“The Hidden Hand Behind Your Swipes” from Land of the Giants

We are sharing an episode of Land of the Giants: Dating. Big tech is transforming every aspect of our world. But how? And at what cost? In this season of Land of the Giants: Dating Games, The Verge and New York Magazine's The Cut trace the evolution of the multi-billion dollar dating app industry. Hosts Sangeeta Singh Kurtz and Lakshmi Rengarajan explore the modern dating landscape forged by companies like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, and their impact on our hopes for connection. They answer the question – are the business goals of dating app companies aligned with users' romantic aspirations? Follow Land of the Giants to hear new episodes every Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:33Alex Cranz?

  Hello, and you're listening to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of building your own lightsaber. I'm your friend Alex Krantz, and I gotta confess, I just lied. There is not an episode of The Vergecast today because I am in Disney World having a great time on vacation. But don't worry, we've got an episode of Land of the Giants playing for you. This season is all about dating apps, and it's really, really interesting. I think you're gonna like it. On Friday, Neelai and I will be back to talk about everything going on in the news this week with lots of other people from The Verge. Stay tuned. Until then, have a great day. Rock and roll.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Lakshmi, I want to tell you about this guy. A dating app guy? Sort of. He's been using dating apps for nearly a decade. But a few years ago, he discovered something about them that made him feel a little cheated. His name is Ev Gilbert. He's an attorney in midtown Manhattan. It's sick that you're a lawyer.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you. It does surprise a lot of people.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  When I met him, he was wearing these heart-shaped Lolita glasses and leather pants. You're definitely the most stylish lawyer that I've come across.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Thank you. That is what I aim for.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  And when it comes to the apps, he's seen it all. He told me he started using them when he was pretty young.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Like most little gay kids, I was using Grindr when I first started, because that's really the only way to meet other gay people.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Grindr was enough when he was living in the suburbs. But he moved to New York in 2016 and had a new city, new me moment. And so he decided to try some new dating apps. OkCupid was first. It had these quirky, queer-friendly ads on the subway that caught his eye.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  I do fall for ads very easily.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Then he got on Tinder.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  When I started, Tinder was like, oh, this is the fancy one. This is the one that you go to to meet a more long-term partner.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  At the time, Tinder was already building a reputation as a hookup app. But when Gilbert compared it to Grindr, it actually felt more serious. So he was on these apps for years and went on so many bad dates, you know, he wanted to be done. I mean, dating burnout is real. Totally. And then in 2018, he thought he saw the light at the end of the tunnel: Hinge. It was supposed to have this sophisticated algorithm, you know, high-quality matches. The app pitched itself as "designed to be deleted."

• 4:05Speaker 03

  And then I, I think the first five or six profiles I've seen were people I had already talked to. And some of them I had already been on dates with, like the same dates that precipitated me switching to a new app.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Okay, so I think I know where this story is going.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Did you proceed to match with them? Or did you like throw your phone away in frustration?

• 4:30Speaker 03

  It just made me sit there for a bit. I was like, this is New York. It's one of the biggest cities in the world. These cannot be the only options here.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  He did not throw his phone, but he was left with a rage-induced curiosity. OkCupid, Tinder, Hinge, these apps were all marketed differently. They were supposed to provide distinct experiences. So why did using them feel so similar? After doing a bit of research, he realized that all of the apps he'd been using over the years, besides Grindr, were under the same corporate umbrella.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Honestly, I felt kind of cheated in a way. It's like, OK, Tinder has been treating me badly. So let me try Hinge. You know, kind of like the same way. Like, if you have a bad product, you're like, oh, I'm going to buy that competitor's product instead.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Dozens of dating apps and websites, all owned by the same company. That company is Match Group.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  I'm like, how? How is this possible?

• 5:42Speaker 04

  This is land of the giants. Match Group owns nearly all of the top dating apps in the United States, which means it controls the way dating works for millions of people.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  That's a lot of power for one company to hold. And it got all of that power through a long campaign of buying up the competition.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  And steering our romantic lives? It's been a lucrative business for Match Group. It knows our most intimate preferences and behaviors. And Match uses that data to better sell itself, to build new features that make more money from our desire to connect.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  But what about users? As Match Group perfects the business model of dating, are people seeing better results?

