United States

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.

A new strategy that’s gaining steam among organizers is using dating apps to reach out to potential voters ahead of crucial U.S. elections.

According to The Guardian, encouraging young voters on dating apps to go to the polls on April 4th was an important strategy in the race in Wisconsin for a State Supreme Court seat, where youth votes ensured a victory for a Democrat-backed justice in the face of increasing rollbacks of rights regarding abortion and education.

In a report from Vanderbilt University in 2020, researchers found that 31 percent of millennial respondents were using online dating services even more than before the pandemic, and an even larger percentage of Gen Z singles were turning to dating apps to meet people. At the same time, they are increasingly resistant to phone calls and texts from organizers and campaign staff, especially as they get bombarded around election time. Dating apps are a way to casually engage their commitment.

In a poll taken by GQ Magazine called "The Modern Lovers Survey", researchers found that 70 percent of men surveyed have lied on dating apps to make themselves appear more attractive to potential matches.

According to the study, respondents admitted to misrepresenting themselves when it came to career, age, height, or appearance, or some combination of those, to get more matches. The study found that 36 percent of respondents had misrepresented themselves in their photos, and 35 percent had lied about their age. The study also found that 28 percent had lied about their careers and 27 percent about their height.

In fact, GQ also found that as many as 21 percent of the men they surveyed were lying about their marital status. These respondents admitted that they were already in monogamous relationships and still using dating apps. And 29 percent of the men surveyed admitted they had kept a former love interest’s nude photos after a breakup, compared with only 8 percent of women who said they did the same.

Single men are increasingly turning to Open AI’s ChatGPT and other AI chat bots to write their dating profiles and send messages to matches on dating app Tinder.

According to Vice, Facebook’s leaked AI tool LLaMA was being tested by dating app users against the popular ChatGPT, both of which can be used to help craft profiles and message matches. And recently, Open AI released ChatGPT4, the newer and more comprehensive version of ChatGPT which took the world by storm.

So far, LLaMA has no guardrails in place so users can experiment as they see fit. ChatGPT 4 is already being used to create text for Tinder profiles and give tips to users for gaining more matches.

Facebook originally made the AI available to researchers and approved other parties, but the tool appeared in 4Chan after a user leaked it on the forum, according to Vice.

Tinder has announced two significant new features it is rolling out, including highlighting relationship types (including non-monogamy) and allowing members to display their pronouns on their profiles.

With the new update, Tinder users will be able to choose from a variety of terms to describe their relationship type, and it will display prominently on their profile just under their name and age. They can choose from descriptions like “monogamy,” “ethical non-monogamy,” “open relationship” or “open to exploring,” for example.

According to the press release, Tinder is making this shift to put relationship types more front and center, since it found that 41 percent of Gen Z users are open to non-traditional and non-monogamous relationships. This feature complements the Relationship Goals feature the company rolled out last year, which gave users the ability to specify if they are searching for “Long-term,” “short term” or long-term, open to short-term” among other types, like “just figuring out my dating goals.”

India is now among the fastest-growing dating app markets worldwide, thanks to a growing young population of singles and their changing attitudes towards dating.

In terms of year-over-year growth, India emerged as the fifth largest market in dating app spending in 2022, according to a new study by data.ai Intelligence. Researchers found that Indian users spent $31 million more in 2022 than they did in 2021 despite economic factors like inflation that affect consumer spending.

Match Group, Bumble, and other major dating app companies have made a big investment in India, hoping to capitalize on this attractive market which now brings in millions of dollars in revenue each year to dating app companies.