OPW – July 30 – Here's the top dating news in ~2 minutes. Subscribe to Two Minute Tuesdays (TMT) on Youtube (and turn on notifications) or to the podcast on Breaker, Google podcasts, Spotify, Anchor.
Category: Match Group
Match Group Shareholders Swipe Right for Bigger Margins
FORBES – July 30 – Match Group has begun telling its Android customers to enter payments details directly at the Match Group website, avoiding the Google Play store fee. This is a huge win for Match shareholders. Epic Games, maker of the popular gaming platform Fortnite, avoided the Play Store altogether last year. And Spotify is in the midst of a legal dispute with Apple. It is encouraging customers to make payments directly. It's the same tactic Netflix is now using. Apple made $257M scraping fees from Netflix in 2018. Epic Games, Spotify and Netflix have one common denominator: scale. Their businesses are so big, they don't need Apple and Google to succeed. You can now put Match Group in the same category. All in, Match had 8.6M paying subscribers at the end of the Q1 of 2019. That’s up 16% YOY. Revenue in the Q1 rallied 14% to $465M, putting the company on track to record $1.8B in 2019 revenue. Based on sales momentum, the stock could trade to $125 in two years, a gain of 65% from current levels.
Tinder’s Take on Safety in Its New Commercial
OPW – July 27 – "It's really important that women never go to someone's house, they meet in a public place, they don't drink…", said Mandy Ginsberg, CEO of Match Group, in 2018 HBO documentary "Swiped". And here are Tinder's official guidelines to women for not getting raped: 1. Never go to someone's house, 2. Meet in a public place, 3. Don't drink, 4. Let someone know where you're going and 5. Never go into someone's car. Yet the new Tinder commercial "Don't Fly Solo" suggests just that. The video features a young woman traveling alone. She is meeting strangers through Tinder app, and jumping into their cars. What's worse, she arranges a meeting with strangers literally in the middle of nowhere. She has a good time and makes lots of new friends but unfortunately, we don't live in a fairytale world. In the real world, these encounters could end up really badly. We find this ad disconcerting. What are you thoughts?
For years Tinder had been trying to shed its hook up imagine. But in Q3 2018 Match Group decided to double down on its casual nature following the acquisition of Hinge, a dating app for more serious relationships. This video is a part of the new "SingleNotSorry" campaign that is celebrating the single life, and portrays Tinder as a more casual dating app. – Irena Brooks, editor of OnlinePersonalsWatch
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Match Fends off Another Patent Infringement Suit
LAW 360 – July 25 – A Texas federal judge tossed a lawsuit against Match Group. Match was suit last year by newly created Texas company called NetSoc. The company has accused Match of infringing NetSoc's patent titled "a social network to facilitate people in life issues." The judge said the patent is invalid because it lacks an inventive concept and constitutes an abstract idea.
Match Stock Jumps as Tinder Could Bypass Google
INVESTORS – July 19 – Match Group shares jumped 4.8% to 76.68 on the stock market today. The Match stock rally comes as the company reportedly explores new ways to monetize the Tinder app, possibly by bypassing the Google Play store on mobile devices. Match/Tinder is among the largest payers of app store commissions in the world. Federal regulators are reportedly looking into the Google and Apple online store policies.
Dating Industry Executives Discuss Best Practices in Safety
The webinar, "Online Safety in the Dating and Social Entertainment Market", was hosted by Northland Capital Markets. Participating from the dating industry were Geoff Cook, CEO of The Meet Group, Casey Burton, Director and Senior Counsel at Match Group, and Jeronimo Folgueira, CEO of Spark Networks.
Representing the panel from various safety and online standards organizations were Larry Magid, CEO of Connect Safely, Stephen Balkam, CEO and Founder of the Family Online and Safety Institute, and George Kidd, CEO of the Online Dating Association.
"We put safety at the core of everything we do," said Geoff Cook, CEO of The Meet Group. "Our users are here to interact and connect – and we think the goal of a safety operation is to promote a safe environment free of bullying, hate speech, and abuse to encourage making meaningful connections."
Topics covered during the discussion included: the current state of online safety, content moderation and law enforcement, working with the app store partners, how technology can help users feel safer, and strategies for building a safer online community.
While safety will always be a major focus in the dating industry, Larry Magid, CEO of Connect Safely, wanted to set the record straight in two specific areas.
"One observation is that between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s, while Internet usage was on a steep rise, violence, both against children and sexual violence in general, has gone down," said Magid. "So anybody who wants to correlate online dating with increased sexual violence is actually looking at the numbers in exactly the wrong way. So while I can't claim data that shows that online dating has made things safer, I can say that during the period that online dating has risen, violence has gone down."
"The other thing to understand is that nobody can guarantee 100% safety on anything, whether it's food safety or transportation safety, or safety using tools," he added. "Nobody can ever say with absolute certainty that nothing bad is going to happen. What we can do is have best practices in an industry (like online dating) – and we can have consumer education."
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The U.S. Dating App Market Is Peaking
THE MOTLEY FOOL – July 2 – Tinder surged in popularity in recent years. However, the market's growth will decelerate over the next three years, according to projections from eMarketer, as fewer new users sign up and users drift between existing apps.
Match Group is preparing for that slowdown with three key strategies: increasing its revenue per subscriber with new premium tiers, acquiring niche challengers like Hinge, and expanding into overseas markets.
Match Stock Rides Tinder App, Overseas Growth as Taboos Die Out
INVESTORS.COM – June 25 – Shares in Match have shot up 75% from a year ago despite Facebook moving aggressively into dating. Match stock popped 7.5% to 71.74 on the stock market today. With the gain, the company is trading less than 5% below a buy point of 75.38. The company gets nearly half its revenue from Tinder. Overseas growth in markets such as India, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea is key for Tinder and other products. In April, Match hired Ravi Mehta as its new chief product officer. Mehta had served as Facebook's product director for youth engagement. At Facebook, he helped develop Lasso, a competitor to the popular TikTok short video sharing app. Match is adding video to the Tinder app. Still, some analysts are cautious on the Match strategy. In May, Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Ng upgraded Match stock to neutral from sell.
Tinder Co-founder’s Lawsuit Against Tinder Parent Company Moves Closer to a Trial
THE VERGE – June 14 – The judge rejects IAC / Match Group's motion to dismiss Sean Rad's case, allowing Rad and his co-plaintiffs to pursue their allegations that Match Group and IAC purposely undervalued Tinder in an effort to avoid paying out billions of dollars in stock options to the original dating app team. It's still unclear whether former plaintiffs like Rosette Pambakian, who alleged sexual misconduct on the part of IAC executives, will be able to participate in the lawsuit. She and three other plaintiffs withdrew from the lawsuit over an arbitration clause, but "without prejudice," which means that they could theoretically rejoin.
Can We Trust the Match Group Cartel With Our Dating Data?