• 6:27Speaker 04

  That is a great question, Sangeetha. Since I used to work at Match Group, we thought it'd be a good idea to hear your fresh take on Match's story. I can't wait to hear what you find out.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Thanks, Lakshmi.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  The dot com boom in the 90s was a bit of a Wild West, and a young computer scientist named Gary Kremen wanted to try his luck. He had an MBA from Stanford, but his big business idea was pretty simple. He bought up a bunch of catchy domain names. Jobs.com, Housing.com, Autos.com. He also owned Sex.com and Match.com. In 1995, the first version of Match.com would have looked familiar.

• 7:19Speaker 05

  I've seen old mockups, and they literally looked like the classified section in the newspaper, which probably don't even exist anymore.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  That's Amarnath Tombre. He's the CEO of Match Group Americas. And that was exactly the idea. That Match and all of those other domains would function as a sort of online classified space. Kremen created a company called Electric Classifieds to house his domains, named himself the CEO, and set out to conquer the digital classifieds business. And what respectable classified section didn't have personal ads? The only thing was that personal ads weren't always that respectable.

• 8:00Speaker 06

  In the mid 90s, a lot of the media was talking about the dangers of the internet. Not only that, personals, which were mostly newspaper 900 numbers, had a very bad reputation.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Fran Meyer was a classmate of Kremen's from Stanford. When she joined Electric Classifieds, Kremen put her in charge of Match.com. Personals had an image problem. Meyer says that the personal ads sections of local weekly newspapers often featured fake ads that were basically scams.

• 8:34Speaker 06

  Ads like "I'm interested in a gangbang." Really disgusting. That would, though, generate lots of phone calls to the 900 number. Okay? So this is the reason why personals were considered fairly sleazy.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Beyond that, the internet was new for most people. And for those who were already online, meeting someone often meant anonymous conversations in occasionally sketchy chatrooms. So Match and Meyer had to figure out how to clean up the sleaze factor and begin to build trust. She said that they started with the idea that men would follow women, and the way to get women on Match was to make sure the men were serious. A great way to do so? Make them pay to use the service. Subscriptions.

• 9:21Speaker 06

  Once we started charging, the percentage of women went up almost immediately. And I think it's because it sort of qualified the guys that were on the service. There were a lot of other online personals, but there was none that was really taking a brand-focused, target-focused approach. And I think that's why we emerged as the winner, really from the very beginning.

• 9:47Speaker 07

  Today, we adapt our regular weekly feature, Computer Line, to Valentine's Day. The search for true romance, as you probably know, can begin just about anywhere. But these days, many of those seeking soulmates are turning to the internet.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Online dating's rebrand got the Good Morning America seal of approval in the late 90s. By then, a lot had changed. For one thing, more people were using the internet. And culturally, things were shifting, too. Conversations about cybersex in shows like Sex and the City and films like You've Got Mail were helping to eradicate the "online dating is dangerous and weird" stigma. It wasn't enough for the owners of Electric Classifieds. Kremen was already gone. He'd bounced in 96 after butting heads with investors. A parade of new CEOs did not see a future for online dating. In 1997, Electric Classifieds sold Match.com.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  This is where media mogul Barry Diller comes in. His company bought Match.com in 1999 for $50 million. Diller was an entertainment executive who'd been the chairman at Paramount Pictures and launched the Fox network. In 1995, he made his last big play in TV and bought a bunch of regional stations.

• 11:07Speaker 08

  Then along came the internet. And essentially, we followed our curiosity. We're not deal junkies, in a sense, but there was a lot of curiosity and a ton of opportunity. And so, we just followed the opportunity.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  That's Diller speaking to Fortune magazine. Opportunity, to him, meant gathering his acquisitions under one corporate umbrella. The name of his behemoth was Interactive Corp., IAC for short. When IAC bought Match.com, the website had 500,000 users. That's roughly the population of Minneapolis. But Diller wanted Match to dominate the whole country and then the world.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  He did what he did best and went on a deal-making spree. He bought exclusive rights to the personal section of New York Mag and BET. He partnered with MSN and AOL to increase Match's membership base. Then, there was the marketing. National radio and TV spots inviting people to "Come and Get Your Love", a very 2006 partnership with Dr. Phil.

