Today, dating apps have become one of the most common ways for couples to meet. They’ve grown rapidly in popularity since first gaining traction in the 2000s. By 2017, 39% of straight couples were meeting online, and over half of the LGBTQ community said they had used the apps. So it’s no surprise that making friends online is also becoming the norm.
However, not all online friends become in-person relationships. While a majority of teens surveyed in 2015 said they’d made friends online, usually through social media or video games, only 20% ever met those online friends in person. Now, that’s starting to change, as some dating apps hope to broaden their business by becoming friendship apps too.
The Shift to Friendship Apps
I feel like in recent years people are moving a lot. If you go to a new city, especially during COVID, it’s very hard to meet people. And like right now, I feel like there’s less shame because people are like, ‘How else are you going to meet people?’ Now, many Gen Zers are making friends through apps like Bumble BFF and Meetup and actually meeting with them in real life.
When I moved to New York almost a year ago, I knew essentially no one. The way I saw it, I could either swallow my pride and download an app to make friends or wait to make friends in a more so-called natural way. I was doing it when it was still embarrassing, you know, to admit that you were on these dating apps. And so it’s going to be the same thing with friendships.
Impact of COVID-19 on Social Connections
After the peak of the COVID pandemic, these apps became more popular. Connections were lost, and people moved away, leaving many to try friendship apps or join Facebook groups. When you think about the changes that the pandemic brought, like the move to remote work, I think it’s very common for folks across all ages and life stages to say, ‘Hey, I’ve grown, I’ve changed in the last few years, and I’m looking to rebuild community and connection now.’
One survey last year found 15% of men say they have no close friendships. That’s more than the number of women who reported no friendships and higher than in 1990. While technology is often blamed for driving a wedge between us, could easy-to-use apps like Bumble BFF actually be a solution to this problem?
Technology and Face-to-Face Interaction
While it’s now easier to communicate with nearly everyone on Earth, face-to-face interaction has taken a hit. A 2022 study found that non-face-to-face interaction can help prevent the deterioration of mental health, but it may not be sufficient for maintaining physical health. That’s something that friendship apps are trying to help fix and make money with in the process.
Bumble’s Foray into Friendships
One of the biggest companies to get into the friendship business is Bumble, where Beth Berger is the VP and GM of BFF. “I think that the need for community and connection has never been higher than it is today, and a lot of the ways that humans have built relationships and come together over the last decades have changed a lot,” she said.
Bumble BFF functions almost identically to the dating app on a separate tab within the Bumble app, which was launched in 2014 purely for dating. You create a unique profile and swipe right on potential friends. If you match, you chat and hopefully meet up soon after. Bumble has certainly dominated as the number two dating brand globally after Tinder, which is owned by Match. They’ve done a really great job of monetizing their user base, particularly in the United States. Whether friendship apps will become as monetizable as dating apps remains to be seen.
Despite this, Bumble is still seeing significant growth since the launch of BFF in 2016. Berger said that by the end of 2021, Bumble saw about 15% of their users on BFF, up from about 10% the year prior. With the online dating market valued at $8.9 billion in 2021, there’s no doubt tech has become a huge player in the world of relationships. Though the potential of tech dominating in the world of platonic relationships is still up in the air.
The Need for Relationships
We’re born in relationships. We need each other. We thrive in relationships of all sorts: romantic, platonic, parent-child relationships. Despite the need for relationships of all types, Bumble BFF hasn’t been an overwhelming success financially. The vast majority of Bumble’s revenue comes from users paying for features on the dating app, like being able to see everyone who has liked your profile. Bumble has talked about monetizing BFF and other relationship verticals that they see as opportunities. Going forward next year, in 2023, we have it contributing about one million dollars out of a total base next year of 1.06 billion, and only one million dollars that we think will come from non-dating.
Other Friendship Apps
Badoo is another dating app under the Bumble brand, which also markets itself as a place to meet friends. Other apps like Clock Out and Meetup put their own spin on forging friendships online and are specifically made for that purpose, which differentiates them from giant dating apps. They’re geared towards connecting people with similar interests like rock climbing or being a foodie in New York. Besides Bumble, big dating apps like Tinder and Hinge are largely sticking to romance.
Bumble BFF has a smaller user base than its dating app. That may be tied to a sense of shame associated with trying to make friends, especially by paying for it. The stigma has sort of been erased for online dating because it’s become more normal. I still think there’s a little bit of a stigma of paying to find friends. I think dating will always probably be the most monetizable use case and probably will always represent the vast majority of their revenue. But it is possible friend-finding becomes kind of secondary to that.
