Tinder

IAC, the company who is the majority stakeholder in popular dating app Tinder, no longer wants Sean Rad in the driver’s seat. As of late March, the company has named the new CEO who will be taking his place: Christopher Payne.

Payne previously worked for eBay as a senior vice president in the company’s marketplaces division, where he was responsible for the North American market. He also founded Positronic, a search technology company, which eBay acquired in 2008. Before that, he worked for 13 years at Microsoft, including heading its search unit, which was then called Windows Search Live.

“Christopher brings invaluable experience running consumer technology businesses that operate at massive scale,” Mr. Rad said in a statement.

But the change might not be completely embraced by Rad, who was embroiled in a very public sexual harassment lawsuit brought about by former employee Whitney Wolfe. They settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, and she has now launched a new dating app of her own that directly competes with Tinder. Rad will remain President of Tinder and retains a seat on the company’s board. According to reports, he will still be in charge of product and marketing, but Payne will take over everything else.

The spotlight that has been on Rad the past few years has not been flattering, and the most recent scrutiny has come as a result of the new premium service Tinder Plus, which is costing as much as $19.99 US per month for two additional features. Users have asked to be able to use Tinder in multiple cities, as well as to “go back” and swipe right on matches they’d previously turned down. The new service offers these features for a price – but if you want to just keep the basic free service, the company has also put limits on the amount of swiping you can do in a 24-hour period. This caused controversy when it launched in the UK, and the app’s rating in the iTunes store went down to one and a half stars as a result.

Another controversial decision was pricing for the new service, which is based on age. For users under 30, Tinder Plus costs $9.99 per month, but for those 30 and older, it goes up to $19.99, and even more in European countries. Rad says a lot of research went into the pricing, and he stands by what he says customers are willing to pay.

Tinder also plans to launch an ad product, but has not disclosed how this will affect the service or user’s experience. Until now, advertising revenue has come from product placement, but the app has a lot of valuable user information for marketing departments to tap into.

IAC hopes that Payne can refocus Tinder’s business goals and help it grow into a more profitable as well as popular company.

Read our review of Tinder to find out more about this popular dating app.

Are you excited about the new Tinder Plus service that has rolled out in the U.S.? Don't get too carried away – turns out, if you’re 30 or older, you’ll have to pay more than your younger single counterparts.

Tinder is charging users of its premium service only $9.99 if they are under 30, but those 30 and older have to pay $19.99 per month for the same service. In the U.K., the pay gap is even larger.

Tinder has been testing pricing and features of Tinder Plus in various markets prior to its U.S. roll out, which is expected to happen in late March. Reports have been mixed – while Tinder claims that its users have responded favorably to the premium service and its features (as well as pricing), the app’s ratings have declined in the U.K. app store thanks to several harsh reviews.

The success of the new service is important to Tinder, who has yet to capitalize on the sheer number of users of the free service. The company has struggled to come up with viable revenue streams that don’t take away from the user experience (they have tried to avoid in-app advertising), in order to maintain their growing user base. Offering a tiered premium service like Tinder Plus seems the best answer, adding some popular features based on users’ requests - such as the ability to go back and see rejected profiles, or to meet matches in different cities.

But along with these improvements, there are reports that Tinder is placing limits on the number of swipes any user can do per day for the free service (which sparked outrage in the U.K. app stores), prompting users to buy the premium service if they want to continue swiping.

And the latest controversy appears to be age discrimination. In a statement to defend its unusual pricing technique, Tinder said this to NPR: "Over the past few months, we've tested Tinder Plus extensively in several countries…Lots of products offer differentiated price tiers by age, like Spotify does for students, for example. Tinder is no different; during our testing we've learned, not surprisingly, that younger users are just as excited about Tinder Plus but are more budget constrained and need a lower price to pull the trigger." 

Not everyone is buying Tinder’s explanation. As website Engadget pointed out, this “sleazy” move by Tinder will likely cause more people to lie about their ages on Facebook.

The real test will has come now since Tinder Plus made its U.S. debut this month. Perhaps this is the move that will make room for other competitors in the crowded dating app market.

