How we fell out of love with dating apps
Antònia Justícia, a journalist at Catalan daily La Vanguardia, called me to talk about the collapse of dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, Meetic and many others. Here’s her Spanish-language article (pdf), in which she covers many of the issues we discussed.
The pressures on this business model are many and varied. First of all, it’s a crowded market, one that enjoyed a boom during the pandemic, with a product that comes in many forms: symmetrical, asymmetrical to give more control to women, long-term relationships, older people, and the many variants within the LGBTQ community. Nevertheless, gender stereotypes persist.
For users of these apps, differentiating which ones work best or allow them to satisfy their needs has often proved to be a time-consuming process of trial and error, often with unsatisfactory results. The arrival of freemium-based models, which offer more privileges, better positioning or practically an SEO/SEM dedicated to something like relationships, has only made things more complex, and in a certain sense, artificial.
But beyond an overcrowded market, there is a bigger problem: people who use these apps in search of a stable partner stop using them as soon as they achieve their objective. The moment of “unsubscribing from Tinder” because you think you have formalized a relationship with a person you met…
