I discontinued our Tinder OnlyFans service

Hey guys, I hope you are well. Slightly sad video to have to put together, to be honest. I think this is the first time that I've ever had to release a video on the channel that I wasn't really looking forward to. Pretty self-explanatory, but as the title says I have made the decision to discontinue the Tinder service. Tinder has been a great acquisition channel for us, one of the primary channels for picking up new subscribers for me at least over the past 12 months.

As with any kind of form of black hat marketing, the channels do always come to an end eventually. We're using these platforms in ways that they're not intended to be used. We are trying to exploit these platforms for personal gain and eventually they become harder and harder to do. And yeah, I'm kind of used to this. I've dealt with this throughout my whole career. I've always worked in black hat marketing and growth hacking, which is generally we are looking for ways that we can use these platforms to market business that I'm working with.

But nonetheless I'm sad to have to make this video. More of an announcement really. Yeah, so this is more of an announcement, but I'm going to try to add in some useful insight and information to just still deliver value and also to explain where we're at and how we're moving forward. So I guess the first question: why close down the service? The main reason is just Tinder has become increasingly hard to recreate, and we have always had workarounds for this, and I believed that I had one again.

So last Sunday I flew back to Georgia to our main office. I was in the office working with the team the whole week trying out new strategies, and I had a new strategy, thinking that I was a clever boy. I had a new strategy that kind of worked. We were able to shave off four days off of the account creation time. On Monday we made 130 accounts, but then by Tuesday morning when I came in we only had about 20 or 30 of the accounts active.

The remainder of them either required verification, which we have a bypass for. It's not a huge issue, but it definitely does mean Tinder is detecting that something isn't right. If they are requesting verification from you to prove that you are a real person and to take the selfies and so on, they are suspicious of something. And the rest of them were either shadow banned or just outright banned altogether. Now previously it would take us about four days to get accounts made and activated, so there was significant improvement on that front, but the issue really is getting the accounts to consistently come active.

The accounts aren't free for us to make. For all of the clients we offer an unlimited account recreation in the event the account is banned or in the event an account is shadow banned for more than 48 hours. It costs us about three dollars to recreate an account, plus the time input from the team, plus the added workload of trying to keep the customer updated on the status of the account. And when it's as volatile as it has been, if we've been seeing with creating 130 accounts and like 20 or 30 of them come active and then we have to update the remainder of the statuses, it just creates quite a lot of workload.

Yeah, and I guess a final kind of cherry on the cake so to speak is if we have a client that orders 10 Tinders and 10 Bumbles, let's say, in 100% of cases at the moment we would be hearing from a client that Bumble is driving more volume than Tinder. And they will know this because in the direct messages they will say hey, matched with you on Bumble. One kind of added benefit of this that could be a factor is that on Bumble the female has to initiate the conversation. If you match with someone, if the girl doesn't initiate the conversation, the male isn't able to start talking.

So when we have the Instagram linked in the bio I think that does help to push traffic over. So that is definitely one factor. But we're also hearing of better return on investment coming from Bumble as well. And I think Bumble offers a higher quality audience. Like one thing that would act in evidence to that is that a subscription on Bumble is about 50 per month. It will take it very slightly based on your geolocation, whereas a Tinder premium subscription is anywhere from three dollars up to about 20. I think maximum is 30 dollars I've ever seen for a Tinder subscription.

And what that is telling you is that the audience on Bumble is actually willing to spend more money, and I think that kind of translates across into OnlyFans as well in terms of purchasing subscriptions but also purchasing more pay-per-view on top of that. We also have more positive feedback and more clients scaling up on Bumble at the moment, which of course is just better for the team to work with and easier to manage from our side. Leading on to that as well, when you also can factor in that Bumble is actually easier for us to set up, we can have a Bumble created and active in less than 24 hours compared to on our previous Tinder strategy it was taking about four days.

Ban rates are also lower for us, so that means less account recreation. We also very rarely see shadow bans on Bumble as well. The accounts are going to either be in status active, need verification, or banned, compared to Tinder that can be stuck in multiple different stages, and it just becomes more complex for our team to manage. And that's the other thing to remember: there is a team of people behind the scenes putting all of this together for our clients, and the more complex the platform, the more different stages in the platform, the more complex our system needs to be, the bigger the team needs to be, the more management required from our side, which just leads to more complex service delivery.

Of course it's much easier if we're able to streamline down our operations. So for all of these reasons I think a no-brainer really to move away, to discontinue the Tinder service. If a client gets better results elsewhere and the service is easier for us to deliver, it just couldn't be more obvious. It's kind of 80 20 at its finest. Another point to add is our agency also works by achieving a return on investment for clients, right. I'm not really interested in working on a five account order, which for us is like a 125 per month subscription. The primary goal of our agency always has to be to generate a return on investment so that the client scales up to 30, 50, 80 accounts, adds in multiple girls, scales up there as well.

That's when it becomes worthwhile. A 125 dollar per month subscription for me to manage five accounts based on all of the work that goes into them — it's there as a way for someone to get their foot in the door, but the end goal for us as an agency always has to be to get them to scale up. So when we are seeing more customers scaling up through Bumble and more issues occurring through Tinder, again it's just another reason to enter the list. Yeah, so it just makes sense for us to put Tinder on pause whilst Bumble is outperforming in all areas and at the same is easier for us to make, faster to make, less customer support, and more streamlined logistics from a service delivery point of view.

At the same moment I'm continuing to test Tinder. I definitely haven't given up on it as an acquisition channel altogether, and at a smaller scale we are able to have it running. But of course, for just the reasons mentioned above, it makes sense at least for now until I figure out some new strategies or there's a change in the OnlyFans market. And this is to be expected. We do see cycles in marketing channels because OnlyFans is relatively new, and once again this is black hat marketing. So when I first started in the OnlyFans space it was Reddit, and then it moved to TikTok, then for me it was Tinder, and now Bumble is outperforming Tinder.

Where will it be in three to six months? I can't answer that question yet. But the thing that I like, my day-to-day job and what I actually love to do, is figuring out new marketing and acquisition channels. So right now of course I'm testing other dating applications as well. Not prepared to share the names publicly at the moment because we're in early stages, but we've got accounts running and it's a case of figuring out how far can we actually scale them. For all existing Tinder clients as well, the solution that we've taken is adding a free Bumble package onto all orders as well.

So let's say if a client orders 10 Tinders, on all previous orders we added up the equivalent amount in Bumble as well, just to make up for the difficulties and kind of lack of performance. Yeah, just to compensate for Tinder. Fortunately it's been a smooth transition. We're in the process of doing that now. I was in the office literally working with the team all week on putting this together. It was a productive week, slightly disappointing at the start, and yeah, disappointing to have to be putting this video together. But again, for the reasons mentioned, it just makes sense.

So yeah, and fortunately our clients don't really mind where the traffic is coming from, right. It's all about where the return on investment is. So from a client's point of view, as long as they're seeing returns they want the model to be on the platform that is going to offer them the best return on investment, and currently that is Bumble. So that is also why we made that transition over. In terms of the future of Tinder, the current kind of tests that I'm trying to explore is instead of needing such a high volume of Tinder accounts put together, we've been testing playing around with Tinder Gold and increasing the volume of swiping up to 500 swipes per day, like around that area.

So instead of let's say having 150 Tinder accounts active, instead we could have 10 Tinder accounts active that are all on Tinder Gold and all doing 500 swipes per day. But again this is early stages, early testing, but yeah just to give you some insight on that is the route that I'm currently exploring. And the other thing is, even with all of the stuff that we've figured out and been able to put