Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-12/tinder-price-setting-more-expensive-for-older-people-looking-to/12549186

by rstuart4133 • 6 years ago

74 120 6 years ago

abc.net.au

00deadbeef2• 6 years ago

Not just straight men. Gay men too. I complained to Apple about this and they didn’t care.

On iOS at least you can get around this. Create a profile aged 18 and purchase a subscription. Now sign out and create your real profile and use the “restore purchases” option.

tomp2• 6 years ago

I never used Tinder myself but based on what I’ve come across on Reddit, if your profile is “premium” you can just hide your age? I guess that could mess up your target matches but you can presumably still set your own age range filter.

EE84M3i4• 6 years ago

To anyone that knows anything about tinder having age hidden implies that you have premium implies that you are desperate. Only a fool would use the hide age option.

00deadbeef2• 6 years ago

Your age is hidden from view but you are still subject to other people’s filters

madballster• 6 years ago

Single, old men are charged more in swinger clubs. Maybe that's where Tinder got the idea.

Jestar3423• 6 years ago

Wow they seem really hell-bent on implementing this given they lost/settled a suit in California for it, and now have been "found out" in Aus, too.

55555• 6 years ago

They've always done this, no?

reallydontask2• 6 years ago

It found that queer females aged under 30 were charged the least, at just $6.99 per month, while city-based straight men over 50 were charged the most, at $34.37 a month.

Any Australians care to comment on the use of queer?

It's pretty derogatory in the UK (in the context of sexual orientation)

edit:

added, in the context of sexual orientation

edit 2:

looks like my knowledge is outdated then :)

p1necone• 6 years ago

I'm in New Zealand and queer is used by the gay community as a positive/less specific term here.

ictebres• 6 years ago

I am not a native English speaker, but queer is repurposed by the LGBT community to include everyone, under a single name [1]. It can even include heterosexuality [2]. I definitely do not read it in any derogatory way, and would identify myself as queer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_heterosexuality

Edit: formatting

schemy• 6 years ago

It's an American term and like usual cultural imperialism means everyone else must use it too.

dmurray• 6 years ago

It's the "Q" in LGBTQ... so it's definitely a word that is being "reclaimed".

Pretty much any word can cause offence these days, but ABC have presumably been advised on a house style that is acceptable.

Edd314159• 6 years ago

I'm in the UK and I don't get the sense that it's derogatory (though I'm a straight male myself, so maybe I'm not the best judge)

Isn't "queer" the Q in LGBTQ, an acronym that most will happily identify with? Perhaps it _used_ to be derogatory, but it appears has been redefined into something positive.

theelous34• 6 years ago

The Q in lgbtq is queer, a term reappropriated a long time ago by the non-cis communities. I don't know of anywhere that thinks of it as a slur, unless you use it like one. Similarly, you can make any descriptor a negative with the right intonation.

"I wouldn't hire that woman."

"I wouldn't hire that woman"

nicoburns• 6 years ago

looks like my knowledge is outdated then :)

Yeah, I think this is partly a generational thing. My step-mum (in her 50s) was a bit taken a back when I used the word queer casually in conversation. But my 20-something friends in the gay/trans community pretty much all use queer to describe themselves.

I think it became popular partly as a reclamation of the word, and partly because the LGBTQIA acronym got so long and unwieldy. People want to be inclusive, but nobody wants to say LGBTQIA often.

reallydontask2• 6 years ago

I need to get out more clearly, I'm only 43

EE84M3i4• 6 years ago

They should be more transparent about their pricing, but it seems to me like they offer different demographics fundementaly different services so charging different amounts isn't unreasonable.

theelous34• 6 years ago

fundementaly different services

Like what?I went through tinders sales page for their tiers and can't see anything that would offer a different experience based on any demographic: https://www.help.tinder.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004487406-T...

I get the feeling you may respond telling me that people over 30 are looking for a different type of relationship, to which I say that no type of relationship has a feasible monetary induction price, and even if it did, it is impossible to know which users are looking to have a fling and which are looking for an SO.

