Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. AFP PHOTO | JOSH EDELSON
Facebook Inc is entering the dating game, Chief Executive Mark
Zuckerberg said on Tuesday, planning a dating service to matchmake
millions of people on the world’s largest online social network and
nudge them into spending more time there.
The service,
which Facebook had considered offering for over a decade and will launch
soon, could help rebuild its popularity among younger consumers and
make people visit the site more often, two key challenges for the
business.
“There are 200 million people on Facebook
that list themselves as single, so clearly there’s something to do
here,” Zuckerberg told software developers at Facebook’s annual F8
conference.
Facebook shares rose 1.1 percent to close
at $173.86 on the news, which sparked a sell-off of established online
dating service providers.
Facebook users have been able to reveal their relationship status on the network since it first went live in February 2004.
Zuckerberg
said Facebook was building the dating service with an emphasis on
privacy, a sensitive subject for people who use dating websites and for
Facebook as the company reels from a scandal over its handling of
personal information.
A dating service could increase
the time people spend on Facebook and be a “big problem” for competitors
such as Match Group Inc, said James Cordwell, an analyst at Atlantic
Equities. Match, the owner of popular mobile dating app Tinder and
OkCupid, calls itself the “global leader in dating” on its website.
“But
the initial functionality looks relatively basic compared to those
offered by Match’s services, so the impact Facebook has on the dating
space will be down to how well it executes in this area,” Cordwell said.
User fall
Facebook
said in January that at the end of 2017 time spent by users had fallen
by about 50 million hours a day, after changes designed to reduce
passive video watching and stem the spread of sensationalism.
Facebook’s entry into the growing online dating market sent shares of industry leaders tumbling.
Match
Group Inc shares closed down more than 22 percent. IAC, Match Group’s
parent company, dropped more than 17 percent. Sparks Networks, owner of
JDate and ChristianMingle, fell 7.3 percent before recovering and
closing up 0.8 percent.
A prototype displayed on
screens at the F8 conference showed a heart shape at the top-right
corner of the Facebook app. Pressing on it will take people to their
dating profile if they have set one up.
Potential
matches will be recommended based on dating preferences, things in
common and mutual friends, Facebook said in a statement.
The prototype was built around local, in-person events, allowing people to browse other attendees and send them messages.
It
did not appear to have a feature to “swipe” left or right on potential
matches to signal interest, as Tinder and other established services
have. But there were two buttons for “pass” and “interested.”
The
optional feature will be for finding long-term relationships, “not just
hook-ups,” Zuckerberg said. It will be launched soon, he added, without
giving a specific date.
More details will be revealed
over the next few months, Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said
in a separate presentation.
Cox said he had been
thinking about a Facebook dating feature since 2005, when he joined the
company about a year after its founding.
The company
began seriously considering adding a dating service in 2016, when
Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook page a photo of a couple who had met
on the network, Cox said.
Thousands of people responded
to Zuckerberg’s post with similar stories about meeting partners on
Facebook, Cox said. “That’s what got the gears turning,” he said.
Potential match
People
will be able to start a conversation with a potential match by
commenting on one of their photos, but for safety reasons that Cox did
not specify, the conversations will be text-only, he said. Unsolicited
nude photos are a recurring worry on dating services.
Facebook
executives were quick to highlight other features for safety and
privacy, noting that dating activity would not show up in Facebook’s
centerpiece News Feed.
Concerns about privacy on
Facebook have grown since the social network’s admission in March that
the data of millions of users was wrongly harvested by political
consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
Before building
Facebook, Zuckerberg created a website called Facemash that allowed
people to choose the more attractive of two women. Zuckerberg, 33, has
described the website as a school prank when he was young.
A
dating service “represents a potentially challenging situation if
Facebook can’t fulfill its promise to offer dating services in a
privacy-protected and safe way,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst
at eMarketer.
However, “I’m sure it will make good use of the data Facebook has been able to collect about its users,” she added.
Zuckerberg
also said on Tuesday that Facebook was building a “clear history”
privacy control to delete browsing history, similar to the option of
clearing cookies in a browser.
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