Hinge (app)
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Hinge is an
online dating Online dating, also known as internet dating, virtual dating, or mobile app dating, is a method used by people with a goal of searching for and interacting with potential romantic or sexual partners, via the internet. An online dating service ...
application. The app displays potential matches one at a time and allows the user to dismiss or attempt to match by responding to a specific piece of information on their profile. The service emphasizes uploading user-generated material in a variety of formats, such as photos, videos, voice recordings, and "prompts", as a way to express personality and appearance. The app is fully owned by
Match Group Match Group, Inc. is an American internet and technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty ...
as of February 2019.


History

In 2011, founder and
CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...
Justin McLeod (alongside a team including Frances Haugen) founded a desktop service called Secret Agent
Cupid In classical mythology, Cupid ( , meaning "passionate desire") is the god of desire, erotic love, attraction and affection. He is often portrayed as the son of the love goddess Venus and the god of war Mars. He is also known as Amor (Latin: ...
, which allowed users to connect to
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and list which of their friends they had crushes on. Throughout 2012, this became a mobile application called Hinge, which launched in February 2013. The application was designed to be less superficial than
Tinder Tinder is easily Combustibility and flammability, combustible material used to Firemaking, start a fire. Tinder is a finely divided, open material which will begin to glow under a shower of sparks. Air is gently wafted over the glowing tinder unt ...
, forgoing a swipe-based
user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...
and branding itself as "the relationship app". Before Hinge gained enough users to sustain the business, the company nearly ran out of funding. When making the app, McLeod spent much of the remaining money on a launch party in
Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...
, which enabled the company to obtain the next round of funding, saving it from insolvency. Throughout 2017, Hinge received more mentions than any other dating app in the "Weddings" section of ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
''. Hinge Matchmaker was released in September 2017, claiming to reinvent online dating for "people that missed out on the dating app craze". Match Group made investments in Hinge as early as September 2017. In June 2018, Match Group acquired 51% ownership of Hinge, with the right to acquire all remaining shares within a year, and came to own 100% of Hinge by the first quarter of 2019. Under Match Group's management, Hinge's revenue rose from $8 million in 2018 to $284 million in 2022. The purchase attracted some criticism from
antitrust Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust l ...
advocates, who see it as indicative of a larger trend toward monopolization in the technology industry. The application's popularity was boosted in 2019 when U.S. presidential candidate
Pete Buttigieg Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg ( ; born January 19, 1982) is an American politician and former naval officer who served as the 19th United States Secretary of Transportation, United States secretary of transportation from 2021 to 2025. A me ...
revealed that he had met his husband on Hinge. Also in 2019, the company started Hinge Labs to research successful matches and fine-tune the app's compatibility algorithm and other features. Hinge was featured on CNET as one of the best dating sites for 2021. A voice message feature was added to the app in October 2021. As of 2023, Hinge had 23 million regular users. At the end of 2023's third quarter Hinge had 1.3 million paying users, up 33% from the year-ago quarter. The number of paying users grew to 1.4 million in the first quarter of 2024, a 31% increase over Q1 2023, with $124 million in revenue.


Operation

Each profile on Hinge features six pictures and three self-selected personal prompts (with the user's location and height always visible), which encourage users to focus on personality traits rather than solely appearance. Instead of swiping, users must "like" (and, optionally, comment on) a specific photo or prompt if they wish to reach out to other members. Users can send "roses" i.e. super-likes to profiles that most appeal to them. Hinge allows users to filter potential matches based on traits such as height, ethnicity, and religion. Users can also prevent people they know in real life from seeing them on the app by entering that person's phone number, email, and name. As a ghosting countermeasure, a "Your Turn" feature reminds a user to continue a conversation. In 2018, in order to find more compatible matches, Hinge launched a "We Met" feature which allows members to privately confirm that they have at least had a first date with a particular match. In July 2018, Hinge rolled out its "most compatible" feature, which uses the Gale–Shapley algorithm to recommend one user per day that Hinge claims is the best pairing, determined by their likes and passes. Hinge formerly used
Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
friend lists to facilitate connections. However, in 2018, the app moved away from using friends of friends as a predictor of compatibility and was redesigned to no longer require Facebook.


Marketing

Hinge marketing focuses on its "designed to be deleted" theme; when two Hinge users fall in love, the app's mascot Hingie is shown being destroyed in various ways such as getting roasted in a campfire, encased in ice, run over by a taxi, or flattened by an air conditioning unit. In 2020, the app launched Hingie Shop, selling products that can be "destroyed," such as bath bombs and
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s, in addition to apparel and jewelry. After a video made by Gina DiVittorio titled "The ideal woman according to guys' Hinge profiles" went viral in 2019, the company hired DiVittorio to star in a
web series A web series (also known as webseries, short-form series, and web show) is a series of short scripted or non-scripted online videos, generally in episodic form, released on the Internet (i.e. World Wide Web), which first emerged in the late 1 ...
called ''Cheap Date,'' which featured her trying and reviewing date ideas that cost less than $20. The series was nominated for a 2020
Webby Award The Webby Awards (colloquially referred to as the Webbys) are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over three thousand industry experts a ...
in the "Social Culture & Lifestyle (Video)" category.


See also

*
Comparison of online dating services This is a partial, non-exhaustive list of notable online dating websites and mobile apps. __TOC__ Online dating services {, class="sticky-header-multi wikitable sortable sticky-table-row1 sticky-table-col1 mw-collapsible" style="font-size: 9 ...
* Timeline of online dating


References


External links

*{{Official, https://hinge.co/ Internet properties established in 2012 Geosocial networking Mobile social software Online dating applications Online dating services of the United States Proprietary cross-platform software