Tinder · B2C · swipe dating app
Show ads to free users to cover their cost
Small share of revenue; ads worth far less than a subscriber
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- scale
In their words
How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta
Jacob EitingI would also imagine too, if your entry level subscription product price point is pretty low, there's probably not a whole lot of people to the right of that. You know what I mean? That are like, oh, it's 4 9, 9 a month too much. I got to pay a dollar a month or whatever. There's probably not a ton of volume there,
Ravi MehtaA hundred percent. And then that cheaper tier is meant to be an on-ramp, find people that are willing to jump the penny gap, get them into a paid product that shows them that they can get a lot more from the experience, and then from there you can upgrade them to Tinder Gold or to the Microtransaction products. Do you show ads to that for users or are they otherwise monetized? They are. There are ads. It's a small part of Tinder's revenue. It's just the numbers in terms of the value of an ad impression versus the value of someone subscribing to Tinder is such a huge difference in terms of order of magnitude. It's a nice way to fill in the gap, but it's not like, I mean business driver.
Jacob EitingYeah, it's incremental. Everybody I've talked to ads is less than a quarter. I'm sure there are exceptions to that, but it's not a huge part of the revenue mix from everybody I've talked to. But it's meaningful. I mean, 10, 20, 15% part of your revenue mix is you should do it, but it's not going to be the workhorse for your business in most cases. For sure. And it helps you subsidize the free users.
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More from this episode
- Offer three subscription levels and sell extra boosts on topFormer CPO calls it one of the best ways to price consumer apps; no revenue split given
- Keep dating free for most users so there are plenty of people to match85-90% never pay; the 10-15% who do fund the business
- Interview users spending $100-250 a month, then build a top plan for themLed to Tinder Platinum; no results shared
- Test many prices for each plan and add-on, country by countryHundreds of price SKUs live at once; no test results shared
- Sell a paid 'super like' that stands out from a normal likeSuper Likes are 3x more likely to get a match
- Let people start swiping in two minutes using Facebook login and photosOnboarding cut from ~20 minutes to under 2; brought younger people into online dating
- Replace a 3-screen checkout with a 20-question intake before paymentConversion up (host says 40%); 99%+ of people answer each next question
- Sort hotels by each traveler's past behavior without calling it 'just for you'Unlabelled version converted better; labelling it 'just for you' dropped conversion
- Start at $20-30 a month; if nobody pays, fix the product, not the price
- Give a short free trial that builds a daily habit, then chargeGuest converted without hesitation; a free-tier rival he uses daily never got paid
- Sell live classes, Zoom sessions and week-long intensives to your most engaged usersRevenue almost doubled; live offers now half of revenue
- Play rain sounds the moment the app opens, and in 15-second ads
- Set quarterly goals as a short why, 3-5 commitments, and a task listGuest says teams that adopted it found it works better than OKRs; no numbers
Tags: ads, free-users, hybrid-monetization