The Vergecast - “The Hidden Hand Behind Your Swipes” from Land of the Giants

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

We are sharing an episode of Land of the Giants: Dating. Big tech is transforming every aspect of our world. But how? And at what cost? In this season of Land of the Giants: Dating Games, The Verge and New York Magazine's The Cut trace the evolution of the multi-billion dollar dating app industry. Hosts Sangeeta Singh Kurtz and Lakshmi Rengarajan explore the modern dating landscape forged by companies like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, and their impact on our hopes for connection. They answer the question – are the business goals of dating app companies aligned with users' romantic aspirations? Follow Land of the Giants to hear new episodes every Wednesday.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and you're listening to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of building your own lightsaber. I'm your friend Alex Cranes,

and I got to confess, I just lied. There is not an episode of the Vergecast today because I am in Disney World, having a great time on vacation. But don't worry, we've got an episode of Land of the Giants playing for you. This season is all about dating apps, and it's really, really interesting. I think you're going to like it.

On Friday, Neli and I will be back to talk about everything going on in the news this week with lots of other people from The Verge. Stay tuned. Until then, have a great day. Rock and roll. Lakshmi, I want to tell you about this guy. A dating app guy? Sort of.

He's been using dating apps for nearly a decade. But a few years ago, he discovered something about them that made him feel a little cheated. His name is Ev Gilbert. He's an attorney in Midtown Manhattan. It's sick that you're a lawyer. Oh, thank you.

It does surprise a lot of people. When I met him, he was wearing these heart-shaped Lolita glasses and leather pants. You're definitely the most stylish lawyer that I've come across. Thank you. That is what I aim for. And when it comes to the apps, he's seen it all. He told me he started using them when he was pretty young. Like most little gay kids, I was using like Grindr when I first started, because that's like really the only way to like meet other gay people.

Grindr was enough when he was living in the suburbs. But he moved to New York in 2016 and had a new city, new me moment. And so we decided to try some new dating apps. OKCupid was first. It had these quirky, queer-friendly ads on the subway that caught his eye. I do fall for ads very easily. Then he got on Tinder. When I started, Tinder was like, oh, this is the fancy one.

This is the one that you go to to meet a more long-term partner. At the time, Tinder was already building a reputation as a hookup app. But when Gilbert compared it to Grindr, it actually felt more serious. So he was on these apps for years and went on so many bad dates, you know, he wanted to be done. I mean, dating burnout is real. Totally. And then in 2018, he thought he saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Hinge.

It was supposed to have this sophisticated algorithm. You know, high-quality matches. The app pitched itself as designed to be deleted. And then I think the first five. five or six profiles I've seen were people I had already talked to. And some of them I had already like been on dates with, like the same dates that precipitated me switching to a new app. Okay, so I think I know where this story is going. Did you proceed to match with them or did you like throw your phone away in frustration? It just made me sit there for a bit. I was like,

this is New York. It's one of the biggest cities in the world. These cannot be the only options here? He did not throw his phone, but he was left with a rage-induced curiosity. OKCupid, Tinder, hinge, these apps were all marketed differently. They were supposed to provide distinct experiences. So why did using them feel so similar? After doing a bit of research, he realized that all of the apps he'd been using over the years, besides Grindr, were under the same corporate umbrella. Honestly, I felt kind of, like, cheated in a way. It's like, okay, Tinder has been treating me badly, so let me try Hinge.

You know, kind of like the same way, like, if you have a bad product, you're like, oh, I'm going to buy, like, that competitor's product instead. Dozens of dating apps and websites, all owned by the same company. That company is Match Group. I'm like, how, how is this possible? This is Land of the Giants. Match Group owns nearly all of the top dating apps in the United States, which means it controls the way dating works for millions of people.

That's a lot of power for one company to hold, and it got all of that power through a long campaign of buying up the competition. And steering our romantic lives? It's been a lucrative business for Match Group. It knows our most intimate preferences and behaviors. And Match uses that data. to better sell itself. To build new features that make more money from our desire to connect.

But what about users? As Match Group perfects the business model of dating, are people seeing better results? That is a great question, Sangita. Since I used to work at Match Group, we thought it'd be a good idea to hear your fresh take on Match's story. I can't wait to hear what you find out. Thanks, Lakshmi.

