The dating app Bumble has lost over half of its value since going public in 2021. The company recently announced plans to cut 30 percent of its workforce.
Bumble is not the only dating app that is in trouble. Tinder is also hemorrhaging members. So is Match. Almost all dating apps are losing paying members, otherwise known as “men”. What gives?
Women almost always get a “free ride” on dating apps. In other words, they almost never have to pay for memberships.
This isn’t because of some feminist conspiracy. It’s because of simple laws of sexual economics. In the human world, as in the animal one, males are in supply, and females are in demand.
If you don’t believe this, and you would like an extreme example as proof, announce online that you’re going to host an orgy at your house. A hundred men will show up, and not a single woman.
This presents an economic balancing act for any dating app (or, indeed, any dating venue with a revenue model): women bring in the men, but the men bring their credit cards.
The corollary here is: alienate enough women, and the men will go away, too. Take away the women and the men have no incentive to be there. But if you drive the men away for other reasons, the outcome is the same. When men go, they take their credit cards with them.
It has long been established that dating apps don’t work for the vast majority of men. The data here comes not from the heavy-breathing corners of the so-called manosphere, but from the online dating industry itself.
Way back in 2009, a survey conducted by the dating site OkCupid revealed that women users rated 80 percent of men on the site as “unattractive” or “below average”.
This result made the rounds in the media for a while, with examples of specific male profiles used in the survey. Even some women journalists acknowledged that the female users of OkCupid were dismissing out of hand guys who were average to moderately attractive.
Once again, I would caution against spinning a feminist conspiracy theory explanation for this. I have a degree in economics, and I prefer the economic explanation.
In dating, as in other areas of life, most of us are just about as picky as our available choices allow us to be. In the online dating world, any attractive woman finds herself in the catbird seat; she is presented with more male profiles than she can possibly evaluate, let alone schedule dates with.
So what does she do? She swipes left on all but the most desirable guys. And in this context, “desirable” is defined by the lowest common denominators: looks, height, and income.
In recent years, men have been realizing that dating apps are the practical equivalent of a Ponzi scheme and leaving, but the numbers are still stacked against them. The male-to-female ratio on dating apps like Tinder is about 3-to-1. This means that about 75 percent of the users are male.
Which brings us back to Bumble. Bumble has been described as a “feminist dating app”. One of the core features of the app is that only women can initiate conversations.
This means that the poor average schmuck of a guy who doesn’t meet the 6’2”-plus, high-income ideal will probably never even get his turn at bat. Bumble is a dating app that allows women to pre-reject men, as if men on dating apps needed more rejection.
Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble, is a former employee of Tinder. Bumble’s restrictive model (only women can message first) was intended to, in Wolfe Herd’s words, “put women in control of the experience”.
But “three guys for every girl”—to reverse -paraphrase the old Jan & Dean song—surely qualifies as “being in control”. At the very least, those numbers confer a significant numerical advantage for female users of Bumble. And female users aren’t the ones most likely to pay for Bumble’s premium features, which enhance a profile’s visibility.
Which might explain why Bumble is in financial trouble, along with other dating apps. Herein lies a fundamental rule of business: never create a product that is designed to alienate your paying customer base.
-ET