnant for a long time just over $3 billion a year. Match first exceeded this figure in 2013. After several stable years and a sharp decline in 2018, it rose again to end 2023 with nearly 3.4 billion in deposits.

A bit of baggage in a decade that, if anything, was marked by financial euphoria for many tech companies that saw certain processes from the physical world move into the online environment. Like dating.

On the other hand, the group’s stock market performance shows significant growth between 2016 and 2021, followed by a sharp decline since then.

The stiff competition that has emerged in recent years is in contrast to Tinder, which hasn’t changed much about its app, its features, and therefore its experience. However, a company has many opportunities to overcome this inertia through marketing or improving the application.

In the background is a panorama with a strange uncertainty: caused by periodic studies published over the years that indicate a disinterest in romantic love and sexual relationships among parts of the population, especially the youngest, Generation Z.

The usual culprits that are usually pointed to are a combination of increased anxiety, antidepressant use, poor sleep quality, obesity or the golden age of pornography, something that weaves a mixture between lack of interest in sex and decreased blood pressure to maintain relationships.

But if anyone can help change that inertia, it’s the app that set the dating standards for a section of society more than a decade ago.

Featured Image | Xataka with Midjourney

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