Dating Services

Grindr has issued a return-to-the-office policy for all workers, forcing them to relocate to one of the company’s three main offices by October 3rd or lose their jobs. Employees say this is a retaliatory move, since it comes two weeks after they announced their plan to form a union.

According to Vice, who obtained the certification form that was sent to workers, the policy states that employees must move to within 50 miles of their newly designated office or they will lose their jobs.

Workers were given the choice to move to either Chicago (for the engineering team), and Los Angeles or San Francisco (for the product and design teams), and if they were not willing to relocate, their jobs would end August 31st. Workers were offered six months’ severance pay and healthcare benefits if they lost their jobs, according to the memo issued by the company.

Shares of Bumble fell 4 percent in early August after the company shared its relatively “lackluster” third-quarter revenue forecast, coupled with a sharper rise in its operating expenses, according to Reuters.

This rise in spending concerned investors, especially after Tinder’s parent company Match Group recently predicted that its third quarter revenue would be higher than analyst expectations, despite its own spend on development and marketing. The company has struggled lately with Tinder, and has been implementing new features to increase in-app revenue and expand its userbase. The company also recently announced it will be launching a high-end service for users who are willing to pay as much as $500 per month.

Bumble meanwhile shared that its operating expenses had jumped 7 percent in the second quarter with additional spend on product development and marketing.

Dating app Bumble is releasing new features for its free and premium services, aimed at fostering a kinder, more curated dating experience, according to the company’s press release.

Mashable noted that one of the new features is Review Before You Send, and will be part of its Compliments feature. While Compliments is intended to encourage positive interactions over the app, sometimes the message isn’t received well, no matter the intention of the sender. In fact, as Bumble tested Review Before You Send, they found that 46 percent of people chose to edit their Compliment after they received the prompt, because it encouraged them to reread their message and think twice about sending it.

Another new feature the app is launching allows users to add their interests to the top of their profile (modeled after the app’s hit “Top Artists” feature, where a favorite band or singer is placed front and center in a user’s profile).

Match Group announced in its quarterly earnings call that its star app Tinder will be launching a “high-end” subscription tier this fall. In addition, Tinder will debut a product refresh to cater to the Gen Z dating market.

The company has been testing price points in different markets, including a $500 subscription that was called Tinder Vault, according to CPO Mark Van Ryswyk. In an interview with Fast Company earlier this year, he noted that there’s a market for daters who are willing to pay for good matches, as evidenced by the success of its exclusive dating app The League.

However, the price point was arguably high for an app that will not include human matchmakers, but instead will continue to rely on technology to serve up better matches.

Parents in China are taking matters into their own hands with their single adult children and using dating apps to help them find someone to marry.

Parent-facing dating apps are taking off in China, according to Rest of World, which reports on tech trends globally. Many parents are using online matchmaking platforms like Perfect In-Laws, Family-Building Matchmaking, and Parents Matchmaking to set up dates for their grown and unmarried children.

On platforms like these, the parents set up profiles for their children, sometimes without their knowledge or consent, according to Rest of World. When the match is made, it’s the parents who meet and get to know each other first, similar to matchmaking apps used in India.

Dating app Tinder is testing an AI feature that will select the best profile photos for users, according to reports from parent company Match Group’s latest earnings call.

Tech Crunch noted that the AI feature will examine a Tinder member’s photo album and select five that “best represents them for their dating profile.” According to Match Group CEO Bernard Kim, choosing pictures is a stressful process for daters, and typically they have doubts about which ones they pick, what he labeled as a “pain point” on the earnings call.

“Sometimes, people are really excited to jump into the Tinder experience,” Kim said. He continued: “then in that exact moment where you upload five pictures, people get generally nervous or uncomfortable, like, ‘What is the right picture that I’ve taken over the last year to make my dating profile more me?’”