From romance to revenue: Bumble enters the $2 billion club

Intelligence from Data.AI has revealed that female-empowered dating app Bumble, has officially surpassed $2 billion in global user spending across the iOS App Store and Google Play. Nine years after it first launched in December 2014, it’s the only other such dating app aside from Tinder to do so. Amongst the slew of other mobile offerings in the multi-billion-dollar cohort: Tik Tok and Disney +.

According to Data.AI’s intelligence and their App ‘IQ Taxonomy’, Bumble’s numbers are primarily driven by subscriptions, with the app becoming the second most downloaded dating app worldwide in the last 12 months, as of June 2023. It ranked behind competitors Tinder and Hinge but remained ahead of counterparts such as Happn and Bumble Inc’s Badoo.

The popular bumblebee-logoed platform has been steadily growing in presence and preference over recent years, particularly for its diverse range of offerings and unique propositions in a sometimes overcrowded and frustrated dating market. Beyond romantic relationships, the app now also consists of various modes, including ‘Bumble BFF’ for friendship-oriented networking and ‘Bumble Bizz’ for professional networking, as well as several unique attributes, including allowing women to make the first move when messaging, prioritising quality and verification of candidates over quantity, and providing access to pre-filtered matches for a subscription fee.

Bumble partner and investor, Priyanka Chopra Jonas. Photo: Getty Images.

From a positioning standpoint, Bumble has also managed to shine from its competitors through a number of clever campaigns with their ‘Hive’ (ambassadors), and forming partnerships of notoriety with the likes of Serena Williams, and popular Indian actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas, as a way to foray into the Southeast Asian markets.

With online dating numbers continuing to propel in Asia and expected to reach 500 million by 2025 in accordance with GMO research conducted in 2022, 120 million of those users are anticipated to emerge from India and 80 million from China respectively alone (Statistica, 2022), it's no wonder that this has been a winning strategy for the brand, who as of January 2023, has over 50 million users in 150 countries worldwide.

As they say, whatever will bee will be.