EE84M3i4• 6 years ago

People have wildly different experiences on tinder based on gender and age, among other things. It would follow that they value the premium features differently and be willing to pay more or less for them too.

to which I say that no type of relationship has a feasible monetary induction price

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

yladiz• 6 years ago

To add to this, as someone who has used the app before I'd be genuinely surprised if the experience they are given was in fact substantially different enough to warrant some people AU$7 while charging others over AU$30 (!!). The paid version allows you to change your swiping location (meaning you can match with someone in a different city), have a few more "super likes", and a couple other features. It's possible there are things I don't know about, or that some of the shoppers also added on the extra "gold" membership[1] in the article, increasing the price, but considering the experience already I think they're just doing differential pricing based on demographics and not actually giving a different experience.

1: The paid membership gives you a lot of features, but one thing you can additionally pay extra for is the ability to see who has liked you directly, so called "Tinder gold".

qshqwudhoquc5• 6 years ago

I don't think a different algorithm counts as a different service, and other than that what could be different about it?

username902• 6 years ago

Women don't need infinite likes, their match rate is very high so 100 likes per day is more than enough to get more conversations than they can handle. So in practice women already have infinite likes for free since they aren't used up anyway. Men's match rate is often less than 1%, so they need hundreds of likes just to talk to a single woman, without infinite likes chances are they will use up all their likes for the day and not get a single match.

So, if we take that into account women get maybe 25 free matches per day and men maybe 0.5 free matches per day. Men pay so they can get more matches per day, women don't. The service cost is per match and not per like. A man liking 1000 candidates costs as much as a woman rejecting 1000 candidates.

clusterfish5• 6 years ago

Charging people different prices based on factors they can't control, and in secret to boot, is just wrong. Whether it's age or race or eye color, it's wrong. Why are people so greedy that they need to push against such simple principles so hard?

gaff33• 6 years ago

What about car insurance? Is it ok to charge more to insure teenage drivers?

aspenmayer4• 6 years ago

You can control if you drive or not despite your ability or lack thereof to control a car. Just don’t get behind the wheel.

taspeotis• 6 years ago

In Australia they don’t charge more on the policy, but if you have an accident your co-pay is higher if you are young, have had your license for fewer than X years, the car is high power e.g. sports car.

But if you don’t crash you pay the same as the next regular Joe.

gambiting8• 6 years ago

No, it isn't, I've been making this argument for years. In all of EU it's illegal to charge more for insurance based on gender, it should also be illegal to charge more based on age. Only your actual driving record, type of car being insured and possibly location should be taken into account when calculating the premium.

clusterfish5• 6 years ago

I'd say yes in principle, because the cost of providing insurance is mostly the cost of risk which objectively and significantly correlates with age. Same for health insurance for example. Taking more profit off younger drivers would still be wrong though imo.

If the underlying cost of the service is legitimately and significantly affected by age, sure, charge accordingly. Tinder's case seems different.

The examples above are about age because any rules about age at least apply more or less consistently to all people as people age over time. I'm not saying that doing the same kind of pricing by other personal traits such as race or gender or eye color would be ok, just so that we're clear.

antihero• 6 years ago

Is it ok to charge people more based on postcode? IE charge poorer people more because they live in areas with higher crime.

I think no. Everyone should shoulder the costs.

skocznymroczny• 6 years ago

OKCupid also charges men, especially more than women for their premium service. It's common on online dating apps.

Not much different than real life... in many clubs women can go inside for free while men have to pay entry ticket fee.

qshqwudhoquc5• 6 years ago

My issue with this is that these decisions aren't necessarily being made because of operating costs. It doesn't cost more to host a man than a woman.

gambiting8• 6 years ago

Having too many men can impact the experience women have, and if they leave then the entire platform collapses. The cost to "host" a user is the same regardless of gender but platforms like these work only if the gender ratio is at least somewhat balanced - the fee seems to help with that, just like it does in a physical club(where it also doesn't cost any more to host a man than it does a woman).

arketyp• 6 years ago

More drinks will be bought if there is a certain ratio.

hombre_fatal• 6 years ago

Meh, it's just like cover prices at a club. As a guy, you can let the "unfairness" bother you, or you can realize it's in your best interest to minimize barriers for women because basically everything is a saugagefest otherwise.

