Match Weathers Romance Recession as Grindr Gains

While the owner of Match.com, Tinder, and other leading dating websites and apps seems to be suffering through a romance recession, gay dating competitor Gindr has been grinding out increased engagement on the web and through its mobile apps.

Match Group is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on Tuesday, while Grindr is on track to go public before the end of the year (via a SPAC deal announced in May). Bumble. another competitor that’s already public and scheduled to report earnings on November 9, is also doing better than the rest of the market. Match missed earnings targets in its last quarterly report, and management had warned that the second half of the year was likely to be weak.

Key takeaways

• While overall engagement for dating apps and websites has been in the doldrums, Match properties tend to be doing worse. For the apps and services we analyzed, traffic was down 10% for the websites, while active users were down 4% on iOS and 1.8% on Android in Q3 (see chart below), according to Similarweb estimates.
• In contrast, Grindr web traffic was up 31.7%, while active users were up 21.6% on iOS and 23.5% on Android.
• For Bumble, web traffic was up 17.5%, while active users were up 20.3% on iOS and 28.2% on Android.
• On a bright note for Match, traffic to matchmediagroup.com advertising portal was up 43.6% year-over-year in the third quarter. However, much of its income comes not from advertising but for upgraded subscriptions to apps such as Tinder. Lower levels of engagement are not a good sign for people wanting to upgrade.

App engagement, as opposed to web visits, tends to be the more significant metric, particularly for engagement with younger people.

Match is falling behind the market in growth

But still a dominant force in dating apps

Despite falling behind competitors in terms of momentum, Match still controls several of the largest brands in online dating, both for apps (for example, on Android) …

… and on the web.

Notes about this analysis: We examined a list of Match Group apps including Tinder, Plenty of Fish, Hinge, OkCupid, Match, OurTime, BLK Dating, Black People Meet, Chispa, and The League. The “Competitive Set” statistics are for about 30 apps (slightly different lists for Android and iOS) including the Match brands. Because of differences between the metrics we get from the app platforms, the percentage increase for active users for Android is based on daily active users, while for iOS it’s monthly active users. For web traffic, “Competitive Set” includes all the brands shown on the ranking chart above.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

Disclaimer: All data, reports and other materials provided or made available by Similarweb are based on data obtained from third parties, including estimations and extrapolations based on such data. Similarweb shall not be responsible for the accuracy of the materials and shall have no liability for any decision by any third party based in whole or in part on the materials.

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".