Types (Niche)

There's no doubt Tinder is the biggest dating app in the game, but even it is not immune to criticism.

More often than not, that criticism takes the form of concerns that the Tinder profile is too minimal, meaning users swipe with their eyes instead of their hearts.

As criticisms go, it's not the most unfounded. Far from it. Serious daters tend to gravitate to services with more thorough profiles, like Match or eHarmony, or even OkCupid, while Tinder gets relegated to the “hookup app” category.

With a couple of new updates, the tide may turn for Tinder. The first is Instagram integration, which allows users to scroll through the Instagram profiles of potential matches within the Tinder app. A high percentage of Tinder users already include their Instagram handles in their profile, so it's a logical move for the app.

With Instagram integration inside Tinder, users can click into each other's Instagram profiles to see the most recent 34 pictures posted. To see more extensive details like comments and likes, they can click directly into a profile. Users who have private Instagram accounts are presented with an option to grant Tinder access without setting the whole profile to public.

At first glance, it's still all about image – Instagram is the king of visual social media, after all. But dig a little deeper and Instagram also offers plenty of details about a person's life, including interests, activities, and personality insights. An Instagram account can provide useful context for a sparse Tinder profile that makes the person behind it more three dimensional.

A second update adds common connection info, allowing you to see if you share mutual friends with a match. "When you're able to assess the degrees of separation between you and an individual,” Tinder cofounder and President Sean Rad told Mashable, “it adds a lot of value in the form of context, trust and everything."

The final update adds an Interests section to the profile, available to both free and paid subscribers. Users can opt to pull their interests directly from Facebook, creating a more well-rounded, accurate Tinder profile.

“This is the first of many steps to take the recommendations engine to the next level and help you assess the person you’re matching with and start those conversations,” Rad told TechCrunch. “If we can provide our users with more relevant information for each connection, we can take them halfway there in terms of getting a conversation going.”

Are you tired of reading endless online dating profiles or answering questions about what kind of food you like to eat? How about messaging potential dates back and forth, hoping that maybe eventually you’ll get to meet in person?

Or perhaps you’re tired of swiping left and right on Tinder, messaging your matches back and forth, only to have them disappear before you’ve even met - such a waste of time!

Okay, maybe using Tinder is not the time drag that other online dating sites can be – like Match.com, eHarmony, or even OkCupid - where you peruse long profiles and can message endlessly without ever getting to the date. HowAboutWe thinks they can appeal to the embattled Tinder user by getting to the actual date much faster. This week, they announced a new “on-demand” feature called TONIGHT for the re-launch of their dating app.

With TONIGHT, users can choose to look for a date – to be specific, for tonight – pick a time, and HowAboutWe will search through potential matches for people who’ve also opted in for a date tonight. In about five minutes, according to the company, the service will send a push notification asking users to look at potential dates and double-tap on the ones that they’d like to go out with. Once everyone has made their selections, How About We matches them in couples (based on profile factors), and sends both users into a text conversation. Then they can accept the date.

While this might seem a little more complicated than choosing someone on Tinder, How About We is more focused on the date itself. When you sign up for HowAboutWe, the app asks you to share what you would like to do on a first date, as well as the usual info (age, location, orientation, etc). You can play it safe and choose “Get a coffee,” or opt for a more creative choice (i.e. “Get your Instagram on at a local antiques shop.”) Your profile isn’t the first thing everyone sees about you, it’s your date idea. HowAboutWe is experience-driven, although profile photos still figure prominently into the scenario.

HowAboutWe has always focused on the real-life meet-up more than the online back-and-forth, so this is a natural next step. The service’s re-launch also includes a “Pool,” or a swipe-based feed for matches similar to Tinder, and “Connections,” a highly targeted daily set of potential matches.

Depending on the length of subscription you choose, membership ranges from $10 to $20 per month. Messaging back and forth between mutual matches are free, but if you’re looking to score outside a match, you need to pay the upgrade. 

Recently, Gap came under fire from Tinder executives by posting fake profiles advertising their wares on the dating app, hoping people would swipe right to participate in a new campaign. The problem was that Gap didn’t get Tinder’s permission, so Tinder ordered Gap to take them down.

