Industry

Tinder CEO Jim Lanzone

Popular dating app Tinder announced that Jim Lanzone, the former head of CBS Interactive, has been named the company’s new CEO.

Lanzone worked at CBS for nine years, including as president and CEO of CBS Interactive. He left CBS last year to join venture-capital firm Benchmark Capital, according to Variety. He replaces Elie Seidman, who headed up OkCupid before taking over Tinder in early 2018.

Bumble's Whitney Wolfe Herd

Female-forward dating app Bumble announced a major rebrand for the company as it also celebrated its milestone of reaching 100 million users worldwide. Parent company Magic Labs, which also owns popular dating app Badoo as well as Lumen and Chappy, will now be called Bumble under the direction of CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd.

Together, the Bumble and Badoo apps have a total of 600 million users around the world. Bumble’s app hit its milestone number in July and will look to Badoo for help in expanding its global reach. 

Wolfe Herd took over a year ago as CEO of Magic Labs when former CEO Andre Andreev left in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct at Badoo, the app company he founded, which employees said contributed to a hostile work environment. Herd’s vision is to be more diverse and inclusive when building dating apps and her companies, and to put social justice and gender equality front and center. Wolfe Herd oversees over 750 employees in Austin, London, and Moscow.

The app industry saw revenue spike to $50.1 billion for the first two quarters of 2020, in part due to people isolating at home to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Dating app Tinder topped the list of non-game app revenue earners.

This marks a 23.4% increase from the first half of 2019 according to Tech Crunch, compared with a 20% increase for the same time period between 2018 and 2019. The data seems to also point to a growing new user base. First time app installs were up 26.1% in the first half of 2020 compared to the same time period in 2019, and reached a total of 71.5 billion downloads.

Topping the non-game app list was dating app Tinder, followed by YouTube, and popular social apps TikTok and Tencent. Netflix was the fifth-highest earner.

New app Joystick Dating, catering specifically to single gamers, launched in June. But ongoing reports of rampant misogyny in gamer culture might impact the number of women interested in signing up.

Niche dating apps aren’t new, but appealing to gamers looking for love shows promise because of the number of people around the world who not only play video games but are avid fans of online gaming and esports. According to the latest stats from The Gamer, there are over 164 million adult gamers in the U.S. alone, which means about 64% of Americans play video games. That’s a huge potential market, considering more than half of U.S. adults are single.

Tinder, while not a niche dating app, has sponsored esports events and organizations, seeing the opportunity to appeal to gamers that Joystick’s creator David Minn sees.

Dating apps like Grindr, Hinge and OkCupid have been weighing whether or not to keep an ethnicity filter on their apps in the wake of protests against police violence in the U.S. and around the world. 

According to Forbes, Grindr announced that it would be dropping the filter as an option from its app in its next update. The company posted a statement on Twitter, adding: “We will not be silent. Black Lives Mater.” But this decision created a backlash among many who saw this move as too little, too late. @guillotineshout responded: “In solidarity we are removing our racism button” is the most tech company thing I could imagine.”

Grindr had received criticism before for the ethnicity filter, but other dating apps like OkCupid and Hinge who also have them, have chosen to keep theirs.

Beijing-based social app Momo is the latest company to see its revenue fall for the first quarter of 2020 due to the economic repercussions of a global pandemic. Interestingly, while other social networks and dating apps have seen an increase in users over the same period, Momo reported a decline there, too.

According to PanDaily, Momo’s net revenues decreased by 3.5% year over year to $3.59 billion Chinese yuan. The bulk of the revenue  - 64.9% - came from live-streaming services on Momo and its popular dating app Tantan. Tantan on the other hand reported an increase in revenue in the first quarter of 29.3 percent from Q1 of 2019. Tantan contributed 10 percent of Momo’s overall revenue for Q1 of 2020.