How coronavirus is impacting online dating

As COVID-19 has quarantined people to their homes, the dating landscape has changed. Yahoo Finance’s Heidi Chung joins Zack Guzman to discuss.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Today, we've been talking a lot about how industries have been impacted by the shutdown tied to the coronavirus crisis on our hands right now, and one of those industries is the online dating industry. Of course, Match Group, a big operator there, and they've seen traffic fall as more people stay home.

For more on that, I want to bring on Heidi Chung with more on the dating downtrend here. Heidi, what have we been seeing?

HEIDI CHUNG: Hey, Zack. Yeah, so this-- what we're seeing in the dating industry does not just impact, of course, Match Group and their business, but it also impacts everyday Americans and people around the world that are looking for love right now. So what we found out recently through Match Group's FTC filing is that the pandemic is actually creating a better user experience for people that are already on the platform. Particularly for people under the age of 30, they are increasingly turning to Match Group's products to, quote-- quote, "cope and connect."

Now, on Tinder, there's been an increase in the number of conversations that are taking place, and those conversations are actually lasting longer as well. The company says that that is up anywhere from 10% to 30% since the outbreak started in many countries. Hinge has also seen an uptick, as much as 30% increase in messages in March, that compared to January and February.

But on the flip side here, new users, especially over the age of 30, are not really signing up for Match Group's products. So how does this essentially impact the financials of Match Group? Well, Match Group's CEO says, quote, "given the impact of the virus, which began in February, we expect our Q1 results to be around the low end of the range, as we previously shared publicly," predicting the rest of this year is pretty much premature given the uncertain overall impacts of the virus.

And they actually expect that the virus impact make it-- will make it extremely challenging to grow revenue from Q1 to Q2. They're going to outline more of what they expect financially when they report their quarterly results. But for now, they're seeing people that are already on the platform using the platform more, but not that many people are signing up. They do say, also, that they're expecting to make video products more available on their platform so that people can talk to each other face-to-face, Zack.

ZACK GUZMAN: Zoom for lovers, perchance, getting integrated here. We are seeing shares off by about 7%, though, for the month, kind of flat. It was $65 at the beginning of March, and now trading at $61.48.