The dot-com boom in the 90s was about. bit of a wild west, and a young computer scientist named Gary Kremen wanted to try his luck. He had an MBA from Stanford, but his big business idea was pretty simple. He bought up a bunch of catchy domain names. Jobs.com, Housing.com, autos.com. He also owned Sex.com and Match.com. In 1995, the first version of Match.com would have looked familiar. I've seen old mockups, and, like, they've looked.

literally looked like the classified section in the newspaper, which probably don't even exist anymore. That's Amernath Tambre. He's the CEO of Match Group Americas. And that was exactly the idea. That match and all of those other domains would function as a sort of online classified space. Kremlin created a company called Electric Classifieds to house his domains, named himself the CEO, and set out to conquer the digital classifieds business. And what respectable classifieds business? and what respectable classified section didn't have personal ads. The only thing was that personal ads weren't always that respectable. In the mid-90s, a lot of the media was talking about the dangers of the internet.

Not only that, personals, which were mostly newspaper 900 numbers, had a very bad reputation. Fran Meyer was a classmate of Kremens from Stanford. When she joined Electric Classifieds, Kremlin put her in charge of Match.com. Personals had an image problem. Meyer says that the personal ads sections of local weekly newspapers often featured fake ads that were basically scams. Ads like I'm interested in a gang bang. Really disgusting. That would, though, generate lots of phone calls to the 900 number.

Okay? So this is the reason why personals were considered fairly sleazy. Beyond that, the internet was new for most people. And for those who were already online, meeting someone often meant anonymous conversations in occasionally sketchy chat rooms. So Match and Meyer had to figure out how to clean up the sleaze factor and begin to build trust.

She said that they started with the idea that men would follow women, and the way to get women on match was to make sure the men serious. A great way to do so, make them pay to use the service. Subscriptions. Once we started charging, the percentage of women went up almost immediately. And I think it's because it's sort of qualified the guys that were on the service. There were a lot of other online persons, but there was none that was really taking a brand-focused, target-focused approach. And I think that's why we emerged as the winner. From really, for the very beginning. Today we adapt our regular weekly feature computer line to Valentine's Day.

The search for true romance, as you probably know, can begin just about anywhere. But these days, many of those seeking soulmates are turning to the internet. Online dating's rebrand got the Good Morning America's seal of approval in the late 90s. By then, a lot had changed. For one thing, more people were using the internet. And culturally, things were shifting to. Conversely, things were shifting to. conversations about cybersex in shows like sex in the city and films like you've got male were helping to eradicate the online dating is dangerous and weird stigma. It wasn't enough for the owners of Electric Classifieds. Kremlin was already gone.

He'd bounced in 96 after budding heads with investors. A parade of new CEOs did not see a future for online dating. In 1997, Electric Classified's sold Match.com. This is where. media mogul Barry Diller comes in. His company bought Match.com in 1999 for $50 million. Diller was an entertainment executive who'd been the chairman at Paramount Pictures

and launched the Fox Network. In 1995, he made his last big play and TV and bought a bunch of regional stations. Then along came the internet. And essentially, we followed our curiosity. We're not deal junkies in a sense, but there was a lot of curiosity and a ton of opportunity.

And so we just followed the opportunity. That's Diller speaking to Fortune magazine. Opportunity, to him, meant gathering his acquisitions under one corporate umbrella. The name of his behemoth was Interactive Corp, IAC for short. When IAC bought Match.com, the website had 500,000 users. That's roughly the population of Minneapolis. But Diller wanted Match to dominate the whole country, and then the world.

He did what he did best and went on a deal-making spree. He bought exclusive rights to the personal section of New York Mag and BET. He partnered with MSN and AOL to increase Matches membership base. Then there was the marketing. National radio and TV spots inviting people to come and get your love. a very 2006 partnership with Dr. Phil. Jody, whoa, Jody. Sorry.

You're still daydreaming about Mr. Wright. Yeah. You've got personality, looks, IQ. You just need little guy cue, that's all. Visit Match.com today. A campaign for people who still felt like online dating was for losers. It featured real match users. In this ad, da-da-da-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-da.

In this ad from 2007, Danish Beauty 22 is wearing an evening gown. She's gorgeous and glamorous. The tagline for the campaign, it's okay to look. Whether it was Match's aggressive marketing, greater internet usage, a shift in pop culture, or all of these things, at some point, online dating became a thing. And Match.com was leading the pack. Here's Diller again, speaking to Fortune in 2009, about 10 years after first buying match. Million 500,000 people pay 25 bucks a month or so to do this thing. Now, and that's a very good margin, really remarkably solid business.

With a solid business, a good margin, and cash flow, IAC could use its forechest to level up Match.com into something entirely new. IAC is a holding company, meaning they have stakes in a variety of other businesses. And so it's like a conglomerate. They don't just have one type of business. David Marcus runs ever more global advisors, an investment firm that specializes in holding companies like IAC. Marcus is a big fan of the Diller Way. I think of IAC as a compounding machine. They just do this. They put in these times. They put in these things, spend years developing them, then what comes out the other side is a great business that can live and stand and thrive on its own. Put it even more simply, think about a magician's hat. IAC itself is the magician's hat. And over the years, he's been pulling all these rabbits out.

But these are rabbits that are multi-billion dollar opportunities. It wasn't enough that Match.com was growing and making money. Diller still wanted to forge a company that would dominate online dating entirely. In 2009, match.com became Match Group. Its strategy, to eat the competition. That same year, Match Group made its first acquisition, People Media, for $80 million. A little over a year later, it acquired Metick.

Each of these sites brought something unique to the business. People Media had niche brands, specifically social connection websites that included OurTime.com and Black People Meet.com. Medick was really popular in France and let Match get its tentacles into the European market. But the most important thing was that these acquisitions brought millions more people under the Match Group umbrella. So Match Group was growing, but it was also wary of the competition. Its biggest problem in 2011 was OKCupid.

The site was reaching younger Gen Xers and millennials who were who were curious about online dating, but reluctant to fork over $30 a month for a Match.com subscription. An OKCupid was free. It liked to rub that in Match's face. In fact, in those days, it cast a lot of aspersions on Match. Match's marketing claimed that 12 couples got engaged today thanks to Match.com. OKCupid took aim at this brag with a snarky blog post, suggesting that given Match's scale,

this was kind of a rip-off. What's more, compared to OKCupid, match was old school. Its users were still building and browsing elaborate profiles. OKCupid did things a little differently. It had users answer tons of personality questions to get a compatibility percentage with other users. It felt scientific but fun. So in the case of OKCupid, it was clearly attracting a more coastal, progressive, geeky, data-oriented person.

Amernath Tambre, CEO of Match Americas. So it was a very unique, passionate user base that liked to answer questions, and like it was a very different way of analyzing and matching people as well as assessing people. So instead of competing with OKCupid, Match just bought it. Match's next major target was Plenty of Fish, a free dating site that was wildly popular in the mid-2010s. It was launched by Marcus Frind, a computer scientist, back in 2003. And it became so successful because Frinn mastered the SEO game. When people searched for dating in L.A. or dating in New York, they would see plenty of fish at the top of the results.

Kim Kaplan joined the company in 2009. So my first week at Plenty of Fish, we went to an online dating conference in Miami. And Marcus got up on stage and was presented with a Darth Vader helmet. And it was basically them saying, you're going to kill everybody in the industry. In a 2009 profile, in Inc. Magazine, Frin talked about how he worked one hour a day and made $10 million each year running the site from his apartment. Marcus said he would never sell. He reiterated that number of times to everybody. I'm never selling. I'm never selling. I'm never selling.

Why would he? He was making millions and he owned 100% of plenty of fish. which, by the way, was true to its name. It had 3.6 million daily active users in 2015. Amranoff Tambre again. I think it was number two in the country. So that was like, obviously it was huge. And extremely popular in like the smaller towns or small town America. This was obviously a problem for Match Group,

a rival dating platform with huge reach that refused to be bought. But at some point, Frind's position on selling had evolved. He went to dinner with Match Group's CEO Sam Jagen, and by the end of it, Match owned plenty of fish. Frind left with over half a billion dollars in his pocket. It was Match Group's largest acquisition to date. With plenty of fish in its portfolio, Match Group now owned four of the five top dating brands in North America. This morning, the biggest dating websites are getting ready to woo. In November 2015, Match Group went public.

It was the moment when Barry Diller pulled the rabbit out of his magician's hat and showed Wall Street just how much online dating was worth. IAC had spent nearly $1.3 billion to acquire 25 brands for its dating portfolio. Match Group's market cap at IPO was nearly $3 billion. More and more daters were turning to mobile apps to live. meet people. While Match owned the most popular mobile dating app out there, it wasn't bringing in much money. That was about to change. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question.

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That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-R-K.com. Upwork.com. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love.

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Part of this was thanks to Tinder, which was created in an incubator owned by IAC. That relationship eventually evolved into Match Group owning the app. Tinder still had something of a startup spirit, though. It spent the first couple of years focused on growth, not revenue. That all changed when Match Group was preparing to go public. I do remember, you know, finding out like, oh, hey, we have to monetize, I think based upon an earnings call. That's Jonathan Bedeen, one of the co-founders of Tinder. And I was like, wait, we're what?

I was like, okay. Tinder had followed a common playbook, make the app free, and figure out how to make money later. Well, it was later. And Match Group wanted Tinder users to start paying up. Tinder just had to find out what users would actually shell out for. Jess Carboneau was one of the people tasked with figuring that out. In 2014, she was studying sociology at user.

and writing about online dating for her dissertation. She was also using dating apps. Carbono had recently matched with Sean Rad, another one of Tinder's co-founders. She took it as a sign when he started to message her while she was on a boring date a few days later. I was literally like back and forth while all this was happening in the bathroom, live messaging Sean. The guy either thought I had a urinary tract infection or a cocaine habit or I was just woefully uninterested. It was obviously the third option here. She pitched her research and herself, and soon enough, she was working at Tinder's offices in West Hollywood.

One of her tasks, she says, was to dig through the data from Tinder's user surveys. I helped them monetize. I helped them figure out what people were willing to pay for. She wanted to know. Would members drop money on a tool that would help them stand out from the crowd? How often were they going to use it? under what circumstances would they use it? Were men more likely to use it than women?

These were all questions that I was trying to answer in the back of my mind to understand the motivation for whether or not we should be investing in it. Her research was fed to teams that developed special features, what Tinder calls superpowers. There was the boost, which got your profile seen by more people for a limited period, and the super leg, which you could send someone to show them that you really liked them. But these features were not. not free. Amernath Tambre again.

We are constantly looking at various ways to, say, give users a way to enhance their chance at succeeding on the app. And that's something that users always willing to pay for. And users did. They spent millions seeking an advantage on the app and on subscriptions, which Tinder added next. In 2016, it brought in $169 million in revenue. And still, match wasn't finished. There were plenty of other dating apps that could pose a threat to Tinder's dominance. So Match Group went back to its old playbook. Competition? No problem. We'll just buy it.

In the mid-2010s, dating apps were mostly the same. All the dating apps were Tinder except for what's your one little wrinkle. That's Tim Matt Gugan, a former executive at Hinge. at Hinge. In the early years, Hinge was pretty much just like Tinder, but it used social media to connect users to friends of friends. We were chasing their tails. We had a swiping experience very much like theirs.

We had profiles very much like theirs. We had a couple little things that made it a little bit different, and we had a little bit of a different ethos, and all that was well and good. But ultimately, people saw us as the same kind of product, and they used us in the same way as a number scheme. But Hinge didn't want to be Tinder, It wanted to beat Tinder.

Internally, we were like at war against Tinder. We were like, we need our product to be better than Tinder's. They're all about gamification. We're all about like really like human design. Lucy Mort was a product designer at Hinge in late 2015 when that war against Tinder took shape. A vanity fairpiece on Tinder's role in the rise of hookup culture had gone mega-viral. Tinder, it said, was patient zero in the quote,

dating apocalypse. Romance as we knew it had been destroyed. Tinder had reduced it to swiping and bad sex and anyone who was serious about finding a partner was out of luck. This is music from an animated video that was part of Hinge's anti-Tinder campaign. In it, a man who looks a lot like Hinge CEO Justin McLeod wanders through a kind of dating hellscape with signs to attractions like eye candy and one-nighter.

Then he walks through a door that says Hinge and finds a bright paradise of happy couples. The campaign was called The Dating Apocalypse, the same name as that Vanity Fairpiece. It was not exactly subtle. If most other apps were just Tinder with a twist, Hinge's new plan was to be everything that Tinder wasn't, to be the anti-Tinder.

We knew that if you can really, like, get to the core of what a young single woman's problem is and solve that, then you were going to have a successful dating product. And at the time, it was like single millennial women. They were just like so tired of hookup culture, tired of like not really knowing a man's intentions. And that was the problem that we really set about solving. Mort led a redesign of hinge to make it feel less tindery.

It started with dropping the swipe. The traditional swiping app experience was a numbers game. It did lead to this, like, culture where people weren't coming into using a dating app with the intention of really like dating and getting to know someone and getting into a relationship. What we wanted to do was to create a environment where actions meant what they were supposed to mean. We knew we had to like slow people down to make sure they're really measured with their decisions and to like help get the conversation started.

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 Gugan. If we were the best at creating dates for our users, we would win. In 2017, Hinge's strategy had started to work. It was gaining users,

and venture capitalists were getting curious. They weren't the only ones. I'm always looking for what's missing, right? Is there a need, user need out there that's, that is not being served. Amernath Tambrey again. Tinder was like fun and fast and easy and like everyone loved it. But there was a certain kind of user which I think I call it like more intentional like

millennial who wanted like to spend more time on each profile, be a little more intentional about who they want to meet, learn more about that person. They wanted something cool and fun and modern as Tinder but a little like slow and intentional. In theory, acquiring Hinge would help Match Group remain a one-stop shop for any online dating experience a user could want. You know, if you hate Tinder, we've got the anti-Tinder. So in 2017, Match made an initial investment in Hinge.

Two years later, it bought the whole thing. Hinge hadn't beaten Tinder, it had joined it. But that was good enough from Matt Gugan. It was a strong sense of validation. that what we were doing was working and that we had a promising future. And Hinge maintained its image as the anti-Tinder after joining Match group. Hinge wants you to meet someone great. If it kills us.

Hinge, the dating app designed to be deleted. But Match didn't buy Hinge just to fill out a place in its portfolio. It expected the app to bring in cash, too. We needed to make money. And so we needed to show a return on investment. So 2020 was the year when we needed to monetize. Good thing there was already a playbook for that. Tinder's business model was a proven success.

It had made hundreds of millions of dollars selling superpowers a la carte and bundling them into premium subscriptions. In 2019, Tinder bought in $1.2 billion in direct revenue. It made sense for Hinge to go down the same path. What you can pay for is a more effective or accelerated experience of finding your next date. Engaging with more people at once, getting more attention. Hinge debuted a new feature called The Rose in 2020. If you saw someone you really liked, you could send them a rose.

Every user got a free rose each week. The idea was that if you were willing to part with your precious rose for someone, they'd be more likely to hit you back. The rose also bumped you to the top of their list of people who had liked them. You might be buried otherwise. And a rose could also get you access to people who are the most desirable on the app, so-called standouts. You could buy more roses for $3.99 a pop. And, of course, they're cheaper by the dozen.

If all of this sounds familiar, that's because the rose is just Tinder's super-like in selifine packaging. The reception to some of these new features, which were, after all, ripped from Tinder, was a little bit frosty. Lucy Mord again. Yeah, it's like withholding pieces of the experience and like dangling a carrot in front of a user, but being like, oh, pay us to get it. And I think that can feel like kind of shitty as a user. But it seems like these apps are improving on taking our money and making us spend more time on their apps than they are. it actually actually matching us with people that we're more interested in, right? That's Jeremy.

We're only using his first name because he works as an app developer and wants to keep his job. Anyway, Jeremy is one of the dozens of dating app users we talked to for this series. He's skeptical of the effectiveness of roses and the other superpowers the app asks users to pay for. I would never pay to send a rose to someone on Hinge. And if I did, I wouldn't think that they'd be most. motivated to match with me over someone else. But Jeremy does pay for a hinge subscription. It lets him see people who have already liked him.

And that, he says, makes things more efficient. But he's not sure efficiency has helped him find what he's really looking for, a partner. For Jeremy and many other users, it's not clear if buying all of this extra stuff is working or if it's just throwing money into the void. Sarah Satiraf is another dater. She diligently uses her free rose every week. I mean upwards. For sure, if it's been a year, then I've given out 50.

But I do it every week. So however long it's existed, I've been doing it once a week. One person has responded to a rose she has sent. A guy who is thinking about moving to her city. They talked for months before he arrived, but in person the chemistry was non-existent. I think I kept going out with him because I was like, on paper, he is so perfect. And there's got to be something here that I'm missing.

I've got to be able to unlock the connection here. And there just wasn't. And I think that's the thing. You can't account for and you can't app optimize for the connection. You just can't make that a feature. Edison Wilkinson also hasn't had luck with roses. Hinge does that, like, oh my goodness, we know you'll be attracted to these women. And you have to give them the one rose you get, or,

pay five bucks for a rose. Yes, absolutely. They do that for sure. Have you paid to interact with those women? Absolutely. For sure. Absolutely. And nothing has come from it at all. Fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me twice. I need to get off this app. But that's not what's happening. People are staying on the app and they're paying. paying on the app. In 2020, Hinge brought in $90 million in revenue. It nearly doubled the following year. Hinge was making more from each paying user, too. In 2019, that was around $5 per month. In 2022, it was 25. The value proposition of these premium features is more efficiency, more visibility, more likes, more, more, but do they allow users to achieve their romantic goals?

to find partners? I put the question to Amernath-Tombre, the match group executive. Do you think those other features do give people more success on the app? Yes, they do. I mean, like, the obvious proof of that is that they're willing to continue to pay for it because when they use it, they see results, and when they see more results, they want to buy it again. Obvious proof is a stretch.

Of the dozens of users we spoke to, it seemed that what people were paying for was the promise of results. Like, spend enough and surely they'll meet the right person, eventually. I wonder, are the roses helping people find love? Is that what the data is showing? It is, it is. I mean, I think there's a stat on the app itself that, like, if you send a rose, you have a far higher chance of getting a response

and getting into a conversation than you don't. That's not really what I asked. But former hinge execs, Tim Matt Guggen, says Matches' money-making strategy, while not perfect, is a win for everyone. Users want to go on dates. That's what the project is there to deliver. People who pay for these things are getting incremental value, otherwise they wouldn't pay for them. The roses that they're buying are working. The boosts they're buying are working. The subscriptions that they're buying are working. They're having a better experience and more dates. And if you want those things, then you can pay for them. You don't. Great.

functionally, I can know that we took nothing away from the free experience when we introduced them. And, you know, a listener might believe me or they might not. I don't know. It's a hard thing to prove and who trusts big corporations, you know. If you assume that they're well-meaning and good, they want to find you, your perfect match. So that more they know about you, the more perfect partner they can show. show you. Ev Gilbert, the lawyer we heard from earlier, doesn't think that paying more for the apps means more success. The less benevolent interpretation is that they're trying to find a way to make more money

off of you. So maybe if they know who exactly you're attracted to, they're going to give you something that's the store brain diversion. So you're like, okay, so the real one is out there. It's like, you're nibbling at the edges but never getting the core. We are sold on the idea that it's just a matter of time until that special person sees our profile and swipes right.

And paying for special features will supposedly shorten the process. It felt like someone was trying to figure out what I liked, but it didn't feel like they were trying to do that to help me in any way. What did you do in terms of that? Like, did that change your relationship to the apps? Did you stop using them? You were pissed about it? I kept using them because what's the alternative?

Lakshmi, welcome back. What did you think? I take it that Ev Gilbert does not pay for dating apps. I don't think so. In his final year of law school, he actually wrote a paper calling Match Group a monopoly. It's like that moment when you realize Procter & Gamble makes all of your household products

or that Rupert Murdoch is the hand behind a lot of the news. But then you stop and think about dating apps. you're hoping they'll help you find other humans to connect with. And then you think, uh, they're run by a multi-billion dollar corporation trying to keep its shareholders happy. That can be concerning. Is this late stage capitalism at its finest? Anything and truly everything has a price.

The thing that strikes me is our love lives are being steered by matchgroup's business objectives. So people are paying for all of these features and they don't really know if the money's getting them anywhere. Yeah, being a part of Match Group seems to flatten these dating services into money-making machines. But a lot of people feel like there aren't many alternatives to this world that Match Group rules. And Match Group truly has its tentacles in every niche of the market. From Black Singles to Single Parents to Folks Over 50, no matter where you turn, you're in the Match vortex.

So many different cars, but when you lift the hood and take a look at the engine, it's still match group. In our next episode, we're going to go one layer deeper into the system and look at the algorithms that are literally shaping our romantic futures. How daters are noticing the patterns in how the apps work, and trying to figure out ways to make them work a little better for themselves. Special thanks to Dr. Helen Fisher, Mark Brooks, and Jim Osmond. Archival clips in this episode are from CBS This Morning. Land of the Giants Dating Games is a production of The Cut, The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Oluwakemi Al-Dissui is the show's producer. Cynthia Betubiza is our production assistant. Charlotte Silver fact-checked this episode. Jolie Myers is our editor. Brandon McFarlane is our engineer and also compose the show's theme. Nicole Hill is our showrunner. Additional support from Art Chung. Jay Kastanakis is deputy editor of The Verge.

Nishak Kerwa is our executive producer. I'm Sengida Singhkertz. And I am Lakshmi Rangarajan. If you liked this episode, please share it. And follow the show by clicking the plus sign in your podcast app.