The first six weeks immediately after the Christmas holidays are always a busy time for dating services. What better way to stave off the post-holiday blues than looking for love? Then there are all those New Year’s resolutions of people who had no one to kiss when the ball dropped—and of course that looming threat of Valentine’s Day on the horizon.
That’s perhaps why it is little surprise that on January 3, the popular dating app Tinder had its biggest single day of growth in its history, according to TechCrunch. That growth included not only its highest-ever app downloads in one day, but the most active users in a single day as well.
To coincide with that growth, January 3 also saw some Tinder users getting a new kind of push notification that read “Wow! Tinder is on fire in your area! Chances of a match are 3X higher right now [flame emoji].”
The new notification is a first for Tinder in that it alerts users when the organic match rate—the number of swipes it takes to get a match—in their specific geographic area increases. The higher the match rate in a given area, the higher the chance of users in that area finding love.
“When there is a spike in engagement on the platform, we want to let users know so that they can take advantage of that moment,” Tinder CEO Sean Rad told TechCrunch. “The most fascinating thing about this type of notification is that, by notifying users when those peak moments are happening, it increases the overall success rate for our users. It has a compounding effect and produces even more activity.”
So far match rate notifications have shown when a user’s chances of a match are both 2x and 3x higher for a given area. No users have reported a 4x or greater match notification yet, but if those levels of match rates begin to ping phones in certain geographic areas, you can bet that some lonely hearts’ New Year’s resolutions may include moving to a new city as well.