Tinder pledges up to $1mn in free in-app ads for women entrepreneurs

The firm is inviting applications from companies where at least 50 per cent of the founding team are women or identify as women.

Location-based dating service major Tinder on Thursday announced it is pledging up to $1 million in in-app advertising to support women and others who identify themselves as women entrepreneurs in India.

"We are proud to have women driving growth within the organisation across various functions including management, product engineering, and design. We remain committed to our promise of opening doors for women around the world and this initiative is another step in this direction," Taru Kapoor, GM, Tinder and Match Group, India, said in a statement.

Over 90 per cent of Tinder's community is between the ages of 18-30, and for any women-owned business aimed at that cohort, the ads are intended to support their business, their network and help them speak directly to potential consumers.

The firm is inviting applications from companies where at least 50 per cent of the founding team are women or identify as women.

To qualify, companies should be under 3 years old, have cumulatively raised less than Rs 35 crore in equity financing, and actively target Gen-Z and millennial audiences in India.

All applicants will be screened by an all-woman panel of Tinder executives in their sole discretion, and all decisions are final.

How online dating is changing the way single people spend their money

This evolution is having an economic impact 'because it's driving consumer spending, it's driving household formation'.

Online dating is not only transforming the way people hook up, it is changing the way single people spend their money and shaping the nature of household spending, according to one investor taking an interest in the emerging sector.

"It's driving pretty much everything, if you think about all the things people spend money on around finding a romantic partner, courting them, getting married, having kids," said Daniel McMurtrie, the young co-founder and CEO of Tyro Capital Management, a New York hedge fund.

McMurtrie, 28, has tracked the rising tide in people going online to find a partner "from a kind of niche category, which was a little bit of a joke to some people, to being the dominant form of dating."

According to a Pew Research Center study published Thursday, 30 per cent of American adults have used a dating app or website. For people under 30, that increases to 50 per cent.

The proliferation of smartphones and the ease of using apps have been game changers. All a user has to do is enter a small amount of personal information to start seeing photos of potential matches. A simple swipe of the finger can show interest, and if it is reciprocated, start a conversation.

The financial cost of arranging a date has been drastically reduced, as has the cost in time from wasted encounters or rejections.

"Historically people have dated within their social circles, their friends, their family, their church, their social groups," said McMurtrie. "That's really maybe 100, 200 people max."

The social penalties have also been reduced. "If you date someone who's a friend of a friend and it doesn't work out, that can be very awkward." "Because everyone can get a number of dates instantly through an app, it doesn't really make sense to take that risk anymore," noted McMurtrie, who published a research paper on the phenomenon in November.

Tinder users appropriating dating app for political campaigning: Study

Users around the world are employing it for multilevel marketing, political campaigning, and promoting local gigs, a new study says.

Although Tinder is a platform facilitating casual dating, some of the app's nearly 50 million users around the world are employing it for multilevel marketing, political campaigning, and promoting local gigs, a new study says.

The study, published in the journal The Information Society, found that Tinder's off-label use -- a term borrowed from pharmacology describing when people use a product for something other than what the package says -- appropriates its infrastructure, and sociocultural meanings.

"When people encounter a new technology, whether it's a hammer or a computer, they use it in ways that fit their needs and lifestyle," said study co-author Stefanie Duguay from Concordia University.

"However, once you buy a hammer, it doesn't undergo regular updates or develop new features -- apps do. They come with their own marketing, vision for use and sets of features, which they regularly update and often change in response to user activity," Duguay explained.

In the study, Duguay assessed media articles about people using Tinder for purposes other than social, romantic, or sexual encounters.

She also conducted in-depth interviews with four off-label users.

One of the users was using the app to conduct an anti-smoking campaign, the study noted.

Another, Duguay said, ran an anti-sex trafficking campaign on Tinder.

A third user, she said, was using the app to market health products, and the last was supporting US Senator Bernie Sanders's Democratic Party presidential nomination run in 2016.

"I also observed individual users adapting their Tinder profiles to self-promote, market local bands, participate in business networking, and conduct private sales," the researcher wrote in the study.

A swipe is not enough: Tinder trials extra control for Indian women

Tinder has been testing the function in India for several months and plans to spread it worldwide if the full rollout proves successful.

The Indian edition of dating app Tinder is trialing a new feature which gives women an additional level of scrutiny and security before they allow men to start messaging conversations, with a view to rolling the function out globally.

The "My Move" feature allows women to choose in their settings that only they can start a conversation with a male match after both have approved each other with Tinder's swiping function.

Normally, the app gives both parties to a successful match - where both have swiped yes on the other's photograph - the right to text each other immediately.

Tinder has been testing the function in India for several months and plans to spread it worldwide if the full rollout proves successful. Rival dating-app Bumble already only allows the female party to a heterosexual match to start conversations.

Dating is still frowned upon in many circles in India's religiously- and ethnically-divided society, where arranged marriages are still the norm.

The country is also ranked the world's most dangerous for women due to the high risk of sexual violence, according to a poll by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Reuters News owner Thomson Reuters Corp.

Yet an emerging class of young, well-to-do Indians in cosmopolitan cities like Bengaluru and Mumbai have made the country Tinder's largest market in Asia.

The company also says it is the "chattiest" globally, with users using the in-app messaging feature more than any other country.

Taru Kapoor, General Manager for Tinder owner Match Group in India, told Reuters the function had been pioneered in India because of Tinder's need to attract more women to the app by making them feel more comfortable and secure.

"We're a platform based on mutual respect, consent, and choice," she said.

"(Users) can shape their own destiny, connect with people they feel comfortable with and at all points of time, feel in control. Our users have the autonomy, especially women have the autonomy, on how to be engaged, to be empowered, to control their experience."

Business Standard