Dawn Hallson has tried almost every dating app you can think of – Tinder, Bumble, eHarmony, Plenty of Fish and Match, to name a few. So when a friend told him about dating on Facebook, he realized, why not give it a shot? She filled her height, if she has children, where she lives and her sexual orientation, then looked around who might be available on the largest social network in the world.
“It was just like all the other apps,” she says. “You match someone. Don’t contact you. If they contact you, they will spend the day with you – never with someone who is attractive, unless, in fact, they just want sex. ”
She met only one person on Facebook Dating, who disappeared when she tried to connect on the first date. After that, he gave up. It lasted about six weeks.
Facebook first introduced its dating product as a test in Colombia in 2018 and brought it to the United States in September 2019. Since then, the company has not said much. The last time there was much talk about meetings in a winning call was immediately after the launch. In this call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he thought it was “already one of the top dating services and we expect it to continue to grow.” In a statement announcing international expansion in Europe last October, the company said it had made more than 1.5 billion matches so far. Meanwhile, Tinder advertises on its website “over 55 billion matches made”.
But a year and a half after launch, Facebook Dating is far from a success. The company did not distribute general usage numbers and data found by The Verge suggests that the app is smaller than competing options. The company shares data only when it wants to, and because the service lives in the larger Facebook app, there’s no way to measure download numbers.
In any case, The Verge found several screenshots that suggest that the actual size of the Facebook dating product is not so large, but that it is growing. The company broadcasts internal ads that promote the number of users it has in certain regions. In the country’s largest city, New York, for example, the company advertised 278,000 singles “currently meeting” in the city this week. In Indianapolis last month, promoted 43,000 people and in Ottawa, Canada, earlier this month, claimed to have 24,000. Users in smaller cities also see hyper-localized data. In Bellingham, Washington, Facebook say it has 2,000 single people using it. A few days after its launch in Ireland, Facebook advertisement with 1,000 people in service in Dublin. The numbers seem to be both dynamic and adjustable. Just last week, the same internal ad in New York promoted about 2,000 fewer people, and a month ago, it posted 9,000 fewer, suggesting that these in-feed ads are successfully registering new users.
Who needs dating on Facebook when you’re told “God called me to tell me he wants me to marry you” from LDS and random polygamists about twice a month in the grocery store?
Facebook is becoming increasingly irrelevant to everyday lmfao pic.twitter.com/dhTC07BAck
– denali (@degandhi_) March 19, 2021
Estimates from the 2019 census suggest that nearly 4 million unmarried people turn to New York City at home, which means that Facebook Dating has about 7% of the city’s single people.
In a statement to The Verge“We have a number of brands with more active users than those in New York, including Tinder and Hinge,” said a Match Group spokesman. It would not develop numbers. However, in its latest earnings, Match Group noted that the average number of paying In the last quarter, subscribers to its apps have reached 10.9 million divided equally between North America and the rest of the world – not to mention the number of people using its apps for free.
However, this advertising data on Facebook raises a variety of questions. First of all, are these users active or just the total number who signed up? For places like New York City, does the number only matter to people living in the five neighborhoods or does it include neighboring places like Westchester County, New York and Jersey City, New Jersey? And how wide is the demographics of these users? If all users tend to be in one age group, another age group will probably not have a good experience using it.
In response to these questions, a Facebook spokesperson sent an e-mail statement saying the platform is designed to help people find “meaningful relationships” and that they are “delighted with its performance and the feedback it has. I received it from people who found love through the platform. ”
So, if the Facebook dating feature isn’t massive, why keep it? Zuckerberg suggested during the January 2020 winning call that Facebook Dating could eventually become a driving force for why people return to the app and engage with it. In the year and a half since its launch in the United States, Facebook Dating has made its way to other parts of the world, including, most recently, 32 European countries, in addition to the 20 it already has. have a deeper interest in increasing the meeting experience. Just this week, The Verge reported on an experimental Facebook app called Sparked, which sets users to four-minute speed data. If Facebook Dating itself is not a successful product, there may be other options.
However, analysts such as Daniel Salmon at BMO Capital Markets are primarily concerned with Facebook’s revenue. Because the company has not incorporated advertising into Dating, nor has it begun to pay for additional functionality, the function is not at a time when Salmon sees it as a significant part of the business. However, this could easily change, depending on how many people start looking at their data to fulfill their love of life.
“Any data Facebook receives about their audience enriches their ad targeting profiles anywhere in their portfolios,” he says. “Any involvement is a good involvement, because any involvement creates data and can be used to improve the advertising platform, even if you don’t have ads in front of people looking for data.”
Although Facebook does not, so far, ask indiscreet specific questions about OkCupid and other dating applications, it does ask for some information. He wants to know the heights of people, if they have children, who they are looking for so far and where they live. The app also asks for photos that can be uploaded to the profile. In addition, conversations can be sent to Messenger, giving Facebook more data, including pictures sent there, the exact location of the sender, their contacts, and browsing history. (The company’s initial launch in Europe was even blocked because the Irish Data Protection Commission “conducted an inspection” at Dublin’s Facebook offices and “gathered documentation” to learn more about the company’s intended data practices.)
Meetings give people who allow their data to stagnate and could have stopped uploading photos to the app for a reason to update, and Facebook gets a better perspective on how to target ads, which is the ultimate goal.
The company may never be aware of the progress of its meeting efforts, but its ambitions are relatively clear. As long as it can keep people coming back to Facebook, whether it’s seeing friends or finding love, a product pays off.
Correction: This story originally said that Daniel Salmon worked at BMO Group. The name is actually BMO Capital Markets. We regret the mistake.