The lucrative business of dating sites is soon preparing to welcome a major competitor. Gradually launched in 2019 on the American continent and in Southeast Asia, the new functionality of the Facebook social network, Facebook Dating (Facebook Dating) already counts “among the first online dating services”, was welcomed at the end of January on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, adding that he expected it to "continue to grow."
Originally scheduled for Thursday, the European launch of the feature has been postponed after the Irish Personal Data Regulator (DPC) conducted an inspection on Monday at the European social network headquarters in Dublin. "We are taking a little longer to make sure the product is ready for the European market," said a Facebook spokesperson. Anyway, the arrival of Facebook today threatens to redistribute the cards.
Facebook copied "everything that worked well on other applications"
If Facebook misses the symbolic Valentine's Day meeting on February 14, the entire market is preparing to welcome a major competitor, completely free. "From the social network to the dating site, there is only one step that does not require a huge technological investment", analyzes Julien Pillot, teacher-researcher at the Inseec business school. According to him, Facebook "copied everything that worked well on other applications and added two or three features. What interests them is above all to encourage users to reconnect with the sharing of private content. ”
Until then the challengers were busy fighting the current mastodon of the sector: Match Group. During an amicable divorce from the American internet giant IAC, the firm controls popular brands like Hinge, OKCupid, the Match.com site, the Meetic group. And above all the ultra-dominant and very profitable Tinder application, launched in 2012 and first in the ranking of user spending among all applications (excluding games) in 2019, according to the application market specialist AppAnnie.
Tinder, the leader in dating, not worried
With $ 1.2 billion in revenue in 2019, Tinder is carving out the lion's share of the mobile dating market, estimated at $ 2.2 billion. "Tinder has redefined the entire user journey of the encounter," analyze Jean-Baptiste Bourgeois and Kevin Pasquier, strategy researchers at We Are Social. The reason for this success, "it is a pretty clever mechanism which after a few" swipes "(a lateral movement of the thumb to move to the next profile) limits the user, frustrates him and generates in him the fear of missing the pearl rare ”, to push him to pay a subscription and have additional choices.
Should the love giant fear the arrival on the social network market of the 2.5 billion monthly active users? "Of course, we are not going to underestimate Facebook," Match Group chief Amanda W. Ginsberg told financial analysts in early February. "But, for the moment, we are not seeing any consequences for any of our brands."
"There will always be the worry of playing with her aunt" on Facebook
"The first returns (from Facebook Dating) to the United States are not crazy," adds Clémentine Lalande, co-founder of Once, the last application to want to seduce French people with the selective concept of a single profile per day. "The big problem with general applications," she believes, is that we end up with a mass of users who do not share the same communities of interest. In particular on Facebook, "there will always be the worry of having a match with her aunt," jokes another specialist.
In December, a Piplsay poll of 21,000 Americans revealed that only 23% of those polled said they trusted Facebook, at the center of several privacy scandals, to keep their personal data safe on their dating platform.
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