Big tech misses out, Tinder doesn’t. More and more people pay for “the right match”

True love cannot speak, wrote Shakespeare. Better “swiping”, then. So while most of the Big Tech industry is losing steam, Tinder continues to hold its own. Last week the Financial Times called it “brutal” for Meta, Google and Microsoft. The three Silicon Valley giants witnessed a billion dollar collapse at the end of October due to fears of a global slowdown in the entire technology sector. While the five largest tech stocks collapsed by $ 950 billion at their peak, Match Group – the company that owns Tinder – has gone beyond the rosiest expectations, recording revenues of 810 million in the third quarter of 2022.

The credit goes to the increase in subscriptions of “premium” subscriptions: The number of users willing to pay to take advantage of the Plus, Gold and Platinum plans – which offer users features such as unlimited likes – has increased by 7 percent and revenue has grown by 6 percent. Thus, in a poor quarter for the US tech sector, Match Group (which owns some other dating apps like Hinge and OKCupid) saw its shares rise 16 percent.

The news is particularly positive for the company because it comes after a troubled year, characterized by changes at the executive level. In August, CEO Renate Nyborg stepped down after less than a year on the job, and soaring inflation cast doubt on the app’s strength. Over the last year, many had already sentenced the end of the era of dating platforms. Tinder, Bumble, Meetic seemed to have had their day. After the period of restrictions of the pandemic in almost the whole world, someone had envisaged a return to traditional methods of courtship. The latest quarterly results of Tinder partially disprove this narrative: despite the physiological need for a technological “detox”, 2022 continues to reward the queen of this type of applications.

The direction, in any case, is far from marked. Match Group itself expects flat revenue growth in the next quarter; Chief Executive Bernard Kim and Chief Financial Officer Gary Swidler have warned that the weakening global economy is affecting the company’s brands, especially those that cater to low-income consumers. It is not known whether, on the scale, the situation of the general economic context weighs more or a hypothetical turnaround of the sentimental habits of the younger generations. Only time will reveal it. When in doubt, however, Tinder seems to hold out.