Will dating app malaise finally kill the flick? For Bumble, at least, that seems to be the case.
In one interview with Axios on Thursday, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd confirmed that Bumble will get rid of swiping, the defining feature of dating apps in the 2010s.
“We’re going to say goodbye to batting and welcome back something that I think is revolutionary for the category,” Wolfe Herd said.
Bumble plans to overhaul its app later this year after several disappointing quarters in which the app consistently lost paying users. In the first quarter of this year, Bumble’s paid users fell about 21% to 3.2 million, from 4 million last year.
Redesigning the app is a pretty serious intervention, signaling to investors that the situation is dire. But like any good CEO, Wolfe Herd has done some verbal gymnastics to argue that Bumble is doing a pretty good job of losing money.
“This has been a period of real transformation at Bumble over the last few quarters,” he said in this week’s quarterly earnings call. “We executed a deliberate reset of our membership base. We made a clear choice to prioritize quality over quantity, focusing on well-intentioned, dedicated members. This decision reduced overall scale, but substantially improved the health of our ecosystem.”
Based on Wolfe Herd’s previous comments about Bumble’s new direction, the company is expected to lean towards AI — Bumble is even working on an AI dating assistant called Bee, and Wolfe Herd has made many comments over the years about how AI will be a “supercharger for love and relationships.”
Of course, dating apps already use artificial intelligence to decide which users should be shown to each other. However, Gen Z has more negative tendencies towards in-your-face AI features, and the Wolfe Herd has expressed interest in more extreme futures, such as having personal AI bots that date other AI bots for you. So it’s unclear whether these “Black Mirror”-like viewings will effectively engage users in their 20s. Bumble’s overhaul isn’t expected to begin until the last quarter of this year, so users will still be browsing for now.
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