But Tinder isn't cracking down on fake profiles or spam-like ads for all companies looking to promote (though it did hire an agency who is cracking down on their spamming issue). Tinder only allows companies who are actually paying to post their fake “profiles” - and these companies are reaching their target audience of young consumers in a really big way.

Native advertising on Tinder works like this: the company creates a "profile" targeted to its audience, and uploads to Tinder. From there, users will come across the profile and swipe left or right, depending on if they like what they see. Companies that have done this recently include Starbucks and Dominos Pizza.

But now, it's not only companies looking to advertise - musicians are taking advantage of Tinder’s user base, using the service to promote new videos and album releases. Because musicians are constantly looking for new ways to reach their audiences and gather new fans, they have become more creative in their online promotions. Tinder is the latest tool, and recently did a campaign with singer Jason DeRulo.

Forbes reported that Jason Derulo became the first musician to use the Tinder promotional strategy to launch a new single. When users swiped right, they were given in link to a YouTube page where they could watch the brand new video for his new song, which was also getting a huge push via radio. The campaign was a success: over 1.1 million people swiped right (meaning they liked him) – in three days. The song became a top 40 hit, with 14% clicking through to purchase his song on iTunes.

Of course, it helped that the song was speaking to his target market – daters who are looking for a late-night hook-up, a la Tinder. In the video, DeRulo is shown fantasizing about a woman he had sex with, jumping out of bed in the middle of the night to go to her apartment, where she is of course fantasizing about him, too.

The success of the campaign will surely capture the attention of other musicians and companies who want to appeal to their target audience: young singles. These companies are also finding that effective advertising means meeting these people on their own turf – social media, rather than traditional stuffy ad campaigns. People are much more mobile, and looking at their phones more than looking up at a billboard.

One thing’s for sure, Tinder doesn’t have to worry about meeting revenue goals through subscriptions to its premium (and pricey) service. Companies will likely be more than willing to offer money for campaigns that have this type of success rate.

For more on this popular dating app you can read our review of Tinder.

Last month, Tinder rolled out its new and highly anticipated premium service Tinder Plus, which had been teased in the press with few details for months. But rather than praising its new features, Tinder has been criticized for discrimination. The company charges $9.99 per month for users in their twenties, but once you hit the magical age of 30, the price jumps to $19.99.

Compare this to the price daters pay for a service like eHarmony ($18.95 per month with a 12-month commitment as of this posting), which touts its match-making capabilities, and Tinder seems like a rip-off. After all, the monthly fee for eHarmony includes a lot of filters to help find a more "quality" match - an extensive questionnaire, a detailed profile, and a “communications process” - all aimed at helping you find a lasting relationship. While people do find good matches on Tinder, it's a lot more hit-or-miss.

Still, people seem to prefer the game-like swiping of Tinder. And according to experts, they will probably pay for it – even if they are 30 or older.

A recent article in The Washington Post claimed that there is a war among dating services like Tinder and eHarmony, who are categorizing daters and their behaviors according to their ages. Tinder assumes that younger daters are their target market (after all, the service began with heavy promoton on college campuses before it was unleashed on the greater population). eHarmony however, is going after the more “seasoned” dater, who has had enough with all the hook-ups and wants a real relationship.

The online dating industry is said to be worth about $2.2 billion, with one in ten adults averaging more than an hour a day on a dating site or app. This rise in popularity isn’t a coincidence – it’s gone hand-in-hand with the amount of time we spend on our phones – a near-constant accessory. Tinder appeared at the right time and made online dating seem like a game, and more importantly, removed its stigma.

The popularity of Tinder however has had a cost among daters. There is an assumption that the app is only for hooking up, and that people using dating apps aren’t serious daters. At least, this perception has been what traditional dating sites like eHarmony have been pushing. It founder Neil Clarke Warren told The Washington Post: “They put all their money on one variable: looks. That fills me with quite a few little chills… I have presided over the funerals of more marriages than any psychologist, and it is miserable.”

eHarmony isn't the only one speaking about Tinder's flaws. “There are limits to the percentage of single people who will become active Tinder users and repeating ‘casual daters,'” Morgan Stanley analysts told their clients in February. “And in our view, Tinder is reaching those limits.”