Then again, the actual figures in the article tell a different story than the title does.

- Queer female under 30: $7/mo

- Straight female over 30: $30/mo

- Straight male over 50: $35/mo

So it's really age in general.

Though I'm a male in my 30s in a metro center and it's just showing me $8/mo. Though that's probably just Tinder's AI recognizing me as the gift to women that I am.

Also, Tinder Gold is optional. I'm a heavy dating-app user and would never pay for premium features.

Sharlin• 6 years ago

It's simply supply and demand. There are many more men than women using most dating services.

PeterisP• 6 years ago

It's perfectly normal that these decisions aren't necessarily being made because of operating costs, pricing in general is arbitrary and does not have to have any relation whatsoever with costs.

roenxi• 6 years ago

Commerce has never been done on the basis of operating costs. Go look at the price difference between a cheap shirt and an expensive shirt. The change in operating costs is nothing compared to the price difference.

mrtksn• 6 years ago

The cost doesn't have anything to do with the price(except for setting the bare minimum if you want to break even).

If the price is higher that what it should be, there's your opportunity to sell your matching service at lower prices.

fimdomeio• 6 years ago

The fact that is common doesn't make it right.

ChuckNorris892• 6 years ago

There is no right/wrong here, Tinder is a business, not a public square or a public service, you choose willingly to use their service so they can charge whatever they want, nobody is forcing you to use it.

Just like in a night club or country club, the house is free to set whichever memebership rules it wants, if you don't like them you are free to go somewhere else.

Unlike the jobs market, the dating market and its (discriminatory) dynamics is not something the government could regulate.

goldenManatee• 6 years ago

This practice only works if companies keep paying male workers more, since essentially this is getting males to pay for those services keeping the lights on. The beneficiaries probably won’t complain since they pay less, but charging guys more is an inherently sexist practice which only makes sense continuing in a world with sexist salary and compensation practices.

Udik2• 6 years ago

I know it's common, but shouldn't it be illegal?

asdff3• 6 years ago

You'd think with rules on the books against discriminating on the basis of sex that it would be a slam dunk case, for this and night club covers, but there must have not been a serious legal challenge to the practice yet.

sasaf52• 6 years ago

Not only this, at least last year (when I abandoned Tinder for good) they were charging women more for the "daily picks" feature (it selects top ranked profiles).

aspenmayer4• 6 years ago

What does this feature do? Does it basically stack your match deck so high ranks are top pull every time? Really makes Tinder seem like a one-armed bandit. Either you pay and get quality folks on balance, due to ratings and such washing out the boys from the men, or you play your hand on randos. And people actually pay for this privilege?

What a world.

username902• 6 years ago

Not really, men don't want high value women since men rarely get matches even when they reject nobody and get the less selected women. Women get matches all the time so they reject almost every candidates to get to the good ones, so to them the feature to remove results they would probably reject anyway is more important. However even for women with this feature you only get men who has plenty of options and is still looking, do you really want that? You are very unlikely to get a long term relationship that way.

xd• 6 years ago

I've only done a quick bit of research but can't seem to find a clear list of protected characteristics in Oz like we have in the UK, age being one of them.. I don't use tinder but just looking up their pricing model it's £3.99 for under 28yo and £14.99 for 28yo and over in the UK... how is this not a breech of the Equality Act 2010?

qshqwudhoquc5• 6 years ago

I'm the last person to defend old men from discrimination (mostly because it's uncommon), but yeah this doesn't sound right to me.

gambiting8• 6 years ago

Did you have to add the "white" in there? Was it definitely necessary or adding anything to this discussion?

dschuetz• 6 years ago

One more reason not to use online dating platforms.

Razengan2• 6 years ago

Or create better ones.

pixelpoet• 6 years ago

Seriously, I would donate to an opensource no-frills efficiently run platform that isn't selling your data etc.

Cthulhu_5• 6 years ago

Great in theory, in practice you'll land in a hugely competitive market and you'll be struggling to find enough people to sign up.

Actually you'll likely find plenty of men, but women - actual, genuinely interested women, not bots / scam accounts - is a lot more difficult.

Personally, I think one should create social communities and have things develop from there, not dating sites where the only reason to go there is to find a match.

