Tinder Launches its First Podcast Offering Dating Advice

The last place many love weary daters would go for advice on how to date is consulting a dating app. Especially Tinder, which has often been accused of being a “hook-up” app, and recently taken to task by competitor Hinge for that reputation.

But last month, Tinder launched a brand new podcast offering online daters some much-needed advice.

Branded podcasts are popping up everywhere, since the platform has really caught on with the way the public consumes information. According to Edison Research, about 21% of Americans over the age of 12, or 57 million people, listen to a podcast monthly, up from 17% last year. It seems Tinder is trying to capitalize on its success and pave a more helpful and hopeful path while expanding its user base.

Tinder’s new podcast DTR, “Define the Relationship,” is produced by Gimlet Creative, which produced many successful branded podcasts, including one for eBay. Tinder also hired host Jane Marie, the Music Supervisor for NPR’s long-standing radio show “This American Life,” to explore the “wild new world of dating, love and sex, in cyberspace,” she is quoted as saying on Gimlet’s website.

DTR was inspired by the most pressing question of dating today – how do you define how casual or serious your relationship is (or how serious you want it to be) when you are afraid to have a conversation about it?

Marie will be interviewing daters and experts, and will be offering general tips on how to improve your online dating experience, such as improving your profile or choosing the right photos, along with the gray area of how to form romantic relationships.

Tinder will contribute some stats for the podcast topics, thanks to its impressive userbase. The company has already been pulling user behavior data for other studies it released. For instance, Tinder revealed the types of GIFs people use to kick-start a conversation, and the career most likely to land you a match as a tool for helping people improve their chances of landing a date.

According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, the first episode discusses the much-criticized habit among daters of starting a conversation with the word, “hey.” Tinder found through its own third-party platform that people who use GIFs on Tinder are 30% more likely to get a response, and GIF users have conversations that last twice as long. (So, it would be a good strategy, as opposed to taking the easy way out with an opening like "hey" or "how are you?")

DTR released its first episode on Thursday, December 8th, and includes six episodes in total. You can listen via iTunes or Soundcloud.