In the comments section, we have been talking about the monetization of online dating and the perceived need to, for instance, “boost” your profile on Tinder to get more matches. A few years ago, Tinder was quite a gold mine for many. However, over time, even guys who used to do exceptionally well have noticed that their success rate has gone down. The current picture is that you need to spend money to get worse results than you had gotten back then without spending a dime. However, if you do not spend any money nowadays, your results will be even worse. Let me speculate a bit of what might be going on behind the scenes.

It is not surprising that Tinder wants to milk its customers. In online dating, however, female profiles are important to get male users. They are used as bait to make you, dear red-blooded male, spend his hard-earned money. This is also why dating sites commonly put up fake female profiles. It is all just to get thirsty beta males to open their wallet. Now, imagine you are some greedy MBA-type who was put in charge with “turbocharging the revenue pipeline” of Tinder, or however those people would call it. What would you notice? Well, an obvious first insight is that your income does not depend on how often Chad gets laid, past a certain point.

I think it is safe to assume that any user has a minimum threshold for success. Tinder has now conditioned them to pay money in order to get any kind of results. They need to “boost” their profile to get some visibility, or they get nothing. Yet, is Tinder going to make more money from you if they’ve gotten your money for this month already? Obviously not. They only want to deliver an experience that is good enough for you to continue. (Continue spending money, that is.) Anything beyond that point does not make any sense in the short-sighted world of your typical MBA.

Sure, if Chad got twice as much pussy, he’d be happier. Women would also be happier if they got to bang twice as many Chads. Yet, the female perspective is not even all that relevant as getting laid is just one of the many motivations behind them getting a profile. Quite a few only want attention online. They rarely meet up with guys anyway, and if they get only 500 versus their previous 1000 matches a day, it does not really affect their experience. Still, you need to keep the women happy enough to stick around on the site as well.

Here is what I would do if I wanted to optimize Tinder for the bottom line: I would get all men the minimum of matches they need to keep paying, i.e. once they have gotten a few matches, which may differ depending on their metrics, I would put them at the end of the queue. Women reject the vast majority of men anyway, so they would have to reject even more men to get to the Chads, which means that my engagement numbers such as minutes spent on the app per day, would be up. The women would also have a worse experience, but they are playing a different game anyway. In fact, I think they spend so little thought on the profiles they reject that they are all a blur. Thus, they may not even be aware that they are getting fewer results.

So far, this was a lot of speculation. Admittedly, there could be other explanations. I would also find it likely that women spend more time on Instagram versus Tinder nowadays as the former makes it possible to get much more attention. Any semi-attractive woman is able to gather a gaggle of simps, with the occasional Chad “sliding into her DMs” (DM: direct message). For attention-maximizing women, Instagram arguably promises a much higher yield. They get a lot more attention for a lot less effort. It just takes one new picture for a new flood of “likes” and comments whereas on Tinder she would have to swipe instead.

I furthermore think that the way women interact with dating apps, or the Internet as a whole, has changed dramatically. The level of narcissism of the average woman is probably already off the charts. It is not at all uncommon that they live in a complete fantasy world that has nothing in common with reality. It is almost as if they think their online existence is more real than their existence in the real world because otherwise I could not explain why they make such an enormous effort, for instance by using filters, to create an image of themselves that is nothing like them. Thus, I think there might be a two-fold issue: women preferring Instagram and, in case they remain on Tinder, using it not only less but also increasingly to get approval of a completely fake persona.

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