Bumble

Dating app Bumble’s share value dropped 30 percent after the company slashed its annual growth revenue forecast in its second quarter earnings report.

According to Reuters, Bumble also fell below estimates for its second quarter revenue. The dating app company reported revenue of 268.6 million, below analyst expectations of $273 million.

This report worried investors who compared Bumble’s second quarter to rival Match Group’s, which reported relatively better revenue numbers driven by robust growth at Hinge and more stability at Tinder.

Dating app giant Match Group announced its plan to cut six percent of its workforce after numbers for the company’s second quarter fell short of expectations, according to BBC.

Match Group owns the popular dating app Tinder (which has seen a significant decline in downloads), along with Hinge, Plenty of Fish and OkCupid, among others. The company’s second quarter earnings report showed an 8 percent decline among the number of paying Tinder users according to multiple reports. Hinge still remains a bright spot with significant growth.

According to BBC, Match Group said job cuts would largely come from shutting down its live-streaming app Hakuna and removing live-streaming features from some of its dating apps. (Despite the popularity of livestreaming dating apps in China, it hasn’t really taken off in the rest of the world.)

Singles are gravitating towards more targeted dating apps and moving away from the one-size-fits-all platforms like Tinder and Bumble.

According to an article in The Financial Times, specialty apps like Grindr (which serves gay and bisexual men) and Feeld (which serves those looking for non-traditional relationships), are seeing downloads and new users increase. Investors are noticing and are looking to these apps rather than the one-size-fits-all dating apps dominating the market.

Tinder and Bumble have seen a decline in downloads and paying users, which has rattled investors. According to the FT, Match Group which owns Tinder has shed about a fifth of its market value since the beginning of 2023, compared to Grindr whose shares have more than doubled in the same time period.

Tinder, Bumble and Hinge have seen surges in downloads and user activity around the Athlete’s Village in Paris as the 2024 Summer Olympics get underway.

According to The Daily Mail, these dating apps have reported thousands of new downloads. Athletes have gravitated to dating apps in the past to hook up during the Olympics, with the exception of an intimacy ban in 2020 due to Covid concerns.

Paris officials have  a different agenda from athletes, providing single beds made of cardboard so that they would be discouraged from having so much sex during the competitions. This has created a lot of buzz on TikTok, with athletes testing out the sturdiness of the beds by jumping on them. (They don’t break or fall apart.)

A vast majority of 79 percent of Gen Z singles said they have experienced dating app burnout, according to a new study by Forbes Health.

The study found that in the last six months, 49 percent of those who reported burnout were using Tinder, followed by Plenty of Fish at 38 percent and Bumble at 29 percent. Raya users had the least amount of burnout reported, at only 3 percent.

“People who experience burnout with dating apps are exhausted from constantly meeting new people, failing opportunities and lies,” Dr. Rufus Spann, a sex therapist and Forbes Health Advisory Board member, said in an article about the study. “Over time, the unfortunate misgivings of being on a dating app can cause someone to lose hope in the dating process and finding the right person.”

Bumble has announced a new reporting feature for users to alert the app if they suspect a profile of displaying AI-generated photos and videos.

“Fake Profile” allows users to flag and report accounts that they think are AI-generated and being used to deceive other app users. According to Tech Crunch, people using AI to beef up their profiles is creating a new problem on dating apps (aside from the typical bots, spam accounts, and safety issues that have been around for a while) – and that is whether or not to believe that the person in the profile they are seeing is actually that person, or an AI-enhanced version of them.

For example, someone could generate a photo of themselves to make them look more like Taylor Swift, or alter their bodies to show muscles they don’t have in real life, hoping to attract more matches through deception. In other words, they are gaming the system with AI.