Tinder Study

OverTindered and Underwhelmed: 61% of the App's Users are Tired of Tinder. (especially women and younger groups)

More than 10 Million people worldwide use Tinder, the dating app that has spread like wildfire in the past years. Since celebrities like Katy Perry and Lily Allen, as well as scores of Sochi Olympians, outed themselves as Tinder obsessives, everyone's been talking about the app that looked set to change the dating game for the smartphone generation. According to Tinder, 60% log on at least once a day, some as often as five or six times. But will activity levels stay high or is Tinder destined to fail once the novelty wears off?

Our new UK survey suggests Tinder is losing its appeal for many

  • 61% of Tinder users are bored by the app
  • 66% of women are tired of Tinder v. 55% of men
  • Younger groups (under 35s) were most fed up with Tinder
  • 85% of women are tired of over explicit messaging from men on Tinder
  • 83% of men are looking for sex on Tinder
  • Despite all the objections 57% of respondents said they were likely to keep using tinder

Dating-Experts asked 1608 Tinder users in the UK about their experiences and their satisfaction with the app. According to the survey, 61% of users are tired of Tinder, while 39% are still having fun with it.

 

Summary

After a long period of ever growing popularity it seems that many people are finally getting tired of Tinder in the UK. This is true for two thirds of women, but also for a majority of men. The key problems seems to be the quality of the messaging on Tinder. This received high levels of criticism across all types of respondent, and the women were especially concerned about the overly sexual or explicit nature of the messages that they were receiving. Older people (over 35s) were most content with the service, perhaps reflecting the fact that many older groups are still in the discovery phase with Tinder.

It was interesting to see that Tinder does live up to its reputation for being all things to all people. Our Tinder using respondents stated they were pursuing a wide variety of different goals on Tinder, from sex to friendship.

Despite all of the criticism, the majority of those using Tinder intended to keep using the service and not look around for other options. So while people are tired of Tinder, it seems they are not doing so well at finding better options...

 

Gender. So what is making Men and Women so fed up with Tinder?

Overall women were considerably more fed up with Tinder than the men were. Two thirds of them said they had had enough.

                                                  

The chief problem for women was that there were too many men sending explicit messages as well as lazy messaging. Men agreed about the lazy messaging, but their chief concern was not getting sufficient responses to their own messages (maybe they need to tone them down a bit!)

 

 

What are people looking for on Tinder? - Answer: Lots of different things!

We asked all Tinder users what they were looking for on Tinder and got a fair spread of results. It will come as no shock to see that a considerably greater number of men than women were looking for sex. It is perhaps more surprising to see how many women considered Tinder the right place to seek new friends. However, overall, we can see that Tinder's defining feature is still its ambiguity of purpose. People use Tinder for different reasons and expect different things from it. Is it a sex hook up app or a serious dating app? - It seems that it is both - depending on who is using it.

 

Age: Over 35s least likely to be tired of Tinder.

68% of the Tinder users who answered our survey were under 35, reflecting the fact that this is still an app most popular with younger groups (32% over 35s)

Perhaps surprisingly, older people were actually less fed up of Tinder than the younger groups. In fact, a majority of the over 35 year old Tinder users said they were happy with the app.

It was also interesting to see that it was younger groups who seemed to be more concerned by explicit messaging...

 

How good is the messaging on Tinder? How good are the profiles?

'boring or lazy' messaging was the single biggest complaint across both genders. 70% identified this as a problem on Tinder.

In separate question, we asked our respondents to rate the overall quality of both profiles and messages on Tinder. Again we can see that respondents were especially underwhelmed by the quality of the messages they had received on Tinder. In contrast they seemed to be fairly happy with the profile quality.

 

What next for Tinder users?

Despite all the criticism it seems that our survey respondents are not all ready to give up on Tinder. While a majority claim to be fed up, a majority also said that they were going to keep using the app. It seems that the lure of Tinder is too strong, even granted its drawbacks

So what is that keeps Tinder users loyal to a service they state they're so tired of? Is it addiction. Is it lack of options? Is it that the sheer popularity of the service makes people think 'everyone is doing it'? We're so perplexed by this last question that we've decided to go back and do another dating-experts poll and delve into these issues a bit deeper to find out what is behind the sticking power of Tinder. - watch this space for the answers....

 

About the Study

The study was hosted on our website here. It was advertised to visitors to our site as well as to a wider group of users on forums and chat rooms in the UK.

Since going live on the 09.08.2014, it received 1,608 responses from people who said they were Tinder users (non-tinder users were discounted from the final results). Of these 51% were women and 49% were men. 68% were under 35 and 32% over 35.


You can see the regional breakdown of no of respondents and how they answered the main quesiton
here