• 12:16Speaker 09

  Jody, whoa, Jody. Oh, sorry. You still daydreaming about Mr. Right? Yeah. You've got personality, looks, IQ. You just need a little guy-que, that's all.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Visit Match.com today. A campaign for people who still felt like online dating was for losers. It featured real Match users.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  In this ad from 2007, Danish beauty 22 is wearing an evening gown. She's gorgeous and glamorous. The tagline for the campaign: "It's OK to look." Whether it was Match's aggressive marketing, greater internet usage, a shift in pop culture, or all of these things, at some point, online dating became a thing. And Match.com was leading the pack. Here's Diller again, speaking to Fortune in 2009, about 10 years after first buying Match.

• 13:14Speaker 08

  Million 500,000 people pay 25 bucks a month or so to do this thing. Now, and that's a very good margin, really remarkably solid business.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  With a solid business, a good margin, and cash flow, IAC could use its war chest to level up Match.com into something entirely new.

• 13:36Speaker 10

  IAC is a holding company, meaning they have stakes in a variety of other businesses. And so it's like a conglomerate. They don't just have one type of business.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  David Marcus runs Evermore Global Advisors, an investment firm that specializes in holding companies like IAC. Marcus is a big fan of the Diller way.

• 14:00Speaker 10

  I think of IAC as a compounding machine. They just do this. They put in these tiny things, spend years developing them. Then what comes out the other side is a great business that can live and stand and thrive on its own. Put it even more simply, think about a magician's hat. IAC itself is the magician's hat. And over the years, he's been pulling all these rabbits out. But these are rabbits that are multi-billion dollar opportunities.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  It wasn't enough that Match.com was growing and making money. Diller still wanted to forge a company that would dominate online dating entirely.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  In 2009, Match.com became Match Group. Its strategy: to eat the competition. That same year, Match Group made its first acquisition: People Media, for $80 million. A little over a year later, it acquired Meetic. Each of these sites brought something unique to the business. People Media had niche brands, specifically, social connection websites that included OurTime.com and BlackPeopleMeet.com. Meetic was really popular in France and let Match get its tentacles into the European market. But the most important thing was that these acquisitions brought millions more people under the Match Group umbrella.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  So Match Group was growing, but it was also wary of the competition. Its biggest problem in 2011 was OkCupid.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  The site was reaching younger Gen Xers and millennials who were curious about online dating, but reluctant to fork over $30 a month for a Match.com subscription. And OkCupid was free. It liked to rub that in Match's face. In fact, in those days, it cast a lot of aspersions on Match. Match's marketing claimed that 12 couples got engaged today, thanks to Match.com. OkCupid took aim at this brag with a snarky blog post suggesting that, given Match's scale, this was kind of a ripoff. What's more, compared to OkCupid, Match was old school. Its users were still building and browsing elaborate profiles. OkCupid did things a little differently.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  It had users answer tons of personality questions to get a compatibility percentage with other users. It felt scientific, but fun.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  So in the case of OkCupid, it was clearly attracting like a more coastal, progressive, geeky, data-oriented person.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Amarnath Tombre, CEO of Match Americas.

• 16:38Speaker 05

  So it was a very unique, passionate user base that liked to answer questions. And like, it was a very different way of analyzing and matching people as well as assessing people.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  So instead of competing with OkCupid, Match just bought it. Match's next major target was Plenty of Fish, a free dating site that was wildly popular in the mid 2010s. It was launched by Marcus Frind, a computer scientist, back in 2003. And it became so successful because Frind mastered the SEO game. When people searched for dating in LA or dating in New York, they would see Plenty of Fish at the top of the results. Kim Kaplan joined the company in 2009.

• 17:22Speaker 11

  So my first week at Plenty of Fish, we went to an online dating conference in Miami. And Marcus got up on stage and was presented with a Darth Vader helmet. And it was basically them saying, "You're gonna kill everybody in the industry."

• 17:38Speaker 02

  In a 2009 profile in Ink Magazine, Frin talked about how he worked one hour a day and made $10 million each year running the site from his apartment.

• 17:48Speaker 11

  Marcus said he would never sell. He reiterated that a number of times to everybody. "I'm never selling, I'm never selling, I'm never selling."

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Why would he? He was making millions and he owned 100% of Plenty of Fish, which, by the way, was true to its name. It had 3.6 million daily active users in 2015. Amarnath Tumbray again.

