更多内容关注微信公众号: 铅笔英语; 课程学习咨询与报名: qiwenrocks004 Business | Swiped out Why people have fallen out of love with dating apps Tinder and Bumble are struggling as singles refuse to pay up When Tinder, a mobile dating app, launched on college campuses in America in 2012, it quickly became a hit. Although online dating had been around since Match.com, a website for lonely hearts, launched in 1995, it had long struggled to shed an image of desperation. But Tinder, by letting users sift through photos of countless potential dates with a simple swipe, made it easy and fun. Soon Tinder and its rivals had transformed courtship. A report published last year by the Pew Research Centre found that 30% of American adults had used an online dating service, including more than half of those aged between 18 and 29. One in five couples of that age had met through such a service. Usage surged during the pandemic, as lonely locked-down singles sought out partners. The market capitalisation of Bumble, a rival to Tinder, surged to $13bn on its first day of trading in February 2021. Later that year the value of Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge and scores of other dating services, reached nearly $50bn. Today roughly 350m people around the world have a dating app on their phone, up from 250m in 2018, according to Business of Apps, a research firm. In June Tokyo’s government even said it would launch a matchmaking app of its own to pair up singles in the city. Yet lately online dating has lost its spark. The apps were downloaded 237m times globally last year, down from 287m in 2020. According to Sensor Tower, another research firm, the number of people who use them at least once a month has dwindled from 154m in 2021 to 137m in the second quarter of this year (see chart 1). On August 7th Bumble reported revenue growth of just 3%, year on year, in the quarter from April to June, and lowered its forecast for the full year to 1-2%. Its shares plunged by a third in after-hours trading. On July 30th Match Group reported that its revenue for the same quarter grew by only 4%. Both companies’ market values have cratered since Bumble’s listing (see chart 2). That reflects users’ increasing disillusionment with dating apps, decreasing willingness to pay for them— and growing interest in offline alternatives. Start with the disillusionment. Apps that once felt fun have, for many, become wellsprings of frustration. The network effects that initially propelled services such as Tinder, in which a widening choice of partners lured in ever more users, have now made them exasperating. Users grumble about spending hours sorting through tens of thousands of profiles. Half of women surveyed by Pew said they felt overwhelmed by the number of messages they received. It doesn’t help that 84% of Tinder users are men. So are 61% of those on Bumble, which is targeted at women. Many users also fret about scams. Younger adults are growing especially weary of the apps. One survey commissioned last year by Axios, a news site, found that only a fifth of American college students were using them at least once a month. “It’s not fun, it’s so superficial and it’s also just like really exhausting,” laments one youthful influencer on TikTok, a short-video app. “I’m kind of over it,” sums up Wunmi Williams, a 27-year-old who, after years of swiping and matching, has been unable to find a partner through a dating app. In a sign of growing despair, the Marriage Pact, an annual event in which participants are matched with a “backup” spouse should their future romantic endeavours fail, has spread to 88 college campuses across America. All this helps explain why dating-app developers are struggling to convince users to part with cash—the second reason for their lacklustre performance. In an effort to boost margins, dating apps have been peddling paid upgrades to supplement their lowly ad revenues. Hinge has a separate feed with popular profiles it thinks you might like, but demands that you hand over $3.99 for a “rose” before you can chat with them. Tinder’s paid plans range from $17.99 a month (which gives you unlimited swipes and lets you change your location) to a hefty $499 a month (which lets you see the most popular profiles on the app and message users you haven’t matched with). Got the ick Online dating may no longer look desperate, but users seem to worry that paying for it might. The share of people who are willing to spend money on dating apps has been falling. Tinder’s paid users have declined for seven consecutive quarters. Men are more likely to cough up, which may be worsening the feeling common among women of being bombarded by messages on the apps. 文本补全, 因为超出了字数限制. 欢迎到铅笔英语查看完整文本. 更多内容关注微信公众号: 铅笔英语; 课程学习咨询与报名: qiwenrocks004

