Dating Apps and Data Markets: A Political Economy of Communication Approach

Introduction

Numerous and widely used, dating apps collect and connect detailed personal data across platforms. They have therefore been responsible for integrating intensive modes of personal data collection and computational decision-making into intimate social life, and, in parallel, for integrating these personal and intimate modes of communication into the platform-dominated digital media environment’s logics and economies of datafication.¹
There is an expanding body of work detailing how people are engaging with dating apps and their various cultures of use, including how various aspects of identity, culture and sexual practice are enabled and constrained by the affordances and architectures of apps.² Methods developed for the critical study of apps in the software studies and platform studies tradition have focused on tracing the relationships between design logics and their sociocultural implications, in effect forming ‘close readings’ of apps’ material features, and drawing inferences from these close readings and a range of background research materials about business models, for example.³ Such work, within the critical digital media and software studies traditions, looks at software, computation, and interfaces, applying approaches that examine these issues in dating apps studies, including work on platform governance.⁴
Some studies of dating apps have also addressed aspects of the present article’s questions about how dating apps interact with and participate in data markets – that is, processes of data aggregation, valuation, commodification, and exchange. Stehling et al. approach dating apps as one of many digital platforms through which user data can be co-opted and commodified.⁵ Gay men’s dating app data, in particular, have been framed as a potential tool for public health organisations, offering opportunities for targeted health promotion and population surveillance in the Asia-Pacific and North America.⁶ David and Cambre, Wang, and Light have documented and interrogated the ways that app users internationally have sought to ‘game’ the ‘data-structured and algorithmic’ aspects of app culture.⁷ In addition, app-users directly engage with data markets via the legitimate deployment of in-app algorithmic affordances for ranking and filtering user profiles, and by means of ‘off-label’ hacks and workarounds to overcome geo-locative restrictions,⁸ or to access premium app features without payment.⁹ Liu and Wu and Ward have noted the ways that Chinese app developers have responded to external moral and political pressures by re-branding dating/hookup apps, such as Momo and Blued, to emphasise non-sexual social networking features.¹⁰ And, at the level of a single app and its connection to other apps, the identification and analysis of such data structures and flows can certainly be accommodated within interface methods approaches that can be used both forensically and in participatory projects that aim to enhance data literacy among ordinary users.¹¹