There’s been an uproar lately with the launch of dating app Tinder’s new premium service, Tinder Plus. The problem? The company is charging users in their twenties $9.99 in the U.S., compared to those 30 and older, who will have to pay $19.99 (and even more in the U.K.).

This has notably sparked some outrage from product reviewers and bloggers, who note the enduring problem of age discrimination when it comes to online dating – especially towards women. According to studies released by sites like OkCupid, young women are more sought-after by men, no matter how old the guy is. According to dating site Plenty of Fish, the ideal age of a single woman is 25 for most of their male daters. And according to OkCupid, that number skews even younger – with the ideal age being 21 or 22, even if the men wanting to date them are in their forties. Once female online daters hit the magic age of 30, they are blocked out from opportunities – some reports pointing to as much as an 80% decrease in messages and matches - as the majority of men prefer to meet women in their twenties.

This isn’t new. And it does explain why many people post old photos and lie about their ages (much to the frustration of the online daters who meet them). So what will these daters 30 and above do with Tinder – will they opt in and pay for Tinder Plus, or will we see more of a dating revolt?

According to Tinder, the company’s move to differentiate pricing based on age really comes down to economics. The company has tested pricing, and discovered that older singles are willing to pay more because they have more income. (The company likens it to services like Spotify which offer discounted rates to “students.”)

The problem with this “economic” view, as some reviewers have pointed out, is that older online daters already have a shrunken dating pool to choose from. (And online dating is a bit different than streaming music – with streaming, you have access to everything offered in exchange for your payment; with online dating, you only have access to those who haven’t filtered you out of their searches, which means fewer options for more money.)

As the Washington Post says: “The [age] problem is so urgent, and so severe, that several sites have spoken out against ageism in online dating in recent years. In 2010, OkCupid’s Christian Rudder wrote an entire blog post dedicated to convincing men that the 30-somethings on his site were just as cool and attractive as recent college grads. On JDate — a paid dating site for Jewish singles — the site’s official relationship blogger, Tamar Caspi, went on a full-blown rant over age.”

The latest move by Tinder might affect its user base, but the problem of ageism in dating still remains. If people are looking to meet someone special, then letting go of superficial restrictions like age only helps open the dating pool – and don’t we all want more choices?

It was only a matter of time before Tinder started monetizing its service. And that time, apparently, is now.

Tinder Plus, the dating app’s first foray into the brave new world of freemium monetization, just launched for $9.99. The new update adds at least one highly requested feature alongside a few others designed to improve the experience.

“The most-requested feature we get is a button to go back and have a second chance with people that users swipe left on,” said co-founder Sean Rad told TechCrunch last year. “Everyone has wanted it from the beginning. It’s absolutely at the top of the list.”

Tinder Plus' new Rewind function lets users go back to the most recent person they swiped left on. If you decide you made the wrong choice, you can pay a little extra to bring them back and get a second chance. Your long-lost love may not be so lost, but only if you're willing to cough up the cash to meet them.

Also included is a Passport feature, which lets users search for matches anywhere in the world instead of being limited to their actual location.

“We often hear that people want to be able to start swiping in a location before they’ve left to go on a trip or vacation, and that once they’ve actually made a meaningful connection with someone in a new location, their trip has come to an end,” said Rad. “We also hear people saying that they want to get recommendations for places to go and where to eat in a new city, and Tinder Plus can do better at that.”

Another interesting update, at least from a business standpoint, is the fact that Tinder Plus will remove ads from the network. You knew it had to happen eventually, right? Re/code reports that Tinder is working on a long-awaited ad product that Greg Blatt, chairman of IAC’s The Match Group, expects to be “a meaningful part of the mix” for the company's revenue.

Rad told the Evening Standard that he believes heavy Tinder users are willing to pay for enhanced service. "There are users that are just so active — they are just almost addicted to the platform," he said. However, he also acknowledges that Tinder Plus won't appeal to all users. "These features aren’t something that everyone is going to want to use, and we sort of don’t want everyone to use them."

