Facebook is launching a dating venture and the primary storyline is that Match and its Tinder money machine is going to suffer. Enter one interesting digital business case study going forward.
The current Match vs. Facebook narrative is a bit too simplistic. After all, Match just posted its best quarter as a public company. Simply put, Match customers--especially Tinder users--are paying up for features and connections.
Naturally, those Match results and the follow up earnings conference call had a lot of questions about Facebook. It's also worth noting that Match's slide of challenges had a twin-bill with GDPR[1] getting as much play as Facebook.
The technology industry always goes for that "___-killer" headline. How many startups was Microsoft going to squash back in the day? Every category Microsoft entered was supposed to be win. Then Google was entering multiple categories with mixed success. Today Amazon is going to disrupt everything--until it doesn't.
With that backdrop it's worth noting that Match has a lot more focus than Facebook when it comes to online dating. Facebook Mark Zuckerberg said at F8 that Facebook's dating feature[2] will recommend matches based on friends, preferences and things in common.
Sure, Facebook has scale, but there's also an argument that Facebook and Match will be frenemies. Think Amazon and Netflix and how they are rivals and partners.
Match CEO Amanda Ginsberg said on Wednesday that Facebook has always been part of the dating landscape. Facebook's now dead Poke feature was a start. Then there was the Graph Search where you could search for single men by locale. Messenger and Discover People are all part of the dating mix. Ginsberg added:
We now know that Facebook is going to turn the