Dating apps search for users who want to be ‘just friends’

Online dating giants and start-ups are betting on a different kind of human connection in the search for revenue growth: friendship.

Bumble, Muzz and Match Group are pushing their friend-finding and community-building products as an alternative model for digital matchmaking, aimed at attracting younger users that have been hit by so-called dating app fatigue.

Bumble, which owns the eponymous female-focused dating app as well as Badoo and Fruitz, said it was bullish about the “untapped potential” of “the friendship space”.

“The opportunity there is quite limitless for us,” said chief executive Lidiane Jones at an investor event this month.

In May, the group acquired community-building product Geneva, which connects people based on shared interests, building on the launch of its friend-finding app BFF last year.

The push into friendship apps comes as some of the biggest online dating players have struggled with a post-pandemic slowdown in growth. Bumble shed a quarter of its market value after slashing its revenue outlook in August.

Jones said Bumble would focus this autumn on “scaling the growth of Geneva and BFF” in order to “over time diversify our business monetisation model”.

Match’s newest app Yuzu, launched in February, is also its first product to explicitly offer a social-only mode as well as a dating function.

The app, which is designed exclusively for the Asian community, allows users to toggle between “social”, “dating”, or “social and dating” modes — a feature the $9.6bn company has suggested it may expand to its wider portfolio of more than 40 dating brands.

“This is a testing ground for us,” Match’s chief financial officer Gary Swidler said at an investor conference this month. “You can draw the line, I think, from things we’re testing in emerging brands, including Yuzu, and what we might be thinking down the road at Tinder.”

Smaller rivals have also moved into the friendship market this year. The decade-old Muslim ‘marriage app’ Muzz, which has 1.5mn monthly active users according to Sensor Tower, began rolling out Muzz Social, a friend-finding and social networking feature, in February.

New users of Muzz Social are automatically added to groups according to their location, and can also join networks based on hobbies or interests. “Automatically you’ve got a bunch of communities you could reach out to,” said founder and chief executive Shahzad Younas.

Gay dating app Grindr, whose user numbers have continued to climb amid slowdowns at both Bumble and Tinder, has also explored adding social features, both for friendship and professional networking, in a bid to broaden its user base.

Start-ups are also seeking to tap into the so-called “loneliness economy” in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

French start-up Timeleft, which algorithmically matches groups of six people to go for a meal together, expanded into the US and UK this year and now operates in over 200 cities.

Events and social connections company Pie secured $11.5mn in funding in September for an app designed to help users meet locals in real life as part of what founder Andy Dunn called “a mission to defeat social isolation”.

But analysts are sceptical that a pivot to friendship will significantly boost revenue growth for existing online dating companies.

Tinder, Hinge, Grindr and Bumble all rely on “freemium” subscription models for the bulk of their revenues, but analysts warn that platforms may struggle to find users willing to pay for friendship — especially when mainstream social networks, like Facebook, are free.

“It’s simple. People are more willing to pay for romance than for friends,” said Ygal Arounian, an analyst at Citi.

Both Bumble and Muzz said they were considering paid partnerships and advertising to monetise their friendship products, in addition to subscriptions.

But building a successful advertising business could require a major push to recruit new users and promote daily engagement with the products. Bumble’s BFF has just 735,000 monthly active users, according to Sensor Tower, while its flagship dating product has more than 20mn. 

Connecting payment with real-life meetups is another option. Users of Timeleft, for example, pay a fee or take out a membership, to reserve a space at one of the company’s weekly dinners. Timeleft keeps the entire fee, while users pay for their own meals at partner restaurants.

But even if they do not make money themselves, Bumble and Muzz are betting that friendship products will help keep users engaged with their brands even when they are not actively seeking a partner, as well as offering a route to their more profitable dating businesses.

Timeleft chief executive Maxime Barbier said friendship products could be the future of online matchmaking. “Dating as it is — swiping, texting and one-on-one first dates — is dying. People are so tired of it and they see us as an alternative.”