Theoretical Framework and Approach

However, we still know remarkably little about the corporate structures behind these apps, how economic value is attributed to and extracted from dating app data, and how these data are monetised. To address this gap, in this article we build on the political economy of communication approach and apply it to the data markets of dating apps. Using maximum variation purposive sampling,¹² we selected and examine three cases: Grindr; Match Group (parent company of Tinder); and, Bumble. The firms selected for these three cases cover the broad spectrum of the dating app market: Bumble is a small, early stage start-up; Grindr is an established, mid-sized operation with strong brand presence; and, Match Group is a large conglomerate and corporate heavyweight in the industry, with a long history operating and managing dating services. These three have also been selected for the way that, while operating in the same space, each employs somewhat distinct business structures and revenue models.
The political economy of communication is an established and well-tested approach¹³ that has been applied not only to the analysis of regulated broadcast media industries, but has already also been partially adapted to addressing the distinctive challenges of studying search,¹⁴ mobile,¹⁵ locative,¹⁶ and social media¹⁷ industries. As Jonathan Hardy explains, ‘critical political economy rests on a central claim: different ways of organising and financing communications have implications for the range and nature of media content, and the ways in which this is consumed and used.’¹⁸ It forms a productive approach for understanding the financing arrangements, business models, and other vested interests of various media industries, thereby guiding analyses of their political and social impacts. When applied to dating apps, a political economy approach directs our attention to the different stakeholders involved with controlling and commercialising applications for web-based and mobile devices, how these are being affected by dynamically changing forces, and what data is generated through them and how it is used and to what ends. In adopting this approach, we ask: What structural factors shape the dating app industry? What are the business structures and revenue models that make dating apps so lucrative? And what strategies have dating app firms adopted to profitably expand their shares of the user/data markets in light of these structural factors? Exploring these issues is vital if we are to make better sense of the data markets and the economic logics that form around dating apps and social media more broadly,¹⁹ and if we are to add to established understanding of the platform affordances²⁰ and cross-platform and other data-sharing arrangements that structure our use of these services,²¹ and the specific algorithmic and software design decisions that underpin them.²²
Building on earlier political economic analyses of audiences,²³ we also want to better understand how subscribers of dating services become, to follow Dallas Smythe’s famous formulation, the ‘audience commodity,’²⁴ both in the more traditional sense of being the target of marketing messages through their engagement with these services,²⁵ and in a more contemporary sense of becoming subject to increasingly intensified processes of datafication.²⁶ As Mark Andrejevic observes, ‘audiences are visibly, measurably, expending effort that results in marketable commodities: not just the content they create, but the information they generate about themselves in the process.’²⁷ Thus, tracing the extraction of economic value is also important given that dating apps serve as generators, repositories, and exchange points for highly sensitive personal data.
It is not our intention in this article to develop detailed walkthroughs of Grindr, Bumble, or Match Group subsidiaries like Tinder. Rather, we focus on developing an account of key strategic developments, corporate directions, and revenue-generation possibilities that each have pursued over the course of their operation, and that has relevance to the structures and dynamics of data markets. To aid in this, and in examining the above issues, we draw on trade press reportage, financial reports, and other ancillary materials associated with the apps and publishers in question. As reliable corporate data are notoriously difficult to obtain, especially in the case of start-ups and privately-owned firms, trade papers in particular remain a vital resource for scholarly researchers interested in the political economic dimensions of the fast-moving field of networked media,²⁸ as well as everyday representations of them. As van Dijck and Poell point out, while ‘the underlying principles, tactics, and strategies’ of social media platforms and dating app firms ‘may be relatively simple to identify,’ it is, however, ‘much harder to map the complex connections between platforms’²⁹ and the business structures, business decisions, and internal company directives underpinning these connections and other economic arrangements.³⁰ Trade sources in particular permit an examination of how dating apps are being discussed within the tech and dating services industries. As has been noted elsewhere, ‘a critical reading of how these sources treat themes and issues over time not only enables a desirable continuity of data collection, a diachronic as opposed to a synchronic perspective, but also makes possible an examination of the narratives and other discursive strategies that are being constructed about and around [in this case, dating apps] by the industry.’³¹ This is to say that, just as we draw upon various sources for the privileged data about the dating industry that they provide access to, we are also interested in observing how the industry interprets this information, and how it talks about itself more generally.³² Thomas Corrigan refers to this dual approach as ‘burrowing down’ and ‘listening in’³³ – both are important when drawing on trade press sources in order to build a more complete picture of dating app related corporate arrangements. And yet, given the often symbiotic nature of the tech industry and the tech press (and where both can be reliant on the same pools of venture capital investment),³⁴ consulting a range of trade press and related sources can prove valuable in reducing ‘information asymmetry,’ thereby enabling greater depth of analysis through the cross-checking of multiple sources, especially around earnings reports, firm-initiated disclosures, and market reactions to these.³⁵ In the present context, a critical analysis of the trade press – among a range of other information sources – provides critical insight into the rapidly shifting corporate landscape of dating and hook-up apps.

Grindr

Founded by Joel Simkhai, Grindr was launched on March 9, 2009. It was one of a raft of early ‘geosocial’ mobile apps that exploited the geolocation possibilities afforded by smartphones for social networking purposes.³⁶ Grindr allows users to locate other nearby users through an interface that displays a grid of photos of these other users, arranged from nearest to farthest away; when a picture is tapped on, a brief profile will be displayed for that particular user, along with the option to chat, send pictures, and share one’s precise location.³⁷ In its early days, Grindr grew its user base primarily through word of mouth and by being featured in the trade press.
By 2013, Grindr’s revenue structure had settled into what prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson famously referred to in a 2006 blog post as the ‘freemium business model.’³⁸ Wilson defined this model as one that follows a two-step process:

[First] give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.³⁹

In adopting this approach, Grindr presented its users with two options: (1) an ad-supported ‘free’ service with basic features; and, (2) a paid service with no ads (Grindr Xtra), that included push notifications, as well as opening up extra features and making more potential matches visible through the interface.⁴⁰ The latter, subscription-based model proved immensely popular with Grindr’s users, with Simkhai reporting that Grindr earned 75% of revenue from subscribers and 25% from advertising (with much of this coming from local businesses).⁴¹ Grindr’s revenue model operates, in other words, according to what Lacroix and Tremblay refer to as ‘club logic,’ a process that enables ‘materialization on individualized supports’ by combining various financing modes, such as advertising or sponsor revenues, subscriptions, and other forms of additional payments.⁴²
As a private start-up, accurate early figures on Grindr use and revenue generation have been difficult to come by. However, some indication of early and projected earnings did emerge as a result of documents released as part of the Ashley Madison hacking scandal. According to these documents, Grindr was said to have recorded revenues of US$16 million in 2012, and US$24 million in 2013, with approximately US$10 million in revenue growth each year, putting earnings expectations for 2018 at around US$77 million.⁴³ Grindr also enjoyed considerable ‘dwell time’ – what in ‘old media’ terms used to be referred to as ‘concentrated viewing’⁴⁴ – with user interactions sitting at 54 minutes per day, versus 42 minutes for Facebook and 15 minutes for Tinder.⁴⁵ The documents also revealed that Grindr had 10.5 million users worldwide,⁴⁶ up from 2 million in 2011,⁴⁷ with 3.8 million using the service at least once per month.⁴⁸ By 2017–2018, Grindr was reported to have 27 million users worldwide and 2 million daily active users; on the basis of the latter figures, Grindr claimed to be ‘the world’s biggest LGBT social networking app.’⁴⁹
Before moving to discuss Grindr’s eventual sale, we note that in 2011 Simkhai diversified by launching a second app, Blendr, that was less focused on hook-ups and, it was hoped, would have broader market appeal.⁵⁰ The following year, Simkhai struck a revenue share deal with Badoo, where Badoo took 50% of the profits in exchange for providing ‘back-end resources and infrastructure.’⁵¹ As Badoo’s CEO Andrey Andreev explains,

From our side, we provide the technology platform, moderation, service-side, a whole bunch of things. The whole infrastructure. From their side, they provide marketing. They market [to] users, they bring the users. They’re responsible for the users, we’re responsible for keeping users on the platform, monetizing users on the platform, making users happy.⁵²

In political economy of new media terms, Badoo provides infrastructural support for ‘information organization, search and retrieval,’⁵³ while Simkhai’s team focused on ‘audience commodity’ concerns. However, for a host of reasons (including poor revenue performance), Simkhai sold Blendr to Badoo in 2016 and refocused his attention on Grindr. Blendr, which continues to operate, became part of a stable of Badoo-owned apps, including Hot or Not, Huggle, and male-rating service Lulu,⁵⁴ and Badoo-powered apps, including Bumble⁵⁵ and Chappy (which is backed by Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd).⁵⁶
For Grindr, a significant corporate shift occurred in 2016 with Beijing Kunlun Technology Share Co., Ltd, or Kunlun for short, paying US$93 million for a controlling 61.53% stake.⁵⁷ Kunlun was founded in 2008 by Zhou Yahui, and built a significant revenue stream (it made US$64 million in operating revenue during the first quarter of 2015 alone) from its specialisation in distributed online games – free-to-play, browser-based MMORPG titles, such as Eden Eternal and Glory Destiny Online.⁵⁸ And yet, while Kunlun is best known as a games company, Grindr was not Kunlun’s only foray into wider investment territory; the same year as the Grindr investment, Kunlun also sank money into Zank, a Chinese gay social networking mobile app,⁵⁹ and paid US$34 million for a 20% stake in UK-based mortgage lender LendInvest Ltd.⁶⁰
Joel Simkhai described the Kunlun deal as an ‘alliance,’ one that would allow Grindr to ‘further expand and offer a more comprehensive array of proximity-based services.’⁶¹ This investment also facilitated the acceleration of Grindr’s transformation from a stand-alone hook-up app to a ‘broader gay lifestyle platform’⁶² (or, in Grindr Vice President of Marketing Peter Sloterdyk’s words, a lifestyle-oriented ‘utility,’ a ‘way for users to discover and navigate the world around them’).⁶³ One immediate outcome of this reorientation around lifestyle was the launch in 2017 of an online magazine, Into.⁶⁴
Underpinning this strategic shift in focus was close scrutiny of end-user analytics:

Analyzing and data mining chat transcripts revealed that […] users were already starting to use Grindr in new ways [beyond hook-ups] – interacting with people around them, asking for travel and accommodation advice, and widely socializing.⁶⁵

