Tinder Adding Video Chat Feature

Tinder has announced that it will be releasing a new video chat feature in the second quarter of this year. This news comes as people around the world continue to socially distance in the wake of the coronavirus, and as its parent company Match Group shared that the app’s subscriber growth had slowed.

Match Group didn’t give specifics about Tinder’s new video chat feature and what it would look like, but they did indicate they were testing the waters with a new video chat platform on another one of its apps, Plenty of Fish. POF offers a live stream video platform where users can observe and weigh in with likes and comments on other user’s live streams. The app is also offering a virtual speed dating feature called NextDate, which allows users to meet and talk briefly with several matches before deciding whether to take the video chat to a one-on-one conversation.

Match Group said that the livestream feature on POF has exceeded expectations, according to Tech Crunch. And Hinge, another Match-owned app, also launched a feature called Date From Home that allows users to request going on a video date, although that would be through a third-party app like Hangouts or Zoom, rather than through Hinge.

Match Group admitted that it has been hesitant to add video features to Tinder in the past, even as apps like Bumble and Facebook Dating began to offer them. Now that daters have no choice but to virtually date, video features will likely become a part of the dating app user experience, so Match executives feel that this is a good time to add them.

CEO Shar Dubey said in a letter to shareholders: “As daters demonstrated strong willingness to video-date, our product and engineering teams around the world mobilized quickly to deploy one-to-one video chat capabilities on many of our platforms.”

Despite setbacks from coronavirus, Match Group shared that Q1 had a revenue growth of 17% year-over-year, beating market expectations. But alongside, Tinder saw subscriber growth decline for the first time from February to March, although they appeared to remain steady in April. From December 2019 to March 31, 2020 Tinder added only 100,000 new paying subscribers overall, compared to this time last year when it added 384,000. To date, Tinder has about 6 million paying subscribers.

People have also been shifting to lower-priced subscriptions on Tinder and purchasing a la carte features instead of subscriptions, which has kept revenue relatively steady, according to Match Group. 

User activity appears to be on the rise, however. According to The Verge, Match Group reported an increase in the average number of swipes per day on Tinder (including in March where it hit 3 billion swipes in one day). They also offered that the average number of daily messages across all its dating apps was 27% higher in April than in February.

For more on this service you can read our review of the Tinder dating app.