More People Are Paying for Tinder Than You Think

Would you pay money in order to get rid of bad first dates? How about paying to avoid the awkwardness of having to chat with a guy you're not really into? Well, if Tinder's paid version is any indication, the answer is a resounding yes. Over a quarter of a million Tinder users now pay for those options, and Hilary Duff probably does too.

On Thursday Tinder's parent company, InterActiveCorp (IAC), reported a healthy quarterly profit from paid subscriptions to the red-hot dating app. Tinder's paid subscription model, called Tinder Plus, was first introduced in early March. IAC said in the earnings call that over 275,000 people have signed up for Tinder Plus since it's release, bringing in about $3 million in revenue. Tinder currently boasts about 32 million active users all over the world. With such a strong global user base, analysts estimate Tinder's paid features could potentially generate somewhere between $10 million and $12 million in revenue.

Tinder Plus users are able to "unswipe" a profile, or retract a match they come to regret or made by accident. Human error does tend happen when you're swiping through a endless batch of singles and some profiles can be deceiving at first glance. That Zac Efron lookalike you swiped left on while tipsy on a Saturday may not be such a heartthrob when you take a sober look at him again the following morning.

By default, the free Tinder users are then only allowed to swipe left (or like) a certain number of profiles before having to upgrade to the paid version. Tinder Plus has an interesting — some would call it ageist — pricing structure: users who are younger than 30 pay $10 a month, while the over-30 crowd pays double, $20 a month, to have access to the same features.

IAC also owns Match.com, OkCupid, BlackPeopleMeet.com, and OurTime.com, the dating website targeting singles over 50. Overall revenue from IAC's dating websites rose 2 percent, and the number of paid subscribers surged by 16 percent to 4 million. But it was Tinder's recently introduced paid model that was the biggest risk, and what ended up with the higher-than-expected pay off.

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