KOREA EXPOSÉ - Feb 19 - The 2018 Winter Olympics are now under way. So it's not surprising that multiple media have reported a 348% increase in usage of Tinder in the area since the games began in early February. Tinder made its debut in South Korea in 2015 but despite its international popularity, the dating app is still largely unknown in a country notorious as the graveyard of many foreign-born startups and companies including Uber and Google. The country's online dating industry is valued at 70B won ($66M), according to a 2017 study by An Hyo-Jin and Kim Seung-in of Hongik University. Shin Sang-hoon is CEO of Nextmatch, the company that owns the most popular South Korean dating app Amanda. He told Korea Exposé that Amanda had ~4M users in South Korea. Given that there were ~8.54M bachelors (aged between 20 and 39) in the country in 2016, it can be inferred that one out of two South Korean bachelors has used or is using dating apps. Tinder has successfully established itself in Hong Kong and Singapore (but not in China because the app insists that users log in via Facebook, which is blocked in the people's republic).
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