Tinder Created an Interactive Show – Gen Z Loves It
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/23/media/tinder-interactive-show-swipe-night/index.html
Kerry Flynn wrote an article for CNN business titled “Tinder Created an Interactive Show – Gen Z Loves It” which describes the Tinder app’s launch of “Swipe Night”, a four-part short form video series of original content – the first of its kind. The episodes were interactive as they asked the users to make choices by swiping left or right which would then affect the rest of the story. The choices that users made during these episodes, which were released every Sunday in October but only available for six hours, also impacted who they would match with in the future. This was a successful initiative by the company as it accomplished their goal of creating a discussion amongst users and interestingly matches on the app increased to 26% from the 12% that typically occurred on a Sunday night of the like. Whether or not you would get in a car to go on an adventure or who you would save during an apocalypse were the types of questions asked during these interactive episodes.
This article was really interesting and remind me of the concept of matching markets that we have learned in class. After collecting the data from all the answers of the participating users, the app is now able to rely on it to make better matches. Of course, no one will be a perfect match and have all the same answers to these questions as well as hobbies / personality etc… but the more accurate the app can be the better. I imagine the Tinder team relies on the ideas behind the concept of matching markets to satisfy their users to correctly propose people they woud be happy matching with. They could set a minimum percentage of similarity and then connect a node / person to everyone in the opposite gender with whom their similarity is above the threshold. After doing that for all the nodes they hopefully have a matching market and can correctly propose people in a user’s feed that are most similar to them based on the questions they have answered during Swipe Night.