So what does this mean? Is Tinder trying to embrace their young daters as the future of dating, or does eHarmony recognize they will never have a service that’s so addictive and easy to use?

Both services offer very different ways of meeting people, and attract different types of users. But it will be interesting to see who will pay for them going forward.

Female Tinder users have dealt with a lot of inappropriate messages from men when dating through the app – it’s one of the issues challenging dating apps today. Men are particularly aggressive in their flirting, crossing boundaries with their sexual suggestions and then wondering why they don’t hear back.

A California-based computer engineer, who incidentally met his girlfriend on Tinder, had heard a lot of his female friends complaining about the guys messaging them over the dating app. In an interview with website The Verge, he disclosed that he had been able to hack Tinder, matching straight guys with other straight guys to see how their typically aggressive flirting progresses.

"The original idea was to throw that back into the face of the people doing it to see how they would react," the hacker said.

His program identifies two men who swipe right on one of his bait profiles (one using a prominent vlogger’s image, the second one of a friend who had let him use her photos). Then they are matched to each other (since they already have the woman they were originally attracted to in common). The suitors’ messages, according to The Verge, were all “unabashedly flirtatious” and relayed back and forth to each other through the dummy profile. Sometimes, it took several messages before the duped men started to figure out something was off.

The creator of the hack apparently stepped in before things got to heated and the matches decided to meet in person. Most of them seemed very confused after exchanging a few flirtatious emails, only to discover later that they weren’t flirting with women, but other men. The hacker witnessed about 40 conversations in the first twelve hours.

It has been reported that Tinder is vulnerable to hacks. There have been a few instances of people tweaking the app to “mass-like” several women at the same time, improving their odds of getting a match exponentially.

The Tinder hacker looked into Tinder’s API and discovered it had few safeguards. “Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system,” he said. “As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person.”  

When asked how he feels about hacking into Tinder’s system, he has mixed feelings. "They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things," he says of the users. "When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all — maybe it’s deserved."

Before flirting with someone you just met over Tinder, you might want to ask a few basic questions first.

You may know Coffee Meets Bagel as the company that turned down the largest offer in Shark Tank history.

For those of you keeping score, that would be a mind-blowing $30 million from Mark Cuban.

Entrepreneurs and sisters Arum, Dawoon, and Soo Kang came to the tank seeking $500,000 for 5 percent of Coffee Meets Bagel, a dating service that uses Facebook profile info to make matches between friends of friends. Without flinching, they rejected Cuban's $30 million offer on the grounds that they saw CMB growing as big as Match, a billion-dollar business.

Anyone else wiping sweat off their foreheads just thinking about that?

CMB went on to close a $7.8 million series A financing round earlier this year, and has now started its international expansion with Hong Kong. The sisters chose Hong Kong for their international launch due to “the highly social nature of life in this city,” they told Forbes, “coupled with the fact that people are often time poor thanks to long work hours.”

Dawoon Kang lived in HK for three years while working at J.P. Morgan, so she's well-versed in the city's dating scene. “Hong Kong is a very young, vibrant city full of ambitious singles in their 20s and 30s who are eager to meet new people but have very little time for it,” she explains. Coffee Meets Bagel was designed for exactly that market of busy young professionals, making Hong Kong an ideal choice for expansion.

Dawoon says the service has achieved consistent 20 percent week on week growth since launch, primarily driven by Facebook. Hong Kong members have a substantial number of Facebook friends – nearly 8 times the worldwide standards – resulting in each Hong Kong Coffee Meets Bagel member having around 48 Facebook friends who also use the app. CMB is primed for success in its new home.

The Kang sisters have noticed differences in the way Hong Kong members and US members use the app. Dawoon says: “On average, 72 percent of Hong Kong members log in every day to check their Bagel. Of these, 77 percent are connecting on an iPhone. They log in 4.3 times a day (33 percent higher than US members) and spend a total of 7.7 minutes a day (117 percent higher than US members).”

On the other hand, the gender ratio is similar in HK, NYC, and Washington DC (62 percent of members in Hong Kong are female). Academic achievements are also similar, with 98 percent of membership in both HK and the US boasting bachelors degrees.

From here, the Kangs plan to continue their international expansion, perhaps one day to their birth country of South Korea.