• 18:10Speaker 05

  I think it was number two in the country. So that was like, obviously it was huge and extremely popular in like the smaller towns or small-town America.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  This was obviously a problem for Match Group, a rival dating platform with huge reach that refused to be bought. But at some point, Frin's position on selling had evolved. He went to dinner with Match Group's CEO Sam Jagan, and by the end of it, Match owned Plenty of Fish. Frin left with over half a billion dollars in his pocket.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  It was Match Group's largest acquisition to date. With Plenty of Fish in its portfolio, Match Group now owned four of the five top dating brands in North America.

• 19:01Speaker 12

  This morning, the biggest dating websites are getting ready to woo Wall Street. Barry Diller's company is...

• 19:06Speaker 02

  In November 2015, Match Group went public. It was the moment when Barry Diller pulled the rabbit out of his magician's hat and showed Wall Street just how much online dating was worth. IAC had spent nearly $1.3 billion to acquire 25 brands for its dating portfolio. Match Group's market cap at IPO was nearly $3 billion. More and more daters were turning to mobile apps to meet people. While Match owned the most popular mobile dating app out there, it wasn't bringing in much money. That was about to change.

• 19:54Speaker 13

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• 20:26Speaker 00

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• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 21:23Speaker 15

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 21:47Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:00Speaker 16

  This series is presented by EY.

• 22:04Speaker 17

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• 22:40Speaker 02

  In 2013, about a third of Match Group's users were signing up for its products on mobile devices. By 2015, that number was closer to 70%. Part of this was thanks to Tinder, which was created in an incubator owned by IAC. That relationship eventually evolved into Match Group owning the app. Tinder still had something of a startup spirit, though. It spent the first couple of years focused on growth, not revenue. That all changed when Match Group was preparing to go public.

• 23:11Speaker 16

  I do remember, you know, finding out like, oh, hey, we have to monetize, I think, based upon an earnings call.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  That's Jonathan Bedeen, one of the co-founders of Tinder.

• 23:20Speaker 16

  And I was like, wait, we're what? I was like, okay.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Tinder had followed a common playbook: make the app free and figure out how to make money later. Well, it was later. And Match Group wanted Tinder users to start paying up. Tinder just had to find out what users would actually shell out for. Jess Carbono was one of the people tasked with figuring that out. In 2014, she was studying sociology at UCLA and writing about online dating for her dissertation. She was also using dating apps. Carbono had recently matched with Sean Rad, another one of Tinder's co-founders. She took it as a sign when he started to message her while she was on a boring date a few days later.

• 24:05Speaker 18

  I was literally like back and forth while all this was happening in the bathroom, live messaging Sean. The guy either thought I had a urinary tract infection or a cocaine habit, or I was just woefully uninterested. It was obviously the third option here.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  She pitched her research and herself, and soon enough, she was working at Tinder's offices in West Hollywood.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  One of her tasks, she says, was to dig through the data from Tinder's user surveys.

• 24:33Speaker 18

  I helped them monetize. I helped them figure out what people were willing to pay for.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  She wanted to know, would members drop money on a tool that would help them stand out from the crowd?

• 24:44Speaker 18

  How often were they going to use it? Under what circumstances would they use it? Were men more likely to use it than women? These were all questions that I was trying to answer in the back of my mind to understand the motivation for whether or not we should be investing in it.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Her research was fed to teams that developed special features, what Tinder calls "superpowers." There was the Boost, which got your profile seen by more people for a limited period, and the Super Like, which you could send someone to show them that you really liked them. But these features were not free. Amrath Tambre again.

• 25:20Speaker 05

  We are constantly looking at various ways to, say, give users a way to enhance their chance at succeeding on the app, and that's something that users are always willing to pay for.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  And users did. They spent millions seeking an advantage on the app and on subscriptions, which Tinder added next. In 2016, it brought in $169 million in revenue.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  And still, Match wasn't finished. There were plenty of other dating apps that could pose a threat to Tinder's dominance. So Match Group went back to its old playbook. Competition? No problem. We'll just buy it. In the mid-2010s, dating apps were mostly the same.

• 26:06Speaker 19

  All the dating apps were Tinder, except for What's Your One Little Wrinkle?