Source: met my girlfriend via gaming forums. I mean sure it took over ten years between first seeing each others' usernames on there and her moving in, but still.

aspenmayer4• 6 years ago

I don’t agree with discrimination in pricing or any other kind in that sense on the platform side. Never paid for Tinder either, but for what it’s worth I did meet my wife on there. And she’s amazing, so there’s that.

nom• 6 years ago

Adjusting prices by demographic is so common in many industries.

Charging less for children, families and the elderly is the same thing. Charging less for women in clubs. Same with booking hotels and flights, based on browsing history, IP address, cookies and the extrapolated demographic.

Even a repair contractor adjusts his prices up for someone who lives in a mansion with expensive cars in the driveway, and down for a single mother with three young kids running around her.

Of course Tinder charges more for older men, why wouldn't they. Every industry ever wanted to be able to do this, and some can now automate it easily with all the available demographic data they collect.

WilTimSon• 6 years ago

"Nowhere on Tinder's website, privacy policy, or in its terms and conditions does the company say that it will charge you a different price based on your personal data," Choice's Erin Turner said.

This is the key bit here. You go in expecting a level-ish playing field (it's not really level, obviously, but for other reasons.) Turns out that to even get access to the same service as young people, you have to pay 5 times as much as them. Dating when you're older is already difficult so making it even more difficult isn't exactly great.

Now, the argument here is that Premium is a choice, you don't have to get it. That's true but I still find it unfair that certain categories get an artificially inflated price. I'm fine with discounts for younger people as they tend to earn less (especially queer women, which are noted as having the lowest asking price for Premium.) However, it shouldn't come at the expense of other users.

rzwitserloot2• 6 years ago

However, it shouldn't come at the expense of other users.

This seems extremely naive.

What is the difference between these two hypothetical grocery stores:

At Pete's, apples cost $3 per kilo, but if you're under 25 and can prove it, pete will give you a $1 discount.

At Jane's, apples cost $2 per kilo, but if you look over 25, jane will stick you with a $1 'ugly old fart' surcharge.

And yet you seem to be arguing that jane's store is over the line, but pete's is a-okay.

That seems rather silly. So all Tinder has to do is adjust _the wording_ used in their tiered pricing model and they're in the clear?

theredlion5• 6 years ago

Dating when you're older is already difficult so making it even more difficult isn't exactly great.

Honestly 50 people have given this similar vibe. You people make it seem like someone has a gun to your head, forcing you to use a dating app. There are alternatives. It's a free market. If you don't like something, don't spend money on it.

M2Ys4U• 6 years ago

Adjusting prices by demographic is so common in many industries.

And often illegal.

Discrimination based on sex/gender or age is (usually) prohibited in Europe, for example, unless there are very compelling grounds to do so.

gridlockd2• 6 years ago

The fact that there's a 10:1 ratio of male to female users on dating platforms might be considered "compelling".

ChuckNorris892• 6 years ago

If we reverse the "expensive for older men" and call it "discount for younger men/free for women" is it still discrimination?

rzwitserloot2• 6 years ago

Discrimination based on sex/gender or age is (usually) prohibited in Europe

From museums to bus fares, europe is littered with discounts for 65+ and <12 or <18.

So is this a case where government run orgs get to price discriminate but business can't, or where the laws make explicit exceptions for gigantic subsets of the economy (I'd call transportation a pretty big sector), or... what? Your claim that price discriminating based on age is illegal in the EU is hard to believe without some proof.

polote2• 6 years ago

Tinder has two goals:

- make the most money from vulnerable people

- make non vulnerable people behave like if they were on a social network

Having different price, per geography, gender and age is just a consequence of the first.

It is not surprising that you can't see anymore the instagram handles of people on tinder. Instagram is a direct competitor to tinder for most of their users ( the non vulnerable ones).

Actually that's very smart, Tinder is probably the only big social network (tinder is not a dating app) which didn't require ads or a lot of funding to get big, only because one small portion of their user are willing to pay to be part of their community

aspenmayer4• 6 years ago

Thank you. You said what I was thinking. It’s a parlor trick to get people to lower their guard like they do at a club with chill vibes and good people through subtle polish and serviceable functionality. It’s not Wolfram they’re coding at Tinder but I am curious what they are coding there. It’s a mystery.

