Smaller Dating Apps on the Rise as Mainstream Struggles

Amid a downturn for large dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, smaller, niche platforms are gaining traction. Several apps focused on specific niches or communities – such as HER- have seen a major upswing in their user numbers while the mainstream platforms find it harder to grow beyond their current size. The current understanding is that users are simply falling “out of love” with conventional dating apps – which has even lead to situations like users treating LinkedIn as a dating platform and Bumble as a work platform, purely because of burnout with how dating platforms work.

While the COVID-19 pandemic spurred record activity on dating platforms, larger apps now face a post-pandemic decline as user preferences shift. Smaller teams behind niche apps – HER operates with a team of 28 compared to Bumble’s 1,000+ employees – can more closely cater to specific communities even once they see sudden growth. Beyond that, this kind of niche platform makes it easier to expect certain types of users: for example, everybody can be open about a kink on an app focused around said kink.

With modern dating burnout becoming a very real and problematic part of the industry, it’s no surprise that the bigger players have had to make changes. While there’s absolutely a chance that this trend will reverse sometime in the next few years, there are a lot of indicators that smaller platforms are the current king of the industry – for example, Tinder’s 8% paying user drop earlier this year.