Online Dating Stronger Than Ever According to New Study

New users are downloading and registering for dating apps every day, and business is booming for the $5.61 billion-dollar industry, despite a recent decline in subscriptions for Tinder.

According to new research gathered from website Cloudwards, 1 in 5 U.S. Internet users are also using a dating app. In fact, the total number of dating app users grew to 366 million worldwide in 2022 alone, up from 240.9 million in 2016 and 323.9 million in 2021.

Gen Z daters seem to have a stronger preference for Tinder, which is the most popular dating app in the U.S. Tinder has a reputation that it’s mainly for singles who aren’t looking for anything serious, and Gen Z daters are on these apps to look for friendships and casual relationships as much as a partner. However, in recent months, Tinder’s new CEO Bernard Kim seems to be taking the app in a new direction and focusing on attracting more serious daters, including testing a new $500 VIP service called Tinder Vault.

Older users from ages 30 to 64 years old prefer Match.com, which has brand recognition among these daters and a more serious approach compared to Tinder. The oldest singles surveyed (over 65) preferred eHarmony or religious dating sites, according to data Cloudwards gathered from Pew.

LGBTQ+ singles are the fastest-growing population of online daters, according to Pew. Fifty-five percent of LGBTQ daters said they have used a dating app compared to only 28 percent of straight adults. About 21 percent of LGBTQ dating app users said they’ve married or had a long-term relationship with someone they met on a dating platform, compared to 11 percent of straight users.

According to he Business of Apps website, the dating app industry witnessed a jump in revenue between 2020 and 2021 thanks to Covid lockdowns, which helped them gain millions of new users. Since 2017, the industry had remained below the $2 billion mark, and only in 2018 did it surpass to hit $2.62 billion. From there, it grew steadily until the huge jump in 2021 to $4.59 billion worldwide across all platforms (and reached $4.94 billion in 2022). Cloudwards reports similar global revenue numbers in earlier years but in 2021 (the last year they report on) they have pegged total revenue at $5.6 billion.

Tinder is still the most popular app in the U.S., but Hinge and Bumble are growing in popularity. In fact, Tinder’s revenue fell for the first time in Q4 of 2022, causing the company to rethink its strategy. In January 2022, it held 32 percent of the U.S. market, while Bumble held 22 percent and Hinge came in at 15 percent.

Bumble had a 96 percent increase in monthly users since January 2019, according to data from Sensor Tower, and Hinge saw a whopping 344 percent growth during that same period.

Plenty of Fish, Grindr, Badoo, OkCupid, Match and Zoosk also held considerable market share among U.S. dating app users.