Facebook Dating starts. Will it help Facebook stand out from ads?

Facebook wants you to know that his new dating service is not like Tinder.

"It's about building real long-term relationships, not just relationships," said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, when the product was announced last May. "We do not want this to sound like a speed-dating session," said Nathan Sharp, the Facebook product manager responsible for creating the service, in an interview with recoding this week.

But while Facebook does not want its new dating product – which was launched on its first market, Colombia, today – mimics the Tinder user experience, it may be in Facebook's interest to replicate the Tinder's business model. Match Group executives say Tinder, which generates almost all of its subscription revenues, will generate more than $ 800 million in revenue in 2018.

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Facebook Dating does not start with a subscription service, and Sharp says the company does not intend to launch one. In fact, Facebook does not intend to make money with its new dating feature, at least not right now. Instead, Facebook seems to be content to let Dating serve as another reason for kids to open the app and allow Facebook into their personal lives.

But like all that Facebook launches, Dating could be huge. Facebook officials say there are 200 million people on Facebook who identify as "single". This is a relatively small percentage of Facebook's 2.2 billion monthly users, but it's a huge potential audience for a dating service.

If Facebook Dating takes off, the company will eventually try to find a way to turn that audience into a business, and Tinder has proven that users will pay a subscription fee for additional features that can help them find dates (or connections). A subscription revenue stream would also help Facebook diversify its business. Facebook has a unique subscription – its competitor Slack, Workplace – but nearly 99% of the company's revenue in the last quarter came from advertising.

Tinder has 3.8 million paying subscribers; Facebook could surpass that with only 2% of its "unique" users. $ 800 million in revenue would not have much impact given Facebook's annual advertising revenue of nearly $ 40 billion, but Facebook could encourage 10% of its users to pay for meetings, as well as Tinder – this could mean more than $ 4 billion in subscription revenue.

These are a lot of big if At this point, especially given the fact that we do not know if people even want to go out with Facebook. The company spent the first half of 2018 trying to convince users that it could still trust its personal data following the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. Now, Facebook wants users to trust him in their romantic relationships – a difficult sell.

Facebook is trying to solve some of these problems. People using Facebook Dating will need to create a separate profile. For example, personal information from this profile will not be used for ad targeting. But the idea of ​​going out on Facebook will deter some people, regardless of the privacy measures taken by Facebook.

Others will try, and given Facebook's massive user base and its set of social connections, this could be a decent place to find a date. And as Facebook's advertising activities evolve, a new potential revenue source that does not rely on the sale of targeted ads does not seem like a bad idea either.