Personal Experiences with Bumble BFF
From my experience, using an app like Bumble BFF can be a little odd because it feels eerily similar to using a dating app. But I was successful in finding a handful of friends that way, like Alex Kristiansen. Much like a dating app, after we met and messaged for a couple of days, we exchanged numbers and met at a bar that’s about halfway between us.
“What was it about my profile that made you want to be friends?” I asked. “That’s a good question. I think you were looking kind of like a hipster. I was trying to make a hipster friend. That’s really what it was. I think I told you that you looked like a hipster. Yeah, that kind of vibe. You moved to Brooklyn, so you felt like you had to have a hipster friend. Definitely. Right.”
Anyways, at this point, it’s hard for younger generations to remember the time when dating apps were embarrassing to use. They’ve become completely mainstream, but using an app to make friends is a newer concept that still carries a certain stigma, like online dating once did.
“Did you feel any shame about that?” “A little bit for like a second. And then I was like, ‘You know, there’s a lot of potential here.’ I don’t feel any shame. I wasn’t going to make that many friends if I just went to the park or went to bars or went to the gym, etc. And I was like, ‘This is what people do to make friends now.’ And I did it.”
The Future of Friendship Apps
While it may feel strange, in a way, it makes sense. As dating norms have shifted to the internet, friends were a fitting next move for social apps. If you’re on a dating app, you’re trying to find characteristics of someone you want to be in a relationship with, or maybe just talk to very quickly, right? But you’re looking for characteristics of what you want. For Bumble BFF, you could say it’s the same thing. You’re looking for characteristics that you want in a friend. While it does sometimes feel like you’re hunting for friends, it has proven successful.
For people like me, Alex, and my fellow associate producer at CNBC, Sydney Boyo. “It feels like you’re shopping for friends, so you kind of have that initial guilt of just judging someone based on, you know, you’re literally just seeing their picture. And some people don’t even write information on their profile. It’s just their picture. So it’s like, how do I judge someone off of this? Like, I don’t know if you would make a good friend because I literally know nothing about you.”
“Yeah, I mean, people do that with the dating apps, and I guess it makes a little bit more sense there. But for something like BFF, it just, I don’t know, what are you trying to gain from that just by showing your pictures here?”
Challenges and Opportunities
But much like dating apps, it’s not a perfect system. I mean, it’s definitely hit or miss. There are definitely a lot of people on Bumble that you’ll talk to, and it just doesn’t work out. In moments of transition, like a move, new job, or a breakup, you might find yourself like me, eating alone in bed, endlessly scrolling through pet adoption websites in New York City. It really is the desire for deep connection with friends.
And so I’m not saying it’s our responsibility as a culture to find friends for individual boys. Obviously, it’s not. But the point is, as a culture, why is it that we don’t value friendships in the first place? Lacking this deep connection could have detrimental impacts. Social isolation has been proven to increase the risk of premature mortality from all causes and increase the risk of developing dementia by 50%. Young men, in particular, are statistically more likely to struggle with finding and maintaining a community. One in four men under the age of 30 said they have no close connections, and only about 48% said they’re satisfied with the number of friends they have, compared to 54% of women. But apps like Bumble BFF could help. 70% of the men who said that they’ve looked online to build friendship and community have successfully done so.
The Evolution of Social Connections
As dating apps become friend apps, some hope they’ll help everyone with the disconnect that’s been growing since long before social media and video games could be blamed. It wasn’t until about the 1940s and 50s. It’s basically post-World War Two. Post-World War Two, we essentially created the nuclear family. So then it becomes focused on the romantic relationship and the marriage as the focus of a good American family. And all of a sudden, you see friendships just drop out of the equation.
It’s a 20th-century, 21st-century phenomenon that we have put all our emotional eggs into one basket, one romantic basket, so that we think somehow we just need a romantic partner in life. I think that there has been no time in history where the need for new tools to start, build, and maintain community has ever been as high as they are today. The idea of social discovery and sort of expanding the barriers of online dating beyond just romantic relationships to more just meeting people, finding friends online, etc., is something that both Match and Bumble are really focused on.
So while in modern-day America, it might seem like technology is what’s driving us apart, it could actually be an answer for those struggling to connect and an emerging market for dating apps to capitalize on.