Facebook’s motivations to get into the dating game are somewhat obvious. Analysts expect dating apps to be a $12 billion business by the end of next year. It’s understandable why Facebook would want a piece of that market, especially because teens and Millennials are abandoning the social network in droves.
To use Facebook Dating—and this is billed explicitly as one of the benefits—you don’t need to download another dating app. Facebook Dating is free and doesn’t include any advertising, and the company says it never will. But it does pull users back into Facebook’s ecosystem, creating a new and very compelling reason for people—especially young people—to use an app they may have deserted.
The latest Pew Research Center data, from 2016, showed that 22 percent of Americans ages 25 to 34, and 27 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24, had dated online. Eighty percent of the people who had done so said it was a good way to meet someone, and 46 percent of college graduates said they could personally name someone for whom online dating had resulted in a marriage or long-term partnership. Those numbers were all drastically higher than they had been when Pew looked into the matter just three years earlier.