• 26:10Speaker 02

  That's Tim McGugan, a former executive at Hinge. In the early years, Hinge was pretty much just like Tinder, but it used social media to connect users to friends of friends.

• 26:23Speaker 19

  We were chasing their tails. We had a swiping experience very much like theirs. We had profiles very much like theirs. We had a couple little things that made it a little bit different. We had a little bit of a different ethos, and all that was well and good. But ultimately, people saw us as the same kind of product, and they used us in the same way, as a numbers game.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  But Hinge didn't want to be Tinder. It wanted to beat Tinder.

• 26:45Speaker 20

  Internally, we were at war against Tinder. We were like, we need our product to be better than Tinder's. They're all about gamification. We're all about really human design.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Lucy Mort was a product designer at Hinge in late 2015, when that war against Tinder took shape.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  A Vanity Fair piece on Tinder's role in the rise of hookup culture had gone mega-viral. Tinder, it said, was patient zero in the "dating apocalypse." Romance as we knew it had been destroyed. Tinder had reduced it to swiping and bad sex, and anyone who was serious about finding a partner was out of luck.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  This is music from an animated video that was part of Hinge's anti-Tinder campaign. In it, a man who looks a lot like Hinge CEO Justin MacLeod wanders through a kind of dating hellscape with signs to attractions like "eye candy" and "one-nighter."

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Then he walks through a door that says "Hinge" and finds a bright paradise of happy couples. The campaign was called "The Dating Apocalypse," the same name as that Vanity Fair piece. It was not exactly subtle.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  If most other apps were just Tinder with a twist, Hinge's new plan was to be everything that Tinder wasn't, to be the anti-Tinder.

• 28:11Speaker 20

  We knew that if you can really get to the core of what a young, single woman's problem is and solve that, then you're going to have a successful dating product. And at the time, it was like, single millennial women. They were just so tired of hookup culture, tired of not really knowing a man's intentions. And that was the problem that we really set about solving.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Mort led a redesign of Hinge to make it feel less Tinder-y. It started with dropping the swipe.

• 28:42Speaker 19

  The traditional swiping app experience was a numbers game.

• 28:47Speaker 20

  It did lead to this culture where people weren't coming into using a dating app with intention of really dating and getting to know someone and getting into a relationship.

• 28:59Speaker 19

  What we wanted to do was to create an environment where actions meant what they were supposed to mean.

• 29:06Speaker 20

  We knew we had to slow people down to make sure they're really measured with their decisions and to help get the conversation started.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  While Tinder liked to brag about its billions of swipes and introductions, Hinge used different metrics. Good dates per user became the app's north star, according to Tim "Matt" Guggan.

• 29:27Speaker 19

  If we were the best at creating dates for our users, we would win.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  In 2017, Hinge's strategy had started to work. It was gaining users, and venture capitalists were getting curious. They weren't the only ones.

• 29:43Speaker 05

  I'm always looking for what's missing. Is there a need, user need, out there that is not being served?

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Amrana Thambray again.

• 29:52Speaker 05

  Tinder was fun and fast and easy, and everyone loved it.

• 29:58Speaker 05

  But there was a certain kind of user, which I think I call it more intentional, like millennial, who wanted to spend more time on each profile, be a little more intentional about who they want to meet, learn more about that person. They wanted something cool and fun and modern as Tinder, but a little slow and intentional.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  In theory, acquiring Hinge would help Match Group remain a one-stop-shop for any online dating experience a user could want. You know, if you hate Tinder, we've got the anti-Tinder. So in 2017, Match made an initial investment in Hinge. Two years later, it bought the whole thing. Hinge hadn't beaten Tinder, it had joined it. But that was good enough for Matt Guggan.

• 30:49Speaker 19

  It was a strong sense of validation that what we were doing was working and that we had a promising future.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  And Hinge maintained its image as the anti-Tinder after joining Match Group. Hinge wants you to meet someone great.

• 31:08Speaker 21

  Even if it kills us.

• 31:11Speaker 21

  Hinge, the dating app designed to be deleted.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  But Match didn't buy Hinge just to fill out a place in its portfolio. It expected the app to bring in cash, too.

• 31:22Speaker 19

  We needed to make money. And so we needed to show a return on investment. So 2020 was the year when we needed to monetize.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Good thing there was already a playbook for that. Tinder's business model was a proven success. It had made hundreds of millions of dollars selling superpowers à la carte and bundling them into premium subscriptions. In 2019, Tinder bought in $1.2 billion in direct revenue. It made sense for Hinge to go down the same path.