更多内容关注微信公众号: 铅笔英语; 课程学习咨询与报名: qiwenrocks004 Business | The taste of things to come Chinese fast-food insurgents are beating McDonald’s and KFCThe healthy appetite comes from smaller cities [截屏2024-06-08 13.21.03] WESTERN CHAINS used to dominate casual dining and drinking in China. The arrival of a Kentucky Fried Chicken in a Chinese city was once regarded as a developmental milestone. Today China is home to 10,000 KFCs (whose owner, Yum China, was spun off from its American parent in 2016), more than twice the number in America. Starbucks has 7,000 coffee shops and McDonald’s boasts 6,000 burger joints. The foreigners’ cash and cachet made it hard for locals to compete. Now the tables are turning. Starbucks’s Chinese sales fell by 8% in the first quarter, year on year, and Yum China reported a drop of 3%. Yet even as they lose their appetite for foreign chains, Chinese consumers cannot get enough of domestic ones. Tastien, which fills hamburgers with local delicacies such as Peking duck or mapo tofu rather than beef, has opened 1,600 new shops in the past six months, bringing its total to 7,000. Wallace, another burger-flipper, now has more than 20,000. Cotti, a two-year-old coffee-shop chain, plans to have that many by the end of 2025, up from 6,000 last October. An older caffeine-pedlar, Luckin, opened 8,000 in 2023, doubling its network. Mixue hawks its bubble tea through 36,000 outlets. Investors are licking their lips. Mixue, which also sells ice cream and churned out 2.5bn yuan ($350m) in net profit in the first nine months of 2023, may soon seek a $1bn initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong. A rival tea-seller, Chabaidao, raised $330m when it listed there in April. Another, Chagee, is said to be preparing for an IPO in America. According to local media, the privately held Tastien is valued at 7bn yuan. A big reason for the sudden popularity of domestic chains is their lower prices. Rather than forgo lattes as China’s economic prospects sour, consumers are trading down. Luckin is selling coffee at a promotional price that is one-third that of an equivalent beverage at Starbucks (it is also lacing some coffees with baijiu, a local firewater). Mixue and Cotti offer similarly cheap (though less boozy) fare. Another explanation has to do with geography. Many homegrown chains come from places other than China’s rich megalopolises such as Shanghai. Cotti and Wallace opened their first outlets in Fuzhou, a “tier-2” city in the south-east. Tastien was founded in Nancheng, an inland railway hub likewise considered second-tier. Those are also the places where such chains are expanding most aggressively, in part because Western rivals have historically ignored them. About half of Tastien’s outlets are in second- and third-tier cities. Luckin’s rapid growth has been driven by its expansion in these relative backwaters, according to Nomura, a bank. Starbucks, by contrast, has barely ventured beyond the biggest cities in the past two years. This has allowed the locals to take advantage of perkier consumer sentiment in such places. According to McKinsey, a consultancy, 30-somethings living there are less gloomy about their prospects than their metropolitan coastal counterparts. UBS, a bank, recently found that residents of smaller cities intended to spend more on dining, cosmetics and sportswear than those in larger conurbations. Can the feast last? Foreign rivals are catching on. Between January and March about 60% of new Chinese KFCs and Pizza Huts (also owned by Yum China) opened in cities that are no bigger than third-tier. Many of the 4,000 new restaurants that McDonald’s is planning to open by 2028 are expected to be in smaller towns. Potentially more worrying, Chinese consumers’ belt-tightening mood may spread inland from the coasts. Overall growth in retail sales has already slowed to 2.3% in April, year on year, down from 3.1% in March and 5.5% in the first two months of the year. Despite its piping-hot growth, and a near- tripling of pre-tax profit last year to 3.1bn yuan, Luckin’s shares have lost half their value since October. Chabaidao’s share price is down by more than 40% relative to what investors just paid at its IPO. Not the sort of bubble investors had in mind.