Fortune

THE DATING GAME
B
OTH COMPANIES WOULD soon be hit with
a much bigger tsunami of news on
May 8, when Zuckerberg made his
announcement. “All of a sudden, he
starts saying, ‘Did you know that one in three
marriages in the U.S. start online?’ ” recalls
Jeferies Internet analyst Brent Thill, who
was in the F8 audience that day. “And I’m
like, ‘Oh, no, here comes the dating app.’ ” In
his presentation, Zuckerberg said that the
Facebook feature would be “for building real,
long-term relationships, not just hookups,” a
dig at Tinder.
Facebook has been light on actual details
but says the opt-in feature will match users
with people they aren’t already friends with,
and that users will be able to create a separate
dating profile that friends won’t be able to see.
Ginsberg addressed the issue on Match’s
earnings call the following week. Research
suggests the majority of singles—especially
women—would not want to use Facebook for
dating, she told investors. Users have concerns
over both privacy and engaging in dating
activities in the same place where they share
updates with family and friends, she said.
She also points out that the dating business
is not as easy as it might seem. While
Match has reams of cards and thank-you
notes hung around its headquarters for every
wedding and child it helped create, it also
hears from plenty of users who have had bad
dates and blame the company. “Part of dating
is the up and down,” she says. “We live with
all that psychology, and they’ll have to, too.
How does that psychology play in with the relationship
they have with their core product?”
All these things are true, but so is the fact
that a half-trillion-dollar company with 2 billion
users just announced it’s getting into a
field that Match has had pretty much to itself
for more than two decades.
One thing everyone seems to agree on is
that Facebook’s efectively endorsing online
dating will be a huge legitimization event
for the industry. “This may actually be a
pump that primes the overall market,” says
Thill. Match has found that when it has gone
into new overseas markets where people
are already comfortable with Facebook, it
reduces the barrier to entry for online dating.
And the truth is, for all the drama between
MATCH GROUP
GLOBAL REVENUES
$1.5
1.0
0.5
0
FY 2012
MATCH GROUP
PROFITS
$400 M
300
200
100
0
FY 2012
FOREIGN
U.S.
$1.3 B
2017
$451.6 M
2017
STOCK PRICE
GROWTH SINCE IPO
(NOV. 18, 2015)
258%
SOURCE: BLOOMBERG
Bumble and Match, and all the angst about
Facebook’s entry, there’s a lot of room in this
category: On average, people use three dating
products at any given time.
A
FTER A FEW WEEKS test-driving both
Tinder and Bumble, I conclude that I
am no fan of the swipe. I find myself
missing the thoughtful, epistolary
correspondence of email-based dating, which,
compared with this, feels almost Victorian.
I also developed an aversion to the apps’
location-driven approach, which draws no
distinction between someone who lives in the
New York City area and someone just passing
through. I signed up for Bumble, for instance,
while visiting friends in Boston and immediately
matched with Bostonians—and then, on
the Amtrak ride home, with eligible singles
all up and down the New England coast.
And it’s true what people say: Compared
with the Match.com of yore, there is much
more short-term-ism. Many profiles don’t
have anything written, just photos. On Tinder,
I saw a few couples looking for a threesome
and a handful of married men looking for
something on the side.
But I found that if I was patient enough
and kept swiping, there did seem to be a
supply of eligible matches in my general
demographic. Ultimately, that’s what really
matters to daters: I may not love these apps,
but if everyone in my demo is using Tinder
and Bumble, then I’m going to use Tinder and
Bumble. (Levin of IAC refers to this as “liquidity
in the marketplace.”) Sometimes, the pack
moves. Case in point: During my research for
this story, someone suggested that I try the
dating site Hinge, noting that it has seen a
spike in use among New Yorkers.
G
INSBERG HERSELF NEVER did much online
dating, save for a few Jdates while she
was in business school. To get into the
online dater’s mindset, she constantly
polls singles about their experiences—including
texting her 19-year-old daughter and her
daughter’s friends to ask what they think
of Tinder. But she knows firsthand how the
excitement of a serendipitous meet-cute can
change a life—and also how relationships
aren’t always easy.
In the early-1990s, after graduating from
UC–Berkeley, Ginsberg decided to spend the
summer as a counselor on a teen tour to Israel,
with the intent of returning to her native Dallas
afterward. But while on the trip, she fell
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FORTUNE.COM // JULY.1.18
GRAPHIC BY NICOLAS RAPP