GTM Sauce

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

Mixedupsell-expansion

What they did

Free Tinder users see ads; an ad impression is orders of magnitude less valuable than a subscriber, so it fills gaps rather than driving the business. Eiting adds that across apps he talks to, ads are usually 10-20% of revenue and help subsidize free users.

What happened

Small part of Tinder revenue.
Stage
scale

In their words

How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta

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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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Tags: ads, free-users, hybrid-monetization