Social Networks

Metaverse dating apps have become popular among singles in China, and now one of the most popular - Soul - intends to go public in the Hong Kong market. It is backed by tech giant Tencent, with Bank of America Merrill Lynch and CICC serving as co-sponsors.

Soul lets users create and use avatars (often resembling Japanese anime) to interact over the app, and rivals TikTok for time spent engaging on the app – an average of about 40 minutes per user, according to South China Morning Post. It currently has over 32 million users.

Downloads and engagement have grown in part due to recurring lockdowns across the country from Covid-19 outbreaks. Between 2019 and 2021, Soul’s monthly active users went from 11.5 million to 31.6 million, according to parent company Soulgate.

The Lox Club has turned to TikTok for attracting new users and is seeing record new downloads of its app as a result. 

The dating app launched last year to big fanfare and a profile in The New York Times, but the real test came with keeping users engaged so they didn’t return to Tinder and other popular dating apps. Since launching its new TikTok marketing strategy, the company has seen 13,000 conversions (clicks turned to downloads of the app) in January and February, according to AdWeek. This is also five times the number of conversions in November and December of last year. 

There’s a crop of new dating apps looking for novel ways to attract Gen Z users who want more than a swiping experience, which means thinking outside traditional advertising options, like Facebook ads which don’t necessarily convert browsers to users. Younger daters also gravitate to creative content and TikTok in larger numbers, opting to be entertained, which has driven some engaging new features in the dating app industry. For example, Tinder launched an “Explore” section, which includes Festival Mode to help users meet up with each other at music festivals and an interactive series called “Swipe Night,” among other features.

Bumble is focusing beyond its popular dating app and adding a new social networking feature to its BFF platform.

Bumble BFF uses the same swipe-based matching found on the dating app, but will expand options for users to include networking groups where they can connect and chat with each other based on topics of interest, according to Tech Crunch. Bumble had hinted that it was testing this new feature and it was “doing well,” according to its first quarter earnings call.

While Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd didn’t offer many details about the new feature on the call, she did describe it was a way to help “people to discover and get to know each other around shared joys and common struggles.” She also noted that over 40 percent of “active BFF users” were checking out the new feature and the various networking groups, sharing that its one-month retention was more than 75 percent, according to Tech Crunch.

Online dating might be heading towards a sea change as VC firms invested about $31 million in 43 rounds of funding towards new dating apps in 2021. 

According to website Crunchbase which studies technology trends, the majority of companies raised angel, pre-seed and seed rounds, which means venture capitalist firms were interested in early-stage developments. (There were only three who received Series-A funding.)

Crunchbase also noted that every ten years there seems to be a shift in consumer preferences when it comes to dating app technology, and it usually follows the larger social app trends. Ten years ago, Instagram was the hot new app and dating apps like Tinder gamified their platforms to put photos front and center, where users could just look and swipe. 

China-based dating app Yumi has started beta testing experiences in its new metaverse, called Meta Town, hoping to attract young Gen Z daters who are interested in immersive experiences.

Users can create avatars based on their photos, explore the metaverse to find other virtual daters, and have real-time audio conversations with “artificial intelligence-powered translation,” according to the South China Morning Post, making it easier for daters who don’t speak the same language to connect.

The metaverse is a platform where people can interact via avatars in real time and in different virtual spaces, often with the ability to exchange virtual goods and services. 

Less than a year after its debut, Meta is shutting down its virtual speed dating service Sparked as it moves forward with the Audio Dates feature for Facebook Dating.

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook (name change happened in Oct of 2021), confirmed that Sparked would be shut down on January 20th, according to Tech Crunch. Sparked was developed by Meta’s in-house testing group the NPE Team in the hopes it would drive people to join the Facebook Dating service. 

Sparked sent an email to its users which read:

"We started building Sparked in late 2020 to help people find love through an experience rooted in kindness. Since then, thanks to regular input and feedback from you, we improved where we could, learned a ton, and made connections between people…Like many good ideas, some take off and others, like Sparked, must come to an end."