The transformation that has taken place at Match Group since I first began working here, 12 years ago, is incredible to contemplate. Back then dating websites were accessible only from a desktop or a laptop. They often required monthly fees and a lot of patience from users, who scrolled through profiles and waited for responses. Online dating also carried a definite stigma, so if a couple had met on Match, they often lied and said they’d met “through friends.” Although the sites had rudimentary matching algorithms in their early days, most users relied on “open search”: They read many profiles that might have little relevance in hopes of finding someone they really wanted to meet.
Match Group’s CEO on Innovating in a Fast-Changing Industry
When the author began working at Match, in the mid-2000s, online dating often required monthly fees and endless patience. It was mostly done by middle-aged people sitting at PCs who scrolled through profiles and waited for responses. If they found and connected with someone, they’d often claim they “met through friends” to avoid the stigma that online dating carried.
Since then, significant industrywide shifts in technology and business models have completely changed how people use Match products. Now online dating is done via apps on mobile phones; it has moved from monthly subscriptions to a “freemium” pricing model; and it has been embraced by people in their twenties, who are the dominant users of Tinder and similar brands. Mandy Ginsberg describes what it’s like to lead in an industry with such fast innovation cycles and discusses incorporating full-motion video into dating apps—part of an effort to predict whether sparks ignited online will persist as chemistry in real life.