From Bumble to Hinge, the dating app industry is made up of mobile phone-based applications that use algorithms to match users with romantic prospects. While it generated roughly $6B globally in consumer revenue in 2024, its financial impacts pale in comparison to its social ones. Dating sites and apps have become a hallmark of modern romance: 53% of US adults under 30 have admitted to using them.
Hours of research by our editors, distilled into minutes of clarity.
As downloads fall across the industry, dating apps are trying to stay competitive by adding paywalls to their business models. The more than $6B dating app industry is largely dominated by Match Group, the parent company of both Tinder and Hinge. This video explores how AI and human behavior are changing the industry one right swipe at a time.
While Tinder took up about 25% of US dating app market share as of 2024, Bumble wasn't far behind at 24%. Up-and-comer Hinge sat in third place with 18% of US market share.
Although early dating sites like Match.com weren't launched until the 1990s, the history of dating apps dates arguably back to the mid-1900s when computer scientists used IBM computers to solve matchmaking and compatibility problems.
Whitney Wolfe Herd founded Bumble as a female-focused alternative to Tinder in 2014, inspired by the harassment she saw women on Tinder facing when she worked there. Instead of both parties being able to message each other first, on Bumble, women had to make the first move.
As dating app user growth slowed and companies like Tinder saw increased competition from upstarts like Bumble and Hinge, the industry has pushed for subscription tier adoption due to pressure from investors for predictable profits and more.
That year, Bumble Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd became the youngest female CEO to ever take a company public. The company pivoted during 2020's COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, focusing its marketing strategy on promoting social-distanced dating and its video chat features.
This relatively high cost of customer acquisition (according to 2022 data from saturated markets) makes profitable growth increasingly difficult for dating apps, which is why many have pivoted to focusing on their subscription tiers for reliable revenue.
Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd was criticized at the time for telling staff to "calm down" during a company-wide call informing staff of the layoffs. "I see a lot of freaking-out emojis, y'all need to calm down … everyone's going to have to be adults in dealing with this," she said on the call. (Some users may experience a paywall.)
Harvard graduate Justin McLeod started Hinge in 2011. Since then, despite competition from larger apps like Bumble and Tinder, it's grown into the third-largest dating app by market share in the US, bringing in roughly $396M in revenue as of 2023.
By August 2012, Tinder, which was originally called Match Box, had launched on the Apple App Store. Match Group merged Tinder into its portfolio in 2017, the same year it set its sights on acquiring Hinge. Experts say that Match has not been declared a monopoly in part because monopolies are "hard to prove."
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