How Many People Have Subscribed To Tinder Plus?

This week, IAC revealed its first earnings report since the launch of Tinder Plus, but remained tight-lipped regarding exact numbers.

Their figures showed that the total number of subscribers for The Match Group’s dating portfolio increased by 550,000 compared to the previous quarter.

Using these figures, and their previous reports, we can begin to estimate how many paid subscribers Tinder Plus has added to the combined total.

From the last quarter of 2014 to the first quarter in 2015, The Match Group’s paying subscribers increased by 505,000.

Tinder Plus was released globally in early March – the last month of Q1.

Now during the four quarters of 2014, the highest total subscriber increase between quarters was 110,000.

And when you compare the increase of 505,000, that includes new subscribers to Tinder Plus, to the increase from the same period the year before (Q4 2013 to Q1 2014), it is significantly lower – 111,000.

So if the rest of The Match Group’s dating products matched the subscriber increase from the year before, Tinder’s premium service would have added an extra 400,000 paying subscribers.

In previous years, going back to the end of 2011, The Match Group’s biggest subscriber increase was from the last quarter of 2012, to the first quarter of 2013.

During this period, The Match Group’s total subscribers increased by 329,000.

So even at the most conservative estimate, with The Match Group’s products equalling their best quarter in years, Tinder would have still added around 180,000 new subscribers.

And if we imagine each of these subscriptions was the lower band of pricing, at around $10, IAC could have made between $2m to $4m from Tinder Plus so far.

Financial services firm Cowen & Co, writing in the NY Post, estimate that Tinder Plus has seen 276,000 subscribers, bringing in around $3m in revenue.

As their analyst John Blackledge noted, this is still only 1% of their total MAUs, but said:

“Over time we believe Tinder could achieve similar or higher free to paid penetration levels to OkCupid.”

Speaking about the impact of Tinder Plus, The Match Group Chairman Greg Blatt said:

“Payment and renewal rates came in solidly against expectations. As we mentioned previously, however, there is lots of learning in these early stages, and while we expect momentum and contribution to build meaningfully over time, we don’t expect it to build on a straight line basis.”

Yesterday, Tinder launched on Apple Watch, following their recent integration with Instagram.

Check out IAC’s Q1 earning report here.