Keep dating free for most users so there are plenty of people to match

David BarnardDoes Tinder have a free tier? I haven't used it enough personally as a happily married man. And how do you think about the free tier in relation to this?

Ravi MehtaYeah, actually that was one of Tinder's innovation. So dating in the very early days with Match, any Harmony was paid only in order to be a member of the site. In order to match with people, you had to be a paid member. And there were a couple of companies that innovated around free to play dating. The first is okay Cupid and the second is Plenty of Fish. Both of them saw really fast user growth because essentially they pull down any friction, they get a much larger number of people into the product, and that's always great when you have a product that has network effects, you want as many people using it as possible. Tinder came in and said, okay, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to have a free to play product. About 85 to 90% of users are entirely free, so there's very little friction to get started.

Ravi MehtaThere's lots of people that are on Tinder that are swiping on each other, that are messaging with each other. So it's a really vibrant ecosystem from that standpoint. And for a subset of those users tend to 15% who want to get more out of this experience, who want to be able to match with more people who want to be able to match with less effort they're willing to pay. And that's where the subscription tiers and the microtransactions come into …

Jacob Eiting… a lot of people. Right? A hundred percent. So you don't want to gate. It's actually interesting to me that, and I'm sure there's probably reasons this works, but so many dating apps were fully paid on both sides of the network. It seems like it would really limit your network effects, be able to get, maybe it works in big cities, but anywhere outside of that would be really tough. You'd have just tough meeting supply and demand, I would think.

Ravi MehtaTotally. And there's an interesting thing there where Tinder needs as many people as possible, and then broadly, there's two categories of people. There's people that are getting a lot of swipe rights and there's people that are not getting a lot of swipe rights that tends to break down on gender lines. So women get a lot more people swiping on them than men do. And because you have these two different characteristics of people within the system, it's important to be free so that the people who are in demand, the people that others want to swipe right on are incentivized to come into the product and don't have to pay to be there

Jacob EitingFor payers, it's predominantly men on Tinder,