Ever hear of "cuffing season"? It's based on the notion that humans tend to look for mates to cuddle up with as the weather gets colder, manifesting in an uptick in dating activity. We've reported on it here before with data that shows cuffing season is indeed a thing when looking at usage trends on major dating apps like Tinder ($MTCH).
Tinder is, for all intents and purposes, the king of dating apps, which makes it a useful case study when it comes to tracking Facebook login usage data. When Tinder launched, it virtually forced users to use Facebook login as a way to curtail rogue accounts, trolling, and phishing. It also pointed to Facebook login as a unique feature that pointed out potential matches who shared Facebook friends as a sort of implied endorsement.
Because of Tinder's usage of Facebook login tokens, we have a couple years of solid login data for the app.
The graph above represents monthly users rank via Facebook login. It's ranking data published daily by Facebook as a way for app creators to track how their app is doing in relation to others.
As you can see, Tinder is a regular top-10 and, most recently, top-5 app when it comes to Facebook login ranks. Its usage spikes clearly occur just before Christmas; Tinder jumped to the 6th-most used app in December 2016 and December 2017 after slight summer swells of activity.
But this year, Tinder saw a major swell in popularity over the summer when it was, for the first time in its history, the 2nd-most used app on all of Facebook at the end of July. It since corrected to more "normal" levels as the weather cooled off in the fall, but if history tells us anything, Tinder is about to roar back to its best Christmas ever.
In both 2016 and 2017, Tinder usage dipped in fall only to roar back in popularity in December. It appears that this month's lull could be the calm before a storm of massive swiping as singles start looking for love as the mercury drops.
As always, we'll keep an eye on it.
