Dating app Tinder will soon be about more than just swiping profiles, flirty chat messages and unrequested penis photos. Soon, it will have advertisements too.
That's according to executives from the app's parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp, who discussed the rapid growth of Tinder in their latest quarterly financials call with analysts earlier this week.
"I think you'll see us begin to monetise it soon, but I think that will be more in terms of nailing the business model as opposed to a push for maximum revenue," said Greg Blatt, chairman of IAC's Match group, which owns dating services Match.com and OKCupid as well as Tinder.
"It's certainly big enough that you can start to monetise it now, but I think there's priorities. This is a small sort of startup-like team that we're building, and everything you do comes at the expense of something else."
Tinder gets users to sign in and browse profiles of people near them, swiping left to reject them and right to indicate interest. When two people have swiped right on one another's profiles, they can chat and (if that goes well) arrange to meet.
IAC now owns 100% of Tinder, after buying out minority stakeholders earlier this year. At the time, inaccurate reports suggested the buyout valued Tinder at $5bn, although these were later corrected to $500m – still a startling figure for an app that only launched in late 2012.
"Today, we – together with management – own 100% of the business," said Blatt during the analyst call, although he declined to give further details. "I'm not going to tell exactly what the valuation was, I'm not going to tell you exactly how much we spent."
Tinder has similarly shied away from publishing details of how many active users its app has, although in February, the company said its users were swiping 750m profiles a day, generating 10m successful matches.
Stats pulled from Facebook by social media industry site AppData suggest Tinder had 4.2m daily active users in April. "Tinder is getting to be a meaningful business. March global downloads were up 15% sequentially over February, and up 300% over the 2013 average monthly number," Blatt told analysts.
"The US momentum continues strong, seven consecutive months of sequential download increases. And given that Tinder has generally better retention characteristics than other products in the category, this is getting to be a very, very big user base."
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IAC is clearly making plans for advertising within Tinder, with Blatt suggesting that it's much more suitable for ads than the company's other dating services.
"I think the nature of the Tinder user experience presents real opportunities for native advertising that certain of our other products don't," he said. Blatt also listed some of the ways IAC may hope to make money from Tinder in the future.
"Yes, we're not yet monetising the business, but really that's just a matter of time. Even if all we need was take our existing monetisation playbook, the discretionary subscriptions, à la carte transactions, background advertising, we'd generate huge returns off these numbers," he said.
"And given the unique nature of Tinder, we think it presents sort of its own unique monetisation opportunities as well."
IAC's plans for advertising within Tinder indicate a possibly-shifting strategy within the company on how best to make money from its popular dating app, though.
In February, Tinder's co-founder Justin Mateen told The Guardian that "we have a very clear idea of how we’re going to monetise, but it’s just not the right time yet. It will be in-app purchases when we do, but anything we do around monetisation will only make the user experience better".
Mateen also said at the time that Tinder was keen to evolve into something more than just a dating app: "As the product evolves, we’re moving into different uses for it, doing little things that will allow people to interact socially in ways other than dating," he said.
That appears to still be the strategy. "I think there's a chance that it's something more messaging, social discovery beyond dating, other forms of discovery," Blatt told analysts this week. "It's really so early in its existence that I think its definition has not yet been written."
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