Tinder CEO gives dating advice & more at Web Summit

Chief executive Sean Rad told the Dublin Web Summit: “We’re about to announce a huge change we’ve made to the algorithm and we have increased the number of matches by over 30 per cent”.

Day two of this year’s Web Summit is getting under way.

Tinder’s CEO has just given hope to lovelorn singletons everywhere, because apparently the dating app is not all about the hook-up. No matter what, there’s always a deeper desire to connect with the world around you.

Rad also shared metrics on Tinder’s use.

“I don’t care about the few things the press likes to focus on that creates newsworthy …” Of course I was going to stay, I saw my role as helping the new CEO [Chris Payne] make the best decisions for the company.

Rad claims that 80% of Tinder’s user base are on to find long-term, meaningful relationships whilst 20% are there for what he calls “brief relationships” and what everyone else calls… whatever.

Rad added that Tinder is working on new features that will help its users “make more sense of the sheer volume of people around you, and build new connections and new ways to interact”.

The once and former CEO-he stepped down from that job after a colleague’s sexual-harassment lawsuit against the company, then regained it in August-reeled off a series of stats about Tinder’s popularity: more than 1.8 billion “swipes” (the gesture by which you reject or express interest in another user’s profile picture), 30 million matches a day, nearly nine billion matches total, and 1.5 million dates a week. “We are a very, very healthy business”, he said. According to Sean Rad, this is the biggest change to the dating app since its release. And if we can add more connections to a person’s life: it could be a friend, it could be something short-term, it could be a marriage, it could be a life-partner. While Tinder is often associated with casual sex, it appears the vast majority of Tinder users are actually swiping for love. “When you’re not yourself, people can sniff that”.