A similar pattern of usage was also revealed through subscription preferences. Despite numerous subscription lengths available (one, two, six, and 12 months), the clear favourite was the longer, 12-month option, suggesting to Grindr’s then Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Lukas Sliwka, that the service fulfilled an important function as a ‘social platform.’⁶⁶
The decision to reposition Grindr as a lifestyle platform was also fuelled by a desire to control what Anne Helmond refers to as ‘data pours’⁶⁷ – that is, the end-user data flowing into Grindr’s servers, and vendor access to those data. As Sliwka put it, ‘We need to own the pipeline on both the server side and the client side, and we want to own all that data.’⁶⁸ Grindr’s desire to control all its data is evidence of the maturation of its business model. José van Dijck and Thomas Poell note that, as platforms mature, they turn ‘more into data firms deriving their business models from their ability to harvest and repurpose data.’⁶⁹ Not only do rich user-generated geodata mean a platform can set higher advertising rates, but this data comes to form the ‘core, saleable asset’ for the owners of the platform.⁷⁰
In the midst of this platform repositioning work, Kunlun paid US$152 million in early 2018 for the remaining 37.47% stake in Grindr. This purchase valued Grindr at US$395 million, an increase of US$150 million from two years earlier.⁷¹ With this sale, Joel Simkhai departed Grindr, Zhou Yahui stepped in as interim CEO, and former Facebook and Instagram engineering manager Chen Jun-yang became CTO.⁷²
Kunlun’s initial investment in, and subsequent purchase of, Grindr has been interpreted in a number of different ways. These moves have been viewed as key in broadening Kunlun’s product portfolio, allowing it to diversify beyond games;⁷³ this is well trodden path for Chinese tech firms, with Tencent holding a stake in Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, and Alibaba investing in mobile messaging platform Tango.⁷⁴ It has also opened up the possibility of new revenue streams,⁷⁵ with one commentator suggesting that Grindr will serve as a ‘new growth engine’ for the Chinese conglomerate.⁷⁶ In addition, it has been viewed as a key acquisition in that it better positions Grindr to compete with Chinese market-leader Blued (and other emerging players, like GeeYuu and lesbian site LesDo) for the nascent yet rapidly expanding Chinese LGBT market, which has been estimated to be worth around US$300 billion (the US market is said to be worth more than double that);⁷⁷ Blued, which was founded by Ma Baoli in 2012, has since grown to now claim to have over 27 million users globally, with a valuation in excess of US$300 million.⁷⁸ Finally, it has also been suggested that Kunlun’s take-over of Grindr should be regarded, in conjunction with its aforementioned investments in Zank and LendInvest, as part of larger, longer term strategy to ‘build an ecosystem where users of its gaming, social networking and Internet finance services can be mutually converted and grow in parallel.’⁷⁹ In other words, Kunlun’s plan for Grindr is for it to form a sort of ‘walled garden’ or ‘digital enclosure,’⁸⁰ a means of encouraging ‘ever greater participation by the public [that] will be transformed into increasingly exclusive forms of proprietary [datafied] knowledge.’⁸¹ It looks, however, as if Kunlun’s ambitions for Grindr might be short-lived. Kunlun’s acquisition of Grindr was apparently not cleared by the US government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is ‘an interagency government committee that scrutinizes acquisitions of U.S. companies for national security risks.’⁸² Despite making a number of assurances to the CFIUS regarding data storage and security, and the composition of the Grindr board, it has been reported that Kunlun has agreed to the CFIUS’s requests to sell Grindr by June 2020.⁸³

