Burnt-out love-seekers are shunning dating apps in their millions, but the apps are trying to woo them back with a counter offer: If you don’t want a lover, perhaps you just need a friend? The giants of the industry — Bumble and Match, which owns Tinder — have both created apps catering to friendly meetups, joining countless smaller platforms that have already entered the friend zone.
Bumble For Friends launched in July last year and by the third quarter of this year had around 730,000 monthly active users, according to figures from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
Bumble has also acquired the Geneva app, which caters to people wanting to form groups around particular interests.
Photo: Reuters
“It’s just the beginning of our vision to expand the company’s footprint and helping people find connections broadly,” Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones said during the Web Summit in Lisbon on Wednesday.
Match, meanwhile, launched the Yuzu app in February targeting the Asian community in the US, offering a choice between friendly or romantic encounters.
The group has also been testing a service dedicated to friendship in France on its dating app for older people, DisonsDemain.
Both firms have suffered dramatic slumps since the boom times of the pandemic, when millions turned to the apps during periods when governments restricted people’s movements.
‘APP FATIGUE
Sensor Tower said while Bumble For Friends was soaring, its dating app had shed eight percent of its monthly active users between the start of October last year and this year — the figure now standing at 21 million.
Tinder, by far the biggest dating app with around 53 million monthly active users, saw a 16 percent slump in the same period.
Seema Shah of Sensor Tower said users were feeling “app fatigue.”
“It’s affecting all apps but in particular these dating apps. People are just kind of tired of it,” she said.
Tinder was hit particularly hard as it targeted younger users between 18 and 22.
“This is the same age group that likes to do a lot of things in person,” she said.
These declines are hitting the firms where it really hurts — the wallet.
Match Group has shed more than US$40 billion from its value in three years.
Bumble achieved a valuation of more than US$20 billion when it went public in 2021, but it is now worth only about US$1.3 billion.
The firm announced the layoff of a third of its workforce in February.
And success in the friend zone is far from assured, with plenty of apps already battling to attract future BFFs.
NOVELTY FACTOR
The apps often cater to particular situations — WeRoad and TripBFF connect solo travelers, Wink and Plura help people find friends based on their interests.
French app Timeleft, launched last year, brings together six strangers every week for dinner at a restaurant.
The app has already organized dinners in 280 cities across 62 countries and is getting closer to profitability, said cofounder Maxime Barbier.
He said diners were assembled using an algorithm enriched by the results of personality tests taken by the users.
For Arthur Czubinski, a 32-year-old translator, it is a winning formula.
He said he had been to 12 dinners organized by the app in just a few months.
“Some of the tables have been incredible,” he said.
But Seema Shah suggested the first flushes of success for friendship apps were at least partly down to novelty.
She expressed doubt people would pay in the long term.
“It’s probably easier to find friends in your area if you join some activity or through your job,” she said.
Recently the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its Mini-Me partner in the legislature, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), have been arguing that construction of chip fabs in the US by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is little more than stripping Taiwan of its assets. For example, KMT Legislative Caucus First Deputy Secretary-General Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) in January said that “This is not ‘reciprocal cooperation’ ... but a substantial hollowing out of our country.” Similarly, former TPP Chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) contended it constitutes “selling Taiwan out to the United States.” The two pro-China parties are proposing a bill that
March 9 to March 15 “This land produced no horses,” Qing Dynasty envoy Yu Yung-ho (郁永河) observed when he visited Taiwan in 1697. He didn’t mean that there were no horses at all; it was just difficult to transport them across the sea and raise them in the hot and humid climate. “Although 10,000 soldiers were stationed here, the camps had fewer than 1,000 horses,” Yu added. Starting from the Dutch in the 1600s, each foreign regime brought horses to Taiwan. But they remained rare animals, typically only owned by the government or
It starts out as a heartwarming clip. A young girl, clearly delighted to be in Tokyo, beams as she makes a peace sign to the camera. Seconds later, she is shoved to the ground from behind by a woman wearing a surgical mask. The assailant doesn’t skip a beat, striding out of shot of the clip filmed by the girl’s mother. This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko — “bumping man” — shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender
Last month, media outlets including the BBC World Service and Bloomberg reported that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are currently flat or falling, and that the economic giant appears to be on course to comfortably meet Beijing’s stated goal that total emissions will peak no later than 2030. China is by far and away the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, generating more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU combined. As the BBC pointed out in their Feb. 12 report, “what happens in China literally could change the world’s weather.” Any drop in total emissions is good news, of course. By
RSS