NestedLoopGoBrr3• 6 years ago

Tinder removed the IG handles more likely because men were stalking women’s instagrams and it wasn’t immediately obvious connecting to instagram was going to display your username for all to see.

polote2• 6 years ago

Bumble did it for that, probably not tinder. Most people who put their insta expect others to be able to add them on insta. This is the whole point of insta, it is to have the most people as possible watching at you. Tinder has always struggled to keep users in their app, which is the most important goal when you are a social network

gridlockd2• 6 years ago

I doubt this is (potentially illegal) age-based discrimination, more likely it's sexual-market-value-based discrimination. It's easy for Tinder to determine who is or isn't attractive - older men just happen to be at a disadvantage here. It's not Tinder making that choice, it's the women on the platform.

Charging more in this case is arguably in the interest of older straight men. The experience of a woman on a dating platform is to get bombarded by hundreds if not thousands of messages. Do you, an affluent man in his best years, want your profile to be drowned by out by hundreds of losers that never stood a chance? One way to mitigate that is to limit exposure to people willing to afford a modest amount of money.

Let's face it, if you are old and you can't afford 30+$/month for something as significant as dating, you are not going to find a woman anyway, might as well take you out of the game so as not to annoy the women on the platform with your unsightly presence.

Razengan2• 6 years ago

Dating apps are probably one of the best examples of conflict of interest: Your purpose is to help people stop using your service!

When money comes into play, you obviously don't want your users to leave.

Honestly, at this point, who is to say that the good matches are not paid employees acting as real users, or that "ghosting" (ending matches or blocking messages) isn't forced by the service, to induce an addiction? Clearly they can get away with scummy tactics, so why not milk all the money they can?

Cthulhu_5• 6 years ago

Plenty of dating sites have been proven to have fake profiles, or being rife with bots trying to sell premium chat- or cam services and scams.

Example from a quick search: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/09/ftc-s...

est312• 6 years ago

Dating apps are probably one of the best examples of conflict of interest: Your purpose is to help people stop using your service!

Most companies that offer some product are in this dilemma. You want to satisfy your customer's demands but not too much so that they come again. You could sell them a laundromat or fridge that lasts 40 years, but you rather sell them one that lasts 10 and welcome them back in your shop much sooner. Planned obsolescence basically.

hatedatingapps2• 6 years ago

I used to work for the third largest online dating company in the world, and we had a tedious 150 questions quiz even before user were allowed to login in the app. And guess what: this test was only used to define a pricing bucket for the user depending on their past dating experience, how desperate they are, location, device os and other factors. There were some psychology related questions and a decision tree to dig deeper in one's soul.

hatedatingapps2• 6 years ago

And their whole business model was built around an idea to trick user into paying yearly subscription for the first year and then do whatever it takes to make them pay for the second year. Cancelling subscription was a quest itself, and given that couple of company's brands are targeting >50 years old people, it was relatively easy to scam them and not return the money

hellisothers• 6 years ago

To the people complaining this isn’t fair, let’s agree that:

* they’re not doing this to make more money off the higher charges cohort as that doesn’t make sense * they’re trying to make they most money, period, and that is done by attracting the most people overall * in order to do that they’re trying to maintain a ratio that attracts all cohorts of all sexes, ages, and orientations * because there is some non-reciprocal demand among cohorts (more older men like younger women than vice versa)

So if they just charged everybody an equally low rate you’d wind up with a lopsided population that none of the cohorts want and people would leave. Nobody wants this.

So arguing it’s not fair because discrimination isn’t fair as a rhetorical argument feels intellectually dishonest since the state you’re advocating for is a failed one.

ryandrake• 6 years ago

To me, this isn't a discrimination thing as much as it is simply different prices for different products. Dating sites offer men and women wildly different products. Men (especially older men) are paying for volume--a steady supply of potential matches, since matches are extremely rare. Women are paying for a filter, since otherwise they would all be inundated with matches all the time. Totally different products. I'd imagine the product for men is likely a lot more difficult to provide, too, hence the higher price.

Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

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