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A Hinge spokesperson told Vox’s Dylan Matthews at the time: “Hinge users are 99 percent college-educated, and the most popular industries include banking, consulting, media, and fashion. It didn’t seem like something the company was trying to hide. But the app was exceedingly ugly, and fell under criticism for appealing to an elitist urge to abandon the masses of Tinder and migrate to something more insular. While Tinder did its best to match users with strangers, Hinge proposed that it would be slightly less alienating and confusing if your matches were based on mutual Facebook friends.īy 2015, it was a hit, and McLeod was claiming it arranged 35,500 dates and 1,500 relationships a week. It didn’t see rapid user growth until 2014, relying heavily on marketing that distinguished it as the alternative to Tinder.
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Founder Justin McLeod has said that it finished out its first year with only a few thousand users and $32,000 in the bank. Hinge, on the other hand, almost failed at launch.
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Its crown jewel is Tinder, which was developed by IAC’s internal incubator Hatch Labs and launched in 2012.Ī post shared by Hinge on at 12:48pm PST Following its incorporation in 2009, it began aggressively courting acquisitions, including OkCupid in 2011, then Plenty of Fish in 2015 - four months before its initial public offering, at which it was valued at $2.9 billion. It also operates the study guide and college-rating company the Princeton Review, and now owns upward of 45 dating-related businesses, including 25 acquisitions. The dating app empire owned by the umbrella company InterActiveCorp (IAC) was founded in 1995, with as its cornerstone. Analysts estimate the global dating app market will be worth about $12 billion a year by 2020. In total, Match Group brought in about $1.7 billion, a pretty big share of a growing pie.
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The dating app industry is a massively lucrative one, particularly now that app-makers have figured out how to monetize all of their individual features: Match’s fourth-quarter earnings for 2018 showed that Tinder added 1.2 million new users last year, and that it brought in $805 million in revenue - more than double the year before. What is Hinge, and why would Match Group want it? Right now, it looks like the near future will see every major dating app ending up in the same hands, just one of the many stories of industry consolidation we’re witnessing in what antitrust expert Tim Wu has called the second Gilded Age, which is maybe abstractly scary - but more tangibly so when you think about Facebook as the only company that could possibly stop it. There is very little about the technology itself that makes one or the other more valuable, so buying a new dating app is almost literally just buying more customers. The self-proclaimed “relationship app,” Hinge matched people based on their mutual friends, was supposedly “designed to be deleted,” and boasted love as its core company value - purposely decentralizing the gamification central to swiping apps but never quite going after the advanced matchmaking algorithm promises of or OkCupid.īut in essence, all dating apps sell you the same thing, which is access to people who might want to date you, and some tools for sifting through them. Match Group, which operates dating apps like Tinder and OkCupid, completed its acquisition of the 7-year-old app Hinge on Thursday, following its purchase of a majority stake in June 2018.įor years, Hinge has positioned itself as the alternative to Tinder, a way to get away from the shallowness and disappointment of flipping through trading-card profiles in an endless carousel.