Mandy Ginsberg has written an article for Harvard Business Review exploring how much online dating innovation has happened since she first joined the industry in 2006.
The Match Group CEO expressed that the transformation at her company over the past 12 years is “impossible to comprehend”. Throughout her post she marked some of the key technological milestones that have contributed to the advancement of the industry.
For example, Ginsberg noted that the introduction of OkCupid and PlentyOfFish caused seismic disruption. While Match.com operated solely by charging monthly subscriptions, the newcomers relied on advertising income.
This caused key companies to consider whether they monetised their platforms in a way that was optimally beneficial for both revenue and UX.
However, she believes the biggest shift came in 2008, when Apple introduced its App Store for the first time. Online dating companies then began to move away from desktop and began focusing their efforts on providing a product for smartphones.
Ginsberg wrote in the Havard Business Review: “Within a few years that completely changed the face of our industry—a change sparked largely by Tinder.”
Tinder was incubated by IAC and Match Group, and it became one of the most well known dating apps in the world following a viral launch on college campuses across the US.
It was one of the first apps to champion a freemium subscription model, whereby users can download for free but a host of powerful features are hidden behind a paywall.
Ginsberg then turned her attention to the future and declared that video is one of the “best tools” at the disposal of product teams, a sentiment shared by many other dating CEOs. The bullishness exists because millennials are supposedly used to the format, having spent years posting videos on Instagram and Snapchat.
She also touched plans to expand in Asia, a less mature dating market where Match Group has been showing considerable interest in recent months.
Read more here.