Finances

Dating app Tinder introduced its new interactive series Swipe Night in early October, hoping to attract young users with compelling content. As it turns out, it may also help lagging user engagement, and give users a reason to stay on the app.

Tinder is parent company Match Group’s star app, and the company has seen incredible growth in both users and revenue. Tinder’s active daily users grew 3.1 percent year-over-year for Android users, from 1.114 million to 1.149 million according to data from SimilarWeb, and installs grew 1 percent.

Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd has secured a 4 million pound dividend payout from parent company Magic Lab, who saw record earnings thanks to its star dating app.

According to The Telegraph, the Bumble windfall is the result of a dividend payout of 20 million pounds from its parent company, and Herd owns about 20% of Bumble. Magic Lab saw earnings skyrocket at the end of 2018 to about 270 million pounds, up 51 percent from the year before. This quarter, the company reported a loss of about 4.8 million pounds.

Bumble’s revenue made up about 48 percent of Magic Lab’s overall business.

How Couples have met from 1940 to 2017

Image: Spark Networks

Despite completing a $255 million acquisition of Zoosk in July, and becoming the second-largest online dating company in North America by revenue, Spark Networks has struggled this year. Shares of Spark have lost more than a third of their value thus far in 2019 and over 50 percent since the deal to acquire Zoosk closed on July 1. To address its poor stock market performance, Spark Networks has released an open letter to its shareholders.

The letter expresses disappointment at the company’s falling stock price and suggests that the losses were primarily due to “concentrated share sales by a minority of our shareholder base,” not the result of under-performance. Spark Networks speculates that the shareholders in question were primarily early stage investors in Zoosk and Affinitas who were looking for liquidity after 10 years.

Spark Networks explains in part their optimism, by pointing to recent studies that shows that the online dating industry continues to grow in leaps and bounds. In 2010 online dating was responsible for 20% of how couples met. By 2013 it had past "met through friends", and by 2017, had reached 39% with no signs of slowing down.

Tinder's New Series is called Swipe Night

Tinder will be releasing an original six-episode video series over its app, according to an exclusive report in Variety Magazine.

The new series will be a “choose your own adventure” story available to users when they log into the app. It’s interactive content, so users are able to swipe left and right to continue to different versions of the story. The basic premise involves the apocalypse, and asks the question: “Who would you spend your last night alive with?”

China’s gay dating app Blued is making its next move – an IPO in the U.S. market.

According to Bloomberg, the largest app for the LGBTQ community in China is planning to raise about $200 million through the IPO. The sale will likely take place next year, and the company could be valued as high as 1 billion US dollars.

Blued was founded by a former policeman named Geng Le in 2012, and now has more than 40 million users and garnered more than $130 million in venture capital as of March of this year, according to Bloomberg. The app offers live streaming and gaming in addition to online dating, and also connects men who want to become parents with surrogates overseas. These types of services are also part of Blued’s strategy to generate additional revenue outside of the traditional dating app.

America's second largest dating company, Spark Networks SE, has reported its first half 2019 financial results. The company's growing portfolio of premium and freemium dating apps includes EliteSingles, Jdate, Christian Mingle, eDarling, JSwipe, Silversingles and, following an acquisition earlier this year, Zoosk.

For the first half of 2019, Spark Networks reported revenue of €49.2 million, a decrease of 7.1% from €53.0 million in the first half of 2018, and a decrease of 4.5% from €51.5 million in the second half of 2018. The company attributes the decline in revenue to a 9% drop in Average Paying Subscribers year-on-year.

Net Loss was €4.9 million in the first half of 2019. This is an increase of €3.8 million compared to €1.1 million in the first half of 2018, and an increase of €2.9 million compared to €2.0 million in the second half of 2018. Spark Networks attributes the year over year increase in Net Loss to the higher professional fees associated with its $255 million acquisition of Zoosk.