Finding a soul mate in the age of social distancing.
Deprived of meeting places such as bars or parties with friends, singles found refuge on online dating applications during the first lockdown.
But the absence of physical contact has fundamentally changed user behavior, forced to postpone the physical encounter until the next easing of restrictions.
Interview with Didier Rappaport, owner of the French application Happn.
He takes stock of a year when even Cupid applied barrier gestures.
Co-founder of Dailymotion, Didier Rappaport launched the Happn application in 2014 / DR
You announced this Tuesday that you have passed the 100 million user mark.
In 2020, have the various confinements linked to Covid-19 been an accelerator or a brake?
DIDIER RAPPAPORT.
I want to dismantle the ideas that are circulating on the only beneficial effects of containment for dating apps, this is not true.
We did less well than a normal year and the psychological conditions did not help.
We observed a drop in activity from the first two weeks of confinement because people had other things to think about than meeting a soul mate.
Significant stress had set in and was not favorable to the romantic encounter.
But then singles didn't have much to do other than check out the app on their sofa ...
Digital has obviously benefited from this health crisis because people, especially singles, had to continue to live and to create relationships with others.
It has had an important social function, but it is not the “dating” that has benefited the most but rather the social networks which provide content.
The results of the Covid crisis are mixed for our finances, but we still managed to have revenue growth of 20% and an increase of 1.5 million users in France in 2020.
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Your “matching” algorithms are based on the geolocation of people encountered in the street or at work.
Social distancing could have hurt you a lot ...
We have been forced to adapt our products.
It was complicated to find who we meet, as our slogan says, in full confinement.
The way the app works has been changed to show our users people they might have encountered.
We simply widened the radius around known geolocations to offer real life people.
We have kept our specificity, which is to meet singles who share common interests, who shop, work or go out in the same place.
This is the only way to win as an independent company against the American giants of online dating.
How did you revive the interest in an application for confined singles?
New tools such as video, previously optional, have become essential.
We were not originally intended to develop the video because we feared the perverse effects and the misappropriation of the tool.
We launched it during lockdown with one hour free and it's now a “must-have” for all apps like our competitors Tinder or Match.com.
It has become a substitute because the exchange by message is not enough when you are in a dynamic of meeting.
Then there was a need for a social link which led to a change in behavior on the application.
There were deeper exchanges and longer message times.
We have seen an 18% increase in the volume of messages exchanged.
This made it possible to deepen relationships before the physical encounter.
We were no longer in the “hook-up” culture or the one-night stand.
You are present internationally in countries such as India or Brazil which have experienced confinements or restrictions to varying degrees.
How did it go there?
The situation was relatively similar in our fifteen main markets, except in Sweden or in certain Latin American countries where sanitary regulations have been less strict.
In India, activity slowed despite the opening of restaurants and lighter traffic restrictions because there was still the fear of meeting strangers in the midst of the pandemic.
