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.
In Taiwan’s politics the party chair is an extremely influential position. Typically this person is the presumed presidential candidate or serving president. In the last presidential election, two of the three candidates were also leaders of their party. Only one party chair race had been planned for this year, but with the Jan. 1 resignation by the currently indicted Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) two parties are now in play. If a challenger to acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) appears we will examine that race in more depth. Currently their election is set for Feb. 15. EXTREMELY
Last week saw the appearance of another odious screed full of lies from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian (肖千), in the Financial Review, a major Australian paper. Xiao’s piece was presented without challenge or caveat. His “Seven truths on why Taiwan always will be China’s” presented a “greatest hits” of the litany of PRC falsehoods. This includes: Taiwan’s indigenous peoples were descended from the people of China 30,000 years ago; a “Chinese” imperial government administrated Taiwan in the 14th century; Koxinga, also known as Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功), “recovered” Taiwan for China; the Qing owned
Jan. 20 to Jan. 26 Taipei was in a jubilant, patriotic mood on the morning of Jan. 25, 1954. Flags hung outside shops and residences, people chanted anti-communist slogans and rousing music blared from loudspeakers. The occasion was the arrival of about 14,000 Chinese prisoners from the Korean War, who had elected to head to Taiwan instead of being repatriated to China. The majority landed in Keelung over three days and were paraded through the capital to great fanfare. Air Force planes dropped colorful flyers, one of which read, “You’re back, you’re finally back. You finally overcame the evil communist bandits and
They increasingly own everything from access to space to how we get news on Earth and now outgoing President Joe Biden warns America’s new breed of Donald Trump-allied oligarchs could gobble up US democracy itself. Biden used his farewell speech to the nation to deliver a shockingly dark message: that a nation which has always revered its entrepreneurs may now be at their mercy. “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms,” Biden said. He named no names, but his targets were clear: men like Elon Musk
RSS