Match Group

Match Group has a somewhat complicated corporate history that is entwined with that of US-based holding company, IAC/InterActiveCorp. IAC was established in 1986 as Silver King Broadcasting Company, a subsidiary of sorts of the Home Shopping Network. Silver King underwent a succession of name changes (HSN Communications, Silver King Communications, HSN Networks), before becoming USA Networks in 1998. By the late 1990s, USA Networks owned Universal Studio’s television assets, as well as significant stakes in online bookings firms (including Ticketmaster Group and Hotel Reservations Network).
During the 2000s, USA Networks began divesting itself of its broadcasting holdings, and refocused itself around the further acquisition of online assets. It invested heavily in online travel, buying TripAdvisor and Expedia, and a diverse array of other assets, such as reference firm Lexico (the parent company of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com), and Urbanspoon (subsequently sold to Zomato for US$52 million). With this shift in strategic focus came a further change of company name with USA Networks becoming IAC/InterActiveCorp in 2014.
Most significantly in the context of this article is that, by the 2010s, IAC had also established itself as the major player in online dating. It purchased Match.com as well as online niche dating firm People Media (to be discussed below) in 2009, Singlesnet and OkCupid in 2011, Meetic in 2013, and PlentyOfFish in 2015, among others. In addition, Chemistry.com was ‘incubated internally’ and launched in 2006 (as a direct competitor to eHarmony),⁸⁴ and Tinder, its most successful product, followed in 2012. All of IAC’s online dating assets have since been placed within Match Group, which was spun-off in October 2015 as its own publicly listed company with IAC as the controlling shareholder.
Match Group presently holds a portfolio of over 45 dating-related brands. The most prominent of these are its flagship products: Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, and OurTime (which is focused on the over 50s market). Match’s European-based products – such as lexamore.nl, lexa.nl, neu.de, partner.de, and e-kontakt.se – are managed by its European-based subsidiary Meetic Group. And, the overwhelming majority of the remaining 45+ brands are micro-targeted products, or ‘niche dating sites,’⁸⁵ that fall under the ‘PeopleMeet’ banner, including BabyBoomerPeopleMeet.com, PetPeopleMeet.com, SeniorBlackPeopleMeet.com, LittlePeopleMeet.com, and so on. The ‘PeopleMeet’ brands came with the US$85 million purchase of People Media in 2009, an acquisition that was made in order to compete with Spark Networks, owners of other niche brands like ChristianMingle and JDate that targets Jewish singles.⁸⁶
In addition to its own holdings, Match Group also has made significant investments in other services. For instance, in 2018 it purchased a majority 51% stake in Hinge, and it also has a 20% stake in Zhenai, China’s ‘most popular dating site,’ with the controlling stake held by Asian investment group PAG.⁸⁷ Match Group has also aggressively, yet so far unsuccessfully, pursued Bumble as a potential acquisition target.
All of these investments have established Match Group as the dominant firm in online and mobile dating. Match Group’s total revenue for the 2017 financial year was US$1.3 billion, with revenue growth of 28% from Q3 to Q4 2017 to reach US$379 million. In addition to Match Group, IAC’s present portfolio of assets include Publishing (Ask.com, CityGrid, Dictionary.com, Dotdash, Investopedia, The Daily Beast, and Reference.com), Video (Vimeo, CollegeHumor, DailyBurn, Electus), and Applications; IAC is also the majority shareholder in the publicly listed ANGI Homeservices Inc. Of IAC/InterActiveCorp’s offerings, Match Group is its best-performing asset, accounting for 40% of total revenue for 2017.
Jiyoung Cha has suggested that, for social media firms, there are limited means by which revenue can be generated from end-user data, with each option tied to platform affordances and the core competencies of each firm.⁸⁸ Julia Dorofeeva suggests that the monetisation opportunities for dating apps are similarly restricted, and tend to fall into three main categories: advertising; subscription plans; and, single purchases (such as Grindr’s ‘Gaymoji’⁸⁹).⁹⁰ These restricted revenue options, in combination with a preference for a freemium business model, means that there tend to be many similarities across dating apps in terms of how monetisation is achieved. What is interesting about them, though, is the implementation of business strategy and the subtle differentiation in revenue generation between services, including between services that are held by the same parent company. For instance, in a 2016 presentation to prospective investors, Match Group sets out what it calls its two main ‘paywall paradigms,’ with its ‘select’ brands aligned according to one of two categories: ‘hard paywall brands’ (Match, Meetic, OurTime) and ‘soft paywall brands’ (OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, Tinder).