A Vanity Fair piece on Tinder's role in the rise of hookup culture had gone mega viral. Lucy Mort was a product designer at Hinge in late 2015 when that war against Tinder took shape. The campaign was called the dating apocalypse, the same name as that Vanity Fair piece. While Tinder liked to brag about its billions of swipes and introductions, Hinge used different metrics. Good dates per user became the app's north star according to Tim Matt Guggen.
Today, Nayeema sits down with dating industry veteran Lakshmi Rengarajan and journalist Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz before we play you an episode of the podcast they host — Land of the Giants: Dating Games. In conversation, the three explore the business of online dating, the incentive apps have to keep users swiping and the power the people who run and build these dating services have in shaping our love lives.
Kara and Nayeema will be back on Monday with a fresh episode of On with Kara Swisher. Until then, find them on Twitter @karaswisher and @nayeema.
__
Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, The League. If you’ve ever wondered why using these different dating apps feels similar, it may be because they’re all owned by Match Group, the company that helped start online dating in the 90s, and now owns two-thirds of the dating app market. Today, Match is a dating app conglomerate with millions of users and over 45 brands around the world. That’s billions of dollars worth of swipes and subscriptions. But does paying for what Match Group calls “superpowers” — things like Hinge’s ‘roses’ and Tinder’s ‘super likes’ — get users any closer to connecting with real-life people?
• Hosted by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz (@sangeetaskurtz) and Lakshmi Rengarajan (@Shmi_So_Far)
• Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear next week's episode by hitting the plus sign in your favorite podcast app
• Follow @TheCut and @verge on Twitter
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices