Online dating might be bad but young people aren’t really leaving

A lot of ink has been spilled about the death of online dating among young people. They’re speed-dating and looking for love IRL for God's sake! But as terrible as the apps might be, and as much as people say they hate them, plenty of people, including young ones, are still using them.

A lot of the reporting on this topic harps on two things: people of all kinds are complaining about how bad the dating apps are, and a perhaps surprisingly low number of young people use them.

As far as dating apps getting worse, that tracks. 

In recent years, as the apps have neared market saturation — many of the people who want to be on them have already joined them — the industry has pivoted its focus to profiting more off those already on its sites rather than adding new people. That’s meant trying to move people from free to paid subscriptions by doing things like withholding more promising matches and better tools behind paywalls. Morgan Stanley last year estimated that about a third of the US single population used online dating and about slightly more than a quarter paid for it. They expect increased monetization rather than user growth to account for the majority of revenue growth for the rest of the decade. 

It’s a decidedly unsexy move but a natural progression in a maturing industry. We know that in 2022 Pew found that people over 30 were much more likely to have paid for dating apps than those under 30. There’s no earlier data on that to show if there’s been a shift, but presumably older people have always had more money — and incentive — to pay for such things. It’s also likely that among a younger generation concerned with “ick” paying for dating can feel very “ick.”

Paying usership for Match Group, which includes most of the online dating app heavyweights like Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid, among others, declined 5% overall in the final quarter of 2023, compared to the same quarter a year earlier. (Its revenue, meanwhile, grew 10%.) Notably, though, user decline depended on the app. Tinder, Match’s biggest revenue source, saw paying usership fall 10% to 10M, while the much smaller but trendier Hinge grew 33% in that time to 1.4M. The drop probably reflects more on Tinder — which is trying to shed its enduring reputation as a hookup app — and some of Match’s older dating sites like Plenty of Fish falling out of fashion rather than something irredeemable about dating apps overall. 

A lot like social media, which has become omnipresent enough to basically be the furniture, the novelty has worn off. One could liken Tinder and Hinge to Facebook and TikTok — and perhaps like the rest of the internet they’re going through their enshittification stage.

You could also make the argument that they’ve always been bad.

“It’s always seemed strange that the system was set up such that the thing that is in the best interest of the company or the creator of the app is not necessarily the success of relationships,” Paul Eastwick, a professor of psychology at UC Davis who studies attraction, told Sherwood.

In addition to misaligned incentives, many have criticized apps for gamifying dating and offering people too many options, which in turn lead people to be flaky or indecisive.

Even the idea of having such a large pool of people to look from — essentially the apps’ biggest selling point — can be a negative, according to Survey Center on American Life director Daniel Cox. Finding people outside your friend groups means less accountability. 

“If you ghost someone or behave intolerably, I'm not going to face a lot of repercussions because we don't know any of the same people, we're not connected in any real sense, there’s not much of a disincentive for me to behave badly,” Cox, who’s written about dating trends among young people, said.

“It’s a horrific way to date.”

For what it’s worth, a little over half (53%) of those who’ve used online dating apps had a positive experience versus 46% negative, according to the 2022 Pew survey, a range that has slightly shrunk for the worse compared to a few years earlier.

Still, there are plenty of reasons to want to get off the dating apps. But as far as the numbers go? It doesn’t appear like young people are leaving the apps in any meaningful way. 

A lot of the recent reporting on this topic centers on a November Axios survey of college students that found 79% said they don’t use dating apps at least once a month. But since it’s a single survey, we don’t know if that’s higher or lower than it used to be. 

Just because Gen Z doesn’t remember a time before the internet doesn’t mean they need the internet for everything. College students, after all, have a pretty large network of potential partners close by. Additionally people are generally forming relationships and marrying later, so dating might not be a pressing issue for them as it might have been for older generations.

While young people are certainly an attractive market for dating apps hoping for their next wave of paid subscribers, they are probably the group least likely to need dating apps or be able to afford to pay for them at this stage of life.

Even still, previous studies from Pew showed that the share of people age 18 to 29 who’ve used dating apps had increased over time from 48% in 2019 to 53% in 2022, the most recent it has. (The share of all adults remained constant at 30%.)

And the apps’ importance in helping relationships form had also grown. More than a decade ago, online dating became the most popular way heterosexual couples met, according to longitudinal data from Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. By 2022 the rate had doubled to more than 50%.

As far as using the apps, younger audiences remain the largest group for the trendiest dating apps, according to data from Business of Apps, which told us that Hinge and Bumble were both seeing total user growth, with upward of 40% of their users age 18 to 24. Data from Similarweb showed similar trends: Tinder has lost monthly active users in recent years while Hinge has gained. Growth has certainly plateaued overall, but people by no means are fleeing the apps en masse. 

Like many online properties, dating apps are likely feeling a bit of a postpandemic rejection as people who’ve spent years glued to their phones are eager to try something else. But they’re not going anywhere.

“Maybe you're on one app or two apps, but you're also taking a cooking class or doing something outdoors. You're expanding your social networks in some of the newer ways and also in some of the old-timey ways,” UC Davis’s Eastwick said. “Maybe they become more part of a balanced dating diet.”