⁹¹ While both categories enjoy similar free features (profile creation, profile searching, and profile matching) and similar ‘à la carte’ features (e.g. self-promotion, private status, etc.), there is far greater variation when it comes to ‘prime subscription drivers.’⁹² For ‘hard paywall brands,’ the taking up of a subscription is said to be driven almost exclusively by the desire to communicate with other members, while, with ‘soft paywall brands,’ there is claimed to be greater flexibility around ‘custom searches’ (e.g. by attractiveness, distance, interest, etc.), ‘expanded usage opportunities’ (e.g. Tinder’s swipe right functionality and ‘Super Likes’), and ‘consumer insights’ (for example, seeing who has liked or viewed your profile)⁹³ – features that saw a significant jump in revenues for Tinder, Match Group’s flagship brand in this category, over its first three years.⁹⁴ These two brand categories have distinct pricing structures, and attract different levels of marketing support, with ‘hard paywall brands’ receiving on-and off-line marketing spend to attract new subscribers, while ‘soft paywall brands’ receive limited marketing spend and are more reliant on word-of-mouth and ‘viral’ growth.⁹⁵ In addition to differentiated pricing structures, Match Group also sees significant opportunities for continued market growth through ‘new technologies and monetization avenues,’ such as increased location services, video sharing, and advertising, and ‘geographical expansion’ into India, Russia, Eastern Europe, South Korea, and Japan.⁹⁶
Despite the healthy revenues currently being generated by Match Group’s suite of services, the online and mobile dating market remains highly fragmented, volatile and unstable, and fast-moving and competitive.⁹⁷ Match Group’s portfolio of 45+ brands is evidence of industry fragmentation. As Dan Slater has noted, ‘by 2011, niche dating sites had taken nearly a third of the market, or roughly ten to fifteen million daters in North America.’⁹⁸ This fragmentation also explains the appeal and proliferation of holding companies, a corporate structure exploited to great effect within the global advertising trade. Within global advertising, as John Sinclair has argued, the introduction of the holding company structure led to an ‘unbundling’ of core services, such that ‘the business of strategically purchasing media space and time [were] hived off from the “creative” business of devising and executing advertising campaigns, in quite separate agencies.’⁹⁹ These, alongside PR firms and specialised digital-strategy firms, became ‘integrated under the one holding group.’¹⁰⁰
One of the key drivers for these ad industry corporate reconfigurations was so that one holding group (such as Martin Sorell’s WPP), could hold (or compete for) multiple accounts with different clients that were otherwise in direct competition with each other (such as Colgate-Palmolive and Proctor & Gamble) without there being any perceived or actual conflict of interest. What this enabled, in other words, was a kind of ‘walled garden’ that encouraged clients – multiple clients – to keep all their business (ad creation, media buying, PR work, etc.) within the one holding company family, and which, for that holding company, meant capturing a greater proportion of clients’ overall ad- and media-spend budgets, as well as associated and invaluable client-related data. In the context of the dating app industry, Match Group remains the dominant example of a dating app related holding company, yet there are many others competing with it, including Berlin-based Spark Networks, as well as Global Personals, The Meet Group, and Badoo (which is increasingly taking on holding company like qualities through, as noted earlier, its many purchases and investments). The potential difficulty with this, as Jonathan Hardy points out, is that ‘market dominance generally entails the ability to influence favourable terms and influence the behavior of other businesses and the options for consumers.’¹⁰¹ Such market dominance is of particular concern in relation to dating services given the sensitive nature of ‘audience commodity’ data that is collected through these apps.
One way concerns around market dominance can be ameliorated is when ‘significant market changes occur.’¹⁰² Despite the presence of a range of large holding companies, the dating app industry remains volatile and unstable – something highlighted by the dramatic 22% initial drop in Match Group shares, the biggest single day drop in its history, when Facebook announced plans to develop its own dating service.¹⁰³ The industry also continues to be fast-moving and competitive, with a suite of established and emerging global firms competing for Match Group’s revenues, including The Inner Circle (an independent, already profitable Netherlands-based service), Happn (founded by Frenchman Didier Rappaport, who also co-founded Dailymotion video sharing website), Coffee Meets Bagel (founded in San Francisco by the three Kang sisters), London-based Badoo (founded by mercurial Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev), and, as we explore below, Bumble.

