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.

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.