Tinder has already rolled out its new premium paid service Tinder Plus in the U.S., and among the new features are some protections from spammers.

Tinder Plus includes a new feature called “Unlimited Likes,” which seems counter-intuitive since users of the free app already have the ability to swipe left and right without limits. Unfortunately, spammers have taken advantage of this feature by creating spam bots which swipe right on thousands of profiles simultaneously, increasing users’ match potential.

Tinder has dealt with increasing abuse of its service from spammers. Chances are if you’ve downloaded Tinder, you’ve also come across a fake profile or two that are actually staged to sell you something or obtain personal information, (violating Tinder’s terms and conditions), rather than to make an actual connection with a real person.

Tinder sees its paid service as a way to reduce spamming, as the rewards for this kind of power matching wouldn’t be worth the cost. Apps capitalizing on users’ penchant to say yes to all their potential matches have cropped up, too – like Tinderoid (now labeling itself as “Tools for Tinder”), which enables users to “like” en masse. 

The roll-out of Tinder Plus has already happened in a few other countries, and so far limiting the number of likes has not been received kindly by users who are used to unlimited swiping. According to reviews in the UK’s app store (which dropped the service to only one and a half stars in its rating), Tinder has prevented quite a few users from swiping endlessly unless they pay for the premium service, and they are not happy about it.

Tinder however, says that regular users of the service should not be affected (as opposed to the tiny fraction that swipe right on every single match they can as frequently as possible).

“That behavior happens with a very small percentage of our users, and they usually find that the experience isn’t very good and self-correct on their own,” Sean Rad, the company’s cofounder and CEO, told Tech Crunch.

The algorithm Tinder has set up to block spammers analyzes a few things before it is triggered: namely, the number of swipes, whether the user is only swiping right, velocity, time spent looking at a profile, etc. According to Tinder, a user can swipe through as many as 500 profiles and still not be blocked or prompted to upgrade to Tinder Plus, so long as the user spends a certain amount of time looking at each profile instead of mindlessly swiping.

Tinder launched Tinder Plus in the U.S. this month. For more information about this app, please read our Tinder review.

A recent article in The New York Times highlighted the increased popularity of dating apps, and how one in particular – Tinder – has changed the online dating game.

The proof is in the numbers. According to the most recent Pew study, 11% of American adults have used an online dating site or app. Back in 2005 when dating sites were becoming more popular, 44% of Americans felt this was a good way to meet people. But in 2013, thanks to dating apps like Tinder, 59% agree that online dating is a good way to meet.

Tinder claims it matches more than 12 million people per day, and processes more than a billion matches daily as well. This has sparked a surge of dating apps to flood the market, some of which have succeeded in growing a steady user base based on differentiating themselves from the so-called "hook-up app" (although utilizing the same Facebook profile-validation system). Hinge and Coffee Meets Bagel limit the number of matches per day, forcing users to consider a match rather than mindlessly swiping left and right. The League markets its clientele – upscale and educated – to attract new users. And apps like LuLu and Bumble are female-centric, allowing the women to call the shots on which guys can message them – as well as how their dates rate according to other female daters.

The New York Times article suggests that Tinder's success might have caused some traditionally successful online dating sites such as Match.com to put more research and development into their mobile apps. But essentially, it was only a matter of time before smartphones – which are now used to access everything from email to Facebook to TV shows at any time, from anywhere – would be a good way to meet potential dates. After all, our phones are so much more accessible than our laptops. (Plus, Tinder’s game-like interface is much more fun, compared to slogging through endless questions and profile descriptions on an online dating site.)

Amarnath Thombre, president of Match.com in North America, says there has been a 35 percent increase in the people who use the Match app each month, and a 109 percent increase in the number of people who use only the app to log in to their Match account every month.

For now, daters seem to be choosing convenience over everything else – which might not be a bad idea. Dating apps help people get to the meetings and messages with their matches a lot more quickly than the algorithm process touted by traditional dating sites. But are daters wasting more time because filters aren’t in place?

One thing is for sure: dating apps are here to stay, until something more convenient comes along.