Bumble

Bumble stands out in the dating app market as an explicitly ‘female friendly’ app. While it is primarily marketed to heterosexuals, female users can nominate a willingness to match with both women and men when in the ‘Bumble date’ mode. Like Match Group’s Tinder, the app deploys a ‘swipe’ functionality for matching, but once a couple has matched, only women can initiate contact by sending an in-app message. The company was founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd in December 2014.¹⁰⁴ Herd, previously a co-founder of Tinder, was awarded an undisclosed sum following a sexual harassment lawsuit against Tinder’s Justin Mateen that was settled out of court.¹⁰⁵ Herd received additional start-up capital from Andrey Adeev, who provided US$10 million worth of start-up funding, and access to Badoo’s data and infrastructure in exchange for 79% ownership of Bumble. Herd retains 20% of Bumble as founder and CEO.¹⁰⁶
While it was free to use when first launched in 2015, since 2016 the app has operated via a ‘freemium’ model.¹⁰⁷ According to Forbes, 10% of users currently pay for premium features, including ‘SuperSwipes’ that allow users to ‘heart’ especially attractive profiles; and, ‘Bumble Boost,’ a US$9.99 monthly subscription which offers the opportunity to search for other users who have ‘liked’ the subscriber’s profile, and rematch with ‘expired connections.’¹⁰⁸
As outlined above, Bumble initially differentiated itself in the dating market as a safer and more female friendly alternative to Tinder.¹⁰⁹ By January 2015, the app had been downloaded 100 000 times, and as of mid 2018, Bumble reported over 35 million users in 144 countries (roughly balanced between male and female), the majority aged between 23 and 27.¹¹⁰ The company has adopted what vice-president of marketing, Chelsea Cain Maclin, terms an ‘omni-channel approach’ to the business, diversifying to add a ‘friend-finder’ function (Bumble BFF) and a platform that matches business contacts, including would-be business mentors and mentees (Bumble Bizz).¹¹¹ While the ‘swipe and match’ functions of the app itself appear to represent Bumble’s core business, since 2017 it has adopted a diverse branding and marketing approach, incorporating cross-platform social media campaigns promoting in-app civility and etiquette, and supporting feminist and/or (US-centred) progressive issues – notably gun control and sexual consent.¹¹² The company also launched an online retail store selling branded clothing and accessories.¹¹³
In 2017, the company launched a series of face-to-face ‘experiential’ events as a deliberate strategy promoting Bumble’s re-branding from a dating app to a ‘networking app.’¹¹⁴ Explaining the app’s shift to social networking in March 2018, head of brand Alex Williamson stated, ‘We like to think of Bumble as the inverse of Facebook. Where Facebook is the place where you can connect with the people that you know, Bumble is the place you connect with the people you don’t know.’¹¹⁵ This re-positioning as ‘a social networking app that facilitates dating’ coincided with the app’s introduction of user sign-up and identity-verification processes that did not require a linked Facebook account.¹¹⁶ While this move was promoted by Bumble spokespeople as a data-security assurance for users in the wake of Cambridge Analytica revelations, it suggests a shoring up of Bumble’s own boundaries of data-ownership and market share.