• 31:55Speaker 19

  What you can pay for is a more effective or accelerated experience of finding your next date, engaging with more people at once, getting more attention.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Hinge debuted a new feature called "The Rose" in 2020. If you saw someone you really liked, you could send them a rose.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Every user got a free rose each week. The idea was that if you were willing to part with your precious rose for someone, they'd be more likely to hit you back. The rose also bumped you to the top of their list of people who had liked them, who might be buried otherwise. And a rose could also get you access to people who were the most desirable on the app, so-called standouts. You could buy more roses for $3.99 a pop. And of course, they're cheaper by the dozen. If all of this sounds familiar, that's because "The Rose" is just Tinder's super-like in cellophane packaging. The reception to some of these new features, which were, after all, ripped from Tinder, was a little bit frosty.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Lucy Mort again.

• 33:03Speaker 20

  Yeah, it's like withholding pieces of the experience and like dangling a carrot in front of a user, but being like, "Oh, pay us to get it." And I think that can feel like kind of shitty as a user.

• 33:16Speaker 22

  But it seems like these apps are improving on taking our money and making us spend more time on their apps than they are in actuality matching us with people that we're more interested in, right?

• 33:29Speaker 02

  That's Jeremy. We're only using his first name because he works as an app developer and wants to keep his job. Anyway, Jeremy is one of the dozens of dating app users we talked to for this series. He's skeptical of the effectiveness of roses and the other superpowers the app asks users to pay for.

• 33:48Speaker 22

  I would never pay to send a rose to someone on Hinge. And if I did, I wouldn't think that they'd be motivated to match with me over someone else.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  But Jeremy does pay for a Hinge subscription. It lets him see people who have already liked him, and that, he says, makes things more efficient. But he's not sure efficiency has helped him find what he's really looking for: a partner. For Jeremy and many other users, it's not clear if buying all of this extra stuff is working, or if it's just throwing money into the void. Sarah Satiroff is another dater. She diligently uses her free rose every week.

• 34:30Speaker 23

  I mean, upwards. For sure, if it's been a year, then I've given out 50. But I do it every week. So however long it's existed, I've been doing it once a week.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  One person has responded to a rose she has sent: a guy who is thinking about moving to her city. They talked for months before he arrived, but in person, the chemistry was nonexistent.

• 34:53Speaker 23

  I think I kept going out with him because I was like, on paper, he is so perfect. And there's got to be something here that I'm missing. I've got to be able to unlock the connection here. And there just wasn't. And I think that's the thing. You can't account for, and you can't app-optimize for the connection. You just can't make that a feature.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Edison Wilkinson also hasn't had luck with roses.

• 35:16Speaker 24

  Hinge does that, like, oh, my goodness, we know you'll be attracted to these women. And you have to, like, you give them the one rose you get, or pay five bucks for a rose. Yes, absolutely. They do that, for sure.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Have you paid to interact with those women?

• 35:30Speaker 24

  Absolutely, for sure. Absolutely. And nothing has come from it at all. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I need to get off this app.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  But that's not what's happening. People are staying on the app and they're paying on the app. In 2020, Hinge brought in $90 million in revenue. It nearly doubled the following year. Hinge was making more from each paying user, too. In 2019, that was around $5 per month. In 2022, it was 25. The value proposition of these premium features is more efficiency, more visibility, more likes, more, more, more. But do they allow users to achieve their romantic goals? To find partners? I put the question to Amarnath Tombre, the Match Group executive.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Do you think those other features do give people more success on the app?

• 36:35Speaker 05

  Yes, they do. I mean, like, the obvious proof of that is that they're willing to continue to pay for it because when they use it, they see results. And when they see more results, they want to buy it again.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Obvious proof is a stretch. Of the dozens of users we spoke to, it seemed that what people were paying for was the promise of results. Like, spend enough and surely they'll meet the right person eventually. I wonder, are the roses helping people find love? Is that what the data is showing?

• 37:07Speaker 05

  It is, it is. I mean, I think there's a stat on the app itself that like, if you send a rose, you have a far higher chance of getting a response and getting into a conversation than you don't.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  That's not really what I asked. But former Hinge exec Tim McGoogan says Match's money-making strategy, while not perfect, is a win for everyone.

