Relationships

Grindr CEO George Arison is hoping to turn things around for the popular gay dating app after a tumultuous year with employees, investors and app users alike. He is focusing on moving Grindr beyond a hookup app, and in streamlining costs.

According to a feature in The Financial Times, an “a la carte” payment option for travel services will be added to boost the company’s revenue. Arison noted that travelling to events such as Aspen Gay Ski Week and New Year’s Eve in Rio de Janeiro is hugely popular among Grindr users, and the company sees advantages to offering those attending a way to connect.

Grindr is currently testing a feature called Teleport, which lets users place their profile in a new location for an hour to connect with others before traveling to that place. Tinder has a similar feature called Passport, where users can mark their location at a place where they are traveling.

A new study by OnePoll/ Forbes Health found that a whopping 70 percent of individuals who met someone on a dating app said it led to a romantic, exclusive relationship, compared to only 28 percent who said it did not.

The study comes as interest in dating apps has started to decline, in part due to the perception that dating app users feel they can’t find a long-term partner this way. Gen Z, the youngest market and the biggest demographic for dating app companies, have begun to look for alternatives to dating apps to meet people.

Millennials and Gen Xers feel differently. In fact, people between 43 and 58 years of age found the most success on dating apps, with 72 percent saying that meeting on a dating app led to a romantic relationship, according to Forbes.

Tinder has just launched a new online course in partnership with youth platform Yuvaa to educate young daters on consent.

The 90-minute self-learning course entitled “Let’s Talk Consent” will be available for free on the Coursera platform, and is intended to be a resource for young adults in India to learn about interpersonal consent.

According to CNBC, there are five main topics in the course: “understanding consent in personal relationships, setting and enforcing personal boundaries, recognizing signs of healthy and unhealthy relationships via red, green and gray flags, and navigating online and offline interactions with safety and respect.”

Dating app Bumble agreed to pay the state of New Jersey $315,000 in a settlement after the state’s Attorney General Matthew Platkin argued that the dating company violated state consumer protection and internet dating safety laws. The lawsuit alleged that Bumble allowed convicted sex offenders and other criminals on the app without warning other users.

Starting in 2020, the Division of Consumer Affairs launched an investigation into Bumble and Badoo dating platforms amid concerns of sexual assault occurring on the dating apps, and found that the company either “inaccurately represented their criminal background screening policies or failed to disclose them all,” according to NJBiz.com. They concluded that this violated the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act and the Internet Dating Safety Act.

Bumble Inc. owns both Bumble and Badoo dating apps.

New research has shown that the dating app market, once booming after the pandemic, has started to show signs of slowing down.

According to Tech Crunch, research firm data.ai found that global downloads of dating apps saw very tepid growth year-over-year in January 2024. The slight increase of 1.9 percent (128 million installs) from January 2023 was down drastically from the 29 percent increase seen the year before.

In the U.S., data.ai found only a 2.38 percent year-over-year growth from January 2023 to January 2024, with 12.7 million installs, down from a 16 percent growth seen during the same time period last year.

The U.S. market is one of the largest and most lucrative for dating apps, but Pew reported last year that only three in ten U.S. adults had ever used a dating app or online dating site, the same percentage that was reported in 2019. This was surprising considering how dating apps took off during the pandemic and the years immediately following.

Image: Neon

Score, a new dating app for those with credit scores of 675 or higher, is now available to join. The app was launched by financial platform Neon Money Club, which wanted to raise awareness about the importance of finances in relationships.

According to Tech Crunch, the fiscally-minded app is intended to push daters to have conversations about money, which is often a taboo subject. “We need to take the conversation to areas where finance isn’t traditionally discussed,” Luke Bailey, co-founder and CEO of Neon Money Club, told TechCrunch. “Before you can educate people, you need to get their attention. With Score, we’re bringing the conversation to dating.”

Users of the app must apply to join, and upon signing up, Neon Money Club will do a credit check (that won’t impact their credit score) to verify they meet the minimum requirement. Tech Crunch notes that credit scores will not appear on anyone’s profile, and people won’t be matched according to their score level (i.e. someone with a score of 680 can match someone with a score of 800).