When I told my old college friends I was moving to New York City to become a columnist, they called me Carrie Bradshaw for an entire week. Well, be careful what you wish for because I've been thinking a lot about online dating over the past few days. And with Bumble Inc's chief executive officer stepping down and the share prices of the leading dating app groups at record lows, I couldn't help but wonder: What are we really willing to pay to find true love?
In the most unromantic sense, it's currently about $25 (887 baht) a month. That's the ballpark for most subscription plans offered by the mainstream dating apps. For that, you're promised more "noticeability" -- though unfortunately not attractiveness -- through an algorithmic boost or preferential treatment when you send a potential date a message. There are also little micro-transactions, such as the "roses" sold on Match Group Inc's Hinge. At about $2 each, they are meant to convey a more enthusiastic compliment (with the downside being it risks looking a bit desperate, but maybe that's just me).
There are more expensive options. The League trades on the idea that it caters to a more refined clientele ("High standards? Keep them that way," its publicity material says). Its subscription is $100 a week. A week! As I said to someone recently, I'd rather reinvest that kind of money in a bigger apartment in which to die alone. Tinder is at it, too: The original "swipe right" app announced in September a $500-a-month option that gives a select few users the ability to message anyone they want, regardless of any sort of reciprocity -- the digital equivalent of interrupting someone who is reading a book while listening to headphones.
Some of the apps offer a discount if you sign up for an entire year -- prompting you to weigh the appeal of a better deal against the depressing prospect that you'll need it for that long. Bumble inexplicably has a "lifetime membership" option for a one-time payment of $269.99. Now, that's what you call optimism.
Co-founded by soon-to-be-former CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd in 2014, Bumble initially stood out from the crowd by seeking to put more control into the hands of women by making it so only they could send the first message upon a new match. It was a simple but masterful idea that came to be worth almost $8 billion when the company went public in 2021. Its stock soared on optimism the company could increase monetisation, expand internationally and branch out to help people make friends and professional connections.
Things have soured since then. Ms Herd's announcement on Monday that she would be stepping down comes as the company's stock languishes some 80% below its IPO days. In after-hours trading on Tuesday, shares fell further when the company announced its third-quarter earnings and forecast that it would miss revenue targets for this year.
Match Group -- which owns most of Bumble's competitors, such as the League, Tinder, OkCupid and, of course, Match.com -- has experienced similar struggles; its shares are down 28% this year. Its revenue forecast for the rest of the year -- or "cuffing season", as those on the dating scene know it -- was bleaker than analysts had hoped.
And so, both Bumble and Match Group have plans to crank up the monetisation. Tinder is shifting to a weekly subscription model, conceding that it might lose a lot of payers in the process but make more from those who remain. Bumble's Herd said that in the coming quarters, the company will more widely roll out a more expensive subscription option that is targeted at "high intent, serious dating users". She didn't have much to say about why it was better other than to say it would be "more premium than the current premium".
All this will prove frustrating for users already fed up with incessant monetisation of dating apps. Typically, access to more desirable matches on the app is restricted -- what a friend described as a "here are the people we actually think you'll really like" section -- behind a velvet rope.
Online dating has never been particularly organic, of course -- chemistry is a mystery that not even artificial intelligence can solve -- but it's now firmly in dating apps' interest to put up these barriers in the pursuit of payment. Users have been pushed too far. Even without the apps, dating is already one of the most expensive things you do with your time. According to one piece of research (which I use in absence of any better data, to be clear), the cost of an average date -- dinner and drinks -- in New York City is around $230.
According to a Pew Research poll published earlier this year, people who had paid to use a dating app were only marginally happier with their experience than those who hadn't -- 58% of payers called online dating a "positive" experience, compared with 50% of those who only used free plans.
Any healthy relationship requires compromise, and it seems keeping investors happy might be incompatible with what most users would consider reasonable pricing for using a dating app. The companies would be wise to remember that just because someone is looking for love doesn't mean they aren't looking for a fair deal. ©2023 Bloomberg
Dave Lee is Bloomberg Opinion's US technology columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the Financial Times and BBC News.