• 37:29Speaker 19

  Users want to go on dates. That's what the product is there to deliver. People who pay for these things are getting incremental value. Otherwise, they wouldn't pay for them. The roses that they're buying are working. The boosts they're buying are working. The subscriptions that they're buying are working. They're having a better experience and more dates. And if you want those things, then you can pay for them. You don't? Great. Functionally, I can know that we took nothing away from the free experience when we introduced them. And, you know, a listener might believe me or they might not. I don't know. It's a hard thing to prove. And who trusts big corporations, you know?

• 38:07Speaker 03

  If you assume that they're well-meaning and good, they want to find you your perfect match. So that the more they know about you, the more perfect partner they can show you.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Ev Gilbert, the lawyer we heard from earlier, doesn't think that paying more for the apps means more success.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  The less benevolent interpretation is that they're trying to find a way to make more money off of you. So maybe if they know who exactly you're attracted to, they're going to give you something that's the store brand version. So you're like, OK, so the real one is out there. It's like nibbling at the edges, but never getting the core.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  We are sold on the idea that it's just a matter of time until that special person sees our profile and swipes right.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  And paying for special features will supposedly shorten the process.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  It felt like someone was trying to figure out what I liked, but it didn't feel like they were trying to do that to help me in any way.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  What did you do in terms of that? Like, did that change your relationship to the apps? Did you stop using them and you were pissed about it?

• 39:18Speaker 03

  I kept using them because what's the alternative?

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Lakshmi, welcome back. What did you think?

• 39:33Speaker 04

  I take it that Ev Gilbert does not pay for dating apps.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  I don't think so. In his final year of law school, he actually wrote a paper calling Match Group a monopoly.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  It's like that moment when you realize Procter & Gamble makes all of your household products or that Rupert Murdoch is the hand behind a lot of the news. But then you stop and think about dating apps. You're hoping they'll help you find other humans to connect with. And then you think, uh, they're run by a multi-billion dollar corporation trying to keep its shareholders happy? That can be concerning.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Is this late-stage capitalism at its finest? Anything and truly everything has a price.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  The thing that strikes me is our love lives are being steered by Match Group's business objectives. So people are paying for all of these features and they don't really know if the money's getting them anywhere.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, being a part of Match Group seems to flatten these dating services into money-making machines. But a lot of people feel like there aren't many alternatives to this world that Match Group rules.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  And Match Group truly has its tentacles in every niche of the market, from black singles to single parents to folks over 50. No matter where you turn, you're in the Match vortex.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  So many different cars, but when you lift the hood and take a look at the engine, it's still Match Group.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  In our next episode, we're going to go one layer deeper into the system and look at the algorithms that are literally shaping our romantic futures.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  How daters are noticing the patterns in how the apps work and trying to figure out ways to make them work a little better for themselves. Special thanks to Dr. Helen Fisher, Mark Brooks, and Jim Osman. Our archival clips in this episode are from CBS This Morning.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Land of the Giants Dating Games is a production of The Cut, The Verge, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Oluwakemi Aladissuyi is the show's producer. Cynthia Batubiza is our production assistant. Charlotte Silver fact-checked this episode. Jolie Myers is our editor. Brandon McFarlane is our engineer and also composed the show's theme.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Nicole Hill is our showrunner. Additional support from Art Chung. Jake Kastenakis is deputy editor of The Verge. Nishat Kurwa is our executive producer. I'm Sangeeta Singh Kurtz.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  And I am Lakshmi Ran garajan. If you liked this episode, please share it and follow the show by clicking the plus sign in your podcast app.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week, as part of our special series on the future of business, I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 42:39Speaker 15

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 43:04Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 43:17Speaker 16

  This series is presented by EY.

• 43:20Speaker 25

  As a pioneer in the organic and natural food industry, the Whole Foods Market philosophy is rooted in a shared connection to people and to the planet. From farmland to stores, its products have always been a symphony of colors, textures, and flavors. In addition to its national brands, Whole Foods Market's team of local foragers continually scours the country to bring over 60,000 emerging and local products to its shelves each year. And they work with credentialed experts and top-of-the-line makers to offer customers the best possible variety. Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online.