“These are the hottest girls I’ve ever seen!”
Sean Rad—29 and recently single—is bowed over his iPhone, eyes inches from the screen, totally enamored with the latest version of his groundbreaking dating app, Tinder. It’s a Monday evening in mid-October at Craig’s, a dimly lit West Hollywood hot spot where paparazzi track every arriving Uber, and Rad can’t believe how attractive the women in his Tinder feed are. He swipes through endless photos while sipping his usual dirty martini, grinning like a kid. “What the fuck?!” he says. “This is nuts!”
The deliciously addictive Tinder is as much cultural phenomenon as dating app—a strikingly simple tool that lets you flick through photos of nearby users. Swipe right to register a “like” or left to skip ahead to the next one. If the other person swipes right on your picture too, the app alerts both of you to a match, and from there, either party can initiate a conversation—and possibly more. It’s a transformational interaction model that now leads to 1.3 million dates per week. Rad is especially pumped tonight because he’s testing out a new algorithm that’s designed to make more matches, and so far it’s performing in overdrive. Rad himself worked to refine these changes, which may explain why, as I open Tinder on my own phone and start swiping, he critiques my every flip. “Yup, yup, yup,” he says approvingly as I like a series of profiles, but then I swipe left on one, and Rad’s elbows jump off the table. “What!? She was hot!” he yells. “Oh, my God, how did you say no to her?” He grabs my phone and starts shuffling through photos on my behalf—picture after picture, complete with running commentary. “Have you ever seen this many hot girls?” he says. “It’s like five hot girls in a row!” He finally stops on one. “Wow, she’s gorgeous. She’s a DJ! This might be your wife.”
Tinder has ballooned to 9.6 million daily active users, accounting for some 1.4 billion swipes per day. And these aren’t just teens looking for a hookup: A recent Tinder survey found that 80% of users are seeking more than a one-night stand—a highly engaged, advertiser-friendly audience. Tinder is part of Match Group, which was created as a division of Barry Diller’s IAC and includes other dating sites, such as OkCupid and Match.com. In November, IAC spun off Match Group as part of an initial public offering that raised around $400 million at a roughly $3 billion valuation. Tinder is key to Match Group’s appeal; as the S-1 SEC prospectus notes, Rad’s app has “risen to scale and popularity faster than any other product in the dating category” and particularly appeals to young users. If Tinder were a freestanding operation, according to one recent estimate, its valuation could be more than $1 billion.
