Undoing a swipe on Tinder is a privilege worth paying for.
That’s what more than 250,000 prowlers across the global dating scene have already decided since the red-hot hookup app launched a paid version of its service last month, according to numbers released this week.
Billionaire Barry Diller’s IAC Interactive Corp., whose Match Group unit owns Tinder as well as dating sites like Match.com and OKCupid, said the ranks of paying subscribers to its dating sites topped 4 million in the most recent quarter.
That’s an increase of more than 500,000 subscribers in the quarter, more than twice the gain many analysts had expected.
“Payment and renewal rates (for Tinder) came in solidly against expectations,” Match Group chairman Greg Blatt said.
More than half of that bigger-than-expected gain came from new subscriptions to Tinder Plus, execs said. Cowen & Co. reckons 276,000 Tinder Plus subscriptions have been sold since the March 2 launch, generating about $3 million in revenue.
That’s less than 1 percent of Tinder’s global base of about 32 million monthly active users, Cowen analyst John Blackledge noted.
“Over time we believe Tinder could achieve similar or higher free to paid penetration levels to OkCupid,” Blackledge wrote, estimating that OkCupid’s paying subscribers are a high-single-digit percentage of the whole.
Launched in early March, the new service gives users the ability to undo “swipes” and past profiles that may have been made in haste. The service also has a “Passport” feature that allows a larger search area.
“We think [Tinder] has reached unmatched global scale in terms of its user base,” Barclays analyst Chris Merwin said, estimating that the app has the potential to generate between $10 million and $12 million a quarter.