TECH CRUNCH – June 30 – Consumer spending on mobile apps grew significantly during H1 2020, in part due to the COVID-19, according to Sensor Tower. In H1, consumers spent $50B worldwide across the App Store and Google Play, up 23.4% from the H1of 2019. In addition, first-time app installs were up 26.1% YOY to reach 71.5B downloads. During the H1 2020, Tinder generated ~$433M in spending across both app stores, combined. However, this number does represent a decrease of ~19% YOY. It's unclear how much that decline is related to consumers' changing behavior and spending habits during the pandemic. TikTok was the most-downloaded app, the No. 2 and No. 3 apps were WhatsApp and Zoom, respectively.
Category: Outlets – Tech Crunch
Match Group Completes Separation From IAC
TECH CRUNCH – July 2 – Previously, Match Group was a publicly-traded company, with digital holding company IAC as its majority shareholder. Last year, the companies announced a plan that would see IAC's ownership of Match distributed to IAC's shareholders – a plan that is now completed. The separation also involves a leadership change, with Mark Stein and Gregg Winiarski stepping down from the Match Group board. The company has four new board members: ExecOnline CEO Stephen Bailey, the NBA's executive president for digital media Melissa Brenner, investor and entrepreneur Wendi Murdoch and actor Ryan Reynolds. Shar Dubey will continue to serve as Match Group's CEO, a position she took at the beginning of this year, while Joey Levin remains a both IAC's CEO and Match Group's executive chairman.
POF Founder, Markus Frind, Investing in Canadian Startup – Symend
TECH CRUNCH – May 12 – Symend, a Calgary, Canada-based company that builds behavioural analytics into customer engagement products to identify customers having trouble with their bills, and then suggests alternatives to keep them from defaulting altogether, has picked up $52M in funding. The company has been around since 2016 and has to date "treated" ~10M customers, on behalf of its enterprise clients. This round is being led by Canadian VC Inovia Capital, with participation from Ignition Partners, Impression Ventures, BDC Capital's Women in Technology Fund, Mistral Venture Partners, and angel investor Markus Frind (the Canadian founder and former CEO of dating site PlentyofFish).
Sam Altman Backs ‘Video-First’ Dating App Curtn
TECH CRUNCH – May 5 – A new dating app advised by Grindr founder Joel Simkhai and former YC chief Sam Altman is aiming to capitalize on the skyrocketing popularity of video chat. The new app, called Curtn, is pushing video as its differentiating factor, encouraging users to create short videos for their dating profiles and aiming to move conversations to video chat after users match. CEO Brenden Strauss and his co-founder and CTO, Benjamin Honig have some noteworthy advisors. For one, Strauss' boyfriend Joel Simkhai is the co-founder of Grindr and was one of his biggest inspirations for building out the app. Former YC president and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also serving as an advisor and is one of the startup's first investors. The team has raised ~$425K pre-seed round of investment to get the app ready to share with the world.
by Lucas Matney
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.com
Facebook Dating to Launch Video Dating
by Sarah Perez
See full article at Tech Crunch
Mark Brooks: The Meet Group got video right before most dating apps in the West. They were inspired by Momo in China for one-to-many video and refined it on MeetMe, then acquired and powered up a number of brands around the world with video, including Skout, Tagged, Lovoo and now more recently Growlr. Their platform also powers POF's video (ref: March, 2020 press release). Full Disclosure: TMG are a client of Courtland Brooks
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Consumers Spent $23.4B on Apps in Q1 2020
TECH CRUNCH – Apr 3 – According to new data from App Annie, Q1 2020 was the largest-ever quarter in terms of consumer spend on apps. In addition, the average weekly time spent in apps and games worldwide was up 20% YOY in the quarter. In Q1 2020, consumers worldwide spent $23.4B through the app stores – the largest-ever quarter. iOS accounted for $15B of that figure and Google Play was $8.3B. There were also 31B new app downloads in Q1 2020, up 15% from Q4 2019.
Tinder’s Video Series ‘Swipe Night’ Gets a Second Season
Tinder Tests New Social Features
TECH CRUNCH – Feb 14 – Tinder is testing a series of new social features designed to boost conversations between users. One of them is a conversational prompt that encourages users to respond to questions or finish a sentence in order to better showcase their personality with their answers. The other, a "Share to Matches" option, allows users to post photos, looping videos and other content that can only be seen by their existing matches. Because the features are tests, some users may see both, some may see neither, and some may see just one or the other. Tinder declined to say where or when the tests were running or when they may roll out more broadly to users.
Facebook Dating’s Launch in Europe Postponed
TECH CRUNCH – Feb 12 – Facebook has been forced to call off the launch date of its dating service in Europe because it failed to give its lead EU data regulator enough advanced warning – including failing to demonstrate it had performed a legally required assessment of privacy risks. Facebook said dating would arrive in Europe by early 2020 but it just didn't think to keep its lead EU privacy regulator in the loop, despite the DPC having multiple ongoing investigations into other Facebook-owned products at this stage. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) had sent agents to Facebook's Dublin office seeking documentation that Facebook had failed to provide. The DPC said Facebook first contacted it about the rollout of the dating feature in the EU on February 3.
New Pew Report: 30% of U.S. Adults Have Used Online Dating
TECH CRUNCH – Feb 7 – According to a new Pew Research Center report on online dating, 30% of U.S. adults have at some point used a dating app. That's up from ~11% in 2013. 12% of U.S. adults said they found a long-term relationship via online dating. Younger adults were more likely to be using online dating apps than older adults. LGB adults were twice as likely as straight adults to have used a dating app. In addition, a majority of users reported an overall positive experience with online dating. However a significant portion of U.S. adults (46%) said they don't think it's safe. Pew's research was conducted from Oct 16 to 28, 2019 across a panel of 4,860 respondents. The full report is here.