Still from 'Tinder - #ItStartsHere' by Tinder on Vimeo
Tinder may be just over a year old, but the dating app has seen incredible growth (some of it fuelled by Olympians) and is now approaching a total of 1bn matches made.
Back in December 2013, Tinder had reached 5m matches per day, but the app has already doubled that output to 10m matches made each day. This is according to CEO and founder Sean Rad, who revealed these figures at the Upfront Summit in Los Angeles yesterday.
Launched in September 2012, Tinder relied on word of mouth among college kids for its marketing, to great effect.
The free-to-download app is available on iOS and Android and analyses users’ Facebook profiles to match them with potential dates based on location, mutual friends and common interests. Users can then swipe through their matches: right if they like them, left if they’d rather pass. Where users that have been matched both swipe right, a connection is made and the opportunity to chat opens up.
The Winter Olympics have also been a boon for the app, with Rad telling The Wall Street Journal recently that there had been a 400pc day-on-day increase of new users in Sochi. There’s even a Tumblr dedicated to the athletes and visitors that were using the app in the Russian city.
A similar boost is now expected during the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.
750m swipes per day
Rad says Tinder is now seeing 750m swipes per day and the average user accesses the app about seven times in a single day.
Rad also claims very few users get no matches and that the majority of Tinder users have been matched over and over again.
As far as tips for users to up their Tinder game go, in this app, a picture is truly worth a thousand words and Rad advises that users choose their profile pics wisely. Headshots and modelling shots don’t work, he says, because pictures need to show the user’s personality.
That would somewhat explain the volume of photos of people with tigers and exploring Machu Picchu, then.