Conclusion

In this article, we have outlined a political economy of communication approach to dating apps, and applied it to an analysis of dating app data markets across three case studies of companies that own and/or publish dating apps: Grindr, Match Group, and Bumble. While each of these three firms are at different stages of development (Grindr and Match Group are established businesses, Bumble is a growth-phase start-up), and while each operate at substantially different scales (Grindr and Bumble are stand-alone businesses, Match Group is a large, publicly listed parent company), there are clear consistencies between them when it comes to revenue generation: all of them rely in some way in the monetisation of user data. All three (Grindr, Bumble, and Match Group’s subsidiaries) largely rely on a ‘freemium business model’ – a mix of ad-supported ‘free’ services and paid subscription services, with subtle variations on how these arrangements play out that are determined by the markets they cater to and particular platform specificities. What was also evident from the examination of Grindr and Bumble was a subtle shift towards diversifying beyond just dating or hooking-up, with Grindr, prior to its sale to Kunlun, pivoting towards the provision of lifestyle services, and with Bumble pursuing what it refers to as an ‘omni-channel approach’ by offering, in addition to dating, ‘friend-finder’ functions and business contact matching (becoming the ‘Linked-In for Women’). Finally, analysis of these cases also reveals clear and increased global concentration in business ownership of dating app services, mirroring trends in social media ownership more broadly. This is occurring through the consolidation and further strengthening of the holdings of established firms, like Match Group, and also through the emergence and rapid rise of new corporate players, like Kunlun and Andrey Andreev’s Badoo, that hold expanding dating-related and wider investment portfolios. Increasingly, these moves to both expand and consolidate their market share have shifted from through the provision of venture capital to start-ups (in the case of Badoo’s relationship with Bumble outlined above), to overly hostile takeover attempts, lawsuits and countersuits.¹¹⁷
A political economy approach thus usefully directs our attention to what the business structures, revenue models, and cross-platform and other data-sharing arrangements are that make dating apps so lucrative. Understanding these issues – particularly the evident further concentration in ownership – is vital if we are to make sense of the data markets that form around dating apps, and the implications of the monetisation of and trade in such highly sensitive personal data. This approach builds on a history of media and communications scholarship, which has connected the concentration of media ownership with an undermining of political and cultural diversity within both news and entertainment media.¹¹⁸ As our case studies demonstrate, however, concentration of ownership within dating app economies is less evident than in legacy media (such as newspapers or television broadcasters). Concentration of legacy media ownership has been critically associated with editorial interference, and the homogenisation of content, which is seen to impact on both media producers and media audiences. In the case of apps, underlying infrastructures and affordances (ie geolocative filters or ‘the swipe’) are re-skinned and re-branded to appeal to diverse niche audiences, allowing the companies behind them to build, aggregate (and trade) larger user datasets across global markets.
The value of political economy of communication approaches for the study of dating services is that they invite us ‘to think through the relations between the reliance on advertising, the collection of personal information, and the customization of the information environment.’¹¹⁹ As a critical tool, however, a political economy of communication approach does have its limitations. For instance, despite insistence to the contrary by some scholars,¹²⁰ political economy of communication is less well adapted as a means of understanding cultural factors, especially the complicated, diverse, multiple and intersecting data cultures that form around and shape dating app engagement and use.¹²¹ In addition, and as noted at the outset of this article, the difficulty of data access, particularly in relation to early-stage start-ups and private companies operating in a highly competitive market such as dating services, can hinder political economic analyses. These critical approaches are also not necessarily well-equipped for making sense of the apparent opacity of social media and search platform interfaces. As Mark Andrejevic writes, the ‘organizational schemes’ of search media firms, for instance, ‘embrace the promise of invisibility (in the form of a natural result for a search) or transparency (giving users exactly what they want) as a means of masking their own in-built imperatives.’¹²²
Thus, beyond the present study, a political economy of dating services approach can also be usefully integrated with app and software studies more generally. For example, various interface methods approaches involve not only the close reading and critical analysis of design features and logics, but also an investigation of the app’s ‘environment of expected use,’ including its operating model, which would be significantly enhanced by the inclusion of a political economy of data markets, data sharing, and business ownership structures. ¹²³ In research projects that engage directly with dating app users, the identification and analysis of such data structures and flows would not only be useful for critical scholars, but can also be integrated with participatory research activities – such as mapping ‘data journeys’¹²⁴—that aim to uncover and enhance data literacies among ordinary users.

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Author Biographies

Rowan Wilken is Principal Research Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. His co-edited and authored books include Cultural Economies of Locative Media (Oxford University Press, 2019), Location Technologies in International Context (Routledge, 2019), The Afterlives of Georges Perec (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Locative Media (Routledge, 2015), Mobile Technology and Place (Routledge, 2012), and Teletechnologies, Place, and Community (Routledge, 2011). At present, he is completing three co-authored books: Digital Domesticity (Oxford University Press, under contract), Wi-Fi (Polity Press, under contract), and Automating Vision (Routledge, under contract).
Jean Burgess is Professor of Digital Media and Director of the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. Her co-authored and edited books include YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Polity Press, 2009; second edition forthcoming 2018), Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone (Routledge, 2012), A Companion to New Media Dynamics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Twitter and Society (Peter Lang, 2014), and The SAGE Handbook of Social Media (in press, 2017). Forthcoming (written with Nancy Baym) is Twitter—A Biography (NYU Press, 2020).
Kath Albury is Professor of Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Her current research focuses on young people’s practices of digital self-representation, and the role of user-generated media (including social networking platforms) in formal and informal sexual learning. Kath leads the Australian Research Council Linkage Project ‘Safety, risk and wellbeing on digital dating apps’, with industry partners ACON Health (formerly the AIDS Council of New South Wales) and Family Planning New South Wales. She is the author of Yes Means Yes: Getting Explicit About Heterosex (Allen & Unwin, 2002) and co-author of The Porn Report (Melbourne University Press, 2008). Her latest book, Digital Sexual Citizenship, will be published by Routledge in 2020.

Notes