Tinder Double Date feature launches to combat declining users
You are tired of navigating alone in the landscape of online dating? Now you can slide directly with friends.
Tinder launched a double dating feature on Tuesday, allowing users to create joint profiles with friends to match other pairs.
The double date, as the functionality is called, is the refined version of the 2016 Tinder social failure product, which was abandoned in 2017 Confidentiality and user confidentiality concerns on his goal.
To activate the double date, users select up to three friends to create a pair with. Then they can browse and love other paired users. When the two pairs like each other, a group cat opens between the four people to coordinate the plans.
The functionality also allows users to send a message to individuals in a paired pair in private if they want to move on to a conversation in head. Users can maintain several pairs with different friends while keeping their separate individual dating profile.
The functionality was popular with young users when it was tested in Europe and Latin America. Cleo Long, Tinder product marketing manager, said that functionality is intended to relieve the stress of meetings for young users.
“It is a social experience first which is really supposed to help relieve part of the pressure that we know a lot of generation Z experiences with dating by making it more social, more fun and by bringing your friends to help strengthen this piece of comfort”, ” Said a long time.
Tinder, based in West Hollywood, said that almost 90% of people who had tried the double date were less than 29 years, lining up on the company’s pressure to keep generation Z.
The dynamics of the group seem to resonate with women, who were three times more likely to show interest in the profile profiles compared to individual tests during tests. Group cat users have also sent many more messages – about 35% more than typical individual conversations.
The company said that the functionality had helped bring users to the platform. About 15% of people who accepted the double date invitations were either completely new to Tinder, or returning after a period of inactivity.
The results of the positive tests prompted Tinder to accelerate its American launch before the calendar.
Tinder belongs to Match Group Inc., the company behind Hinge and Okcupid. He faces increasing pressure on his activities. In the first quarter of 2025, Match Group reported a 5% drop in subscribers to pay in all its applications, while Tinder saw a 6% drop in subscriptions. In response to these quarters of work, Match made the decision to Make it around 325 employees,, or 13% of his workforce.
These recent losses are part of a wider diagram. Tinder’s paid user base has gone from more than 11 million subscribers at the end of 2022 to around 9.1 million today. The coherent decline has drawn the attention of militant investors, notably Elliott Investment Management.
The assembly pressure has caused significant leading changes within the company. In May, Tinder CEO Faye Iosotaluno announced that it would resign in July after less than two years in the role. Spencer Rascoff, who was appointed Match Managing Director in February to combat the slowdown in user engagement, intervened directly to direct Tinder.
Rascoff has described an ambitious recovery plan focused on technology. In a internal memo Seen by the Wall Street Journal, he called on staff to accelerate product changes and use artificial intelligence, stressing that employees should prioritize user experience on short -term income.
The company has deployed AI features that help users create better profiles and encourage them to reconsider potentially inappropriate messages before sending them.
Tinder also launched “The Game Game”, which uses Openai’s speech technology to allow users to practice flirting with characters generated by AI in exaggerated scenarios designed to reduce the anxiety of meetings thanks to humor.
During the call for the results of the first quarter of the company, Rascoff noted that the match applications fell in disgrace with the young date because many considered them as a “game of figures”. He thinks that the double date can help move perceptions, call it less “hook-uppy” and more on the “good time as an older”.
Tinder’s difficulties reflect wider trends in the meeting apps industry. Meeting applications have lost their appeal among singles in recent years, in particular Gen Z, the generation born between 1997 and 2012. Only 26% Online dating services in the United States are 18 to 29 years old, while 30 to 49 years represent 61% of the same user basis.
Gen Z prefers more and more potential partners by common friends and real rallies.
Los Angeles has become a test field for Dating alternatives that completely skip the scanning. Start-ups like First Round, based in El Segundo, on me encourage immediate meetings in person, while the Lox Club of Venice organizes weekly community events for singles to mingle.
It remains to be seen if the double date can reverse Tinder’s fortune, but Rascoff is betting that the future of dating does not reside in the improvement of the blow, but by reinventing the way people connect.
Generation Z is “not a generation of connection,” he said. “They don’t drink as much alcohol, they don’t have as many sex. We have to adapt our products to accept this reality. ”
