Tinder – the popular, localized dating app – has announced a brand new feature called “Tinder Gold,” that offers exclusive, members-only features. According to the announcement, which was made via the company’s official blog, testing for the feature will happen throughout four countries “in the coming days.” Those include Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Mexico, with a rollout expected to the rest of the app’s worldwide user base to follow some time after. The announcement itself was made on June 28.
Tinder Gold includes 7 primarily exclusive features that should make it easier than ever for any given user to find a date nearby. Those include Passport, Rewind, Unlimited Likes, five Super Likes per day, one Boost per month, more control over a user’s profile, and a Likes You feature. “Likes You” allows a user to see other users who have already liked them before they swipe. The company describes it as a way for users to have immediate access to “pending matches.” The Unlimited Likes feature, as its name implies, removes restrictions on the number of likes a user can parcel out over a day. Meanwhile, Super Likes and Boosts are typically accessed through other paid options, while they come as a pack-in for the new Tinder Gold and its users. Boosts and Super Likes are used to draw more attention to an interested party from those users in their local area. A Boost, for example, lasts for a half hour and can increase profile views by up to 10 times. Passport allows users to “visit a location” virtually, effectively letting them explore potential matches in an area they may soon visit or move to – or to just explore. Finally, Rewind allows a user to go back to a previous swipe, in case they may have swiped too hastily.
It is almost certainly safe to assume that Tinder Gold will be a premium service, which means it will cost users money to gain access. This certainly isn’t the first monetization to be added to the application, but it is definitely a more aggressive approach to monetization than past efforts and builds on last year’s “Tinder Plus.” With that said, the new features may strike some people as being just a bit too “pay to play” for a dating service. However, it is also hard to see how the company could fail to gain at least some fresh income from these features, given how popular Tinder actually is. The app even sparked a meme of its own thanks to its swiping mechanism. All that remains to be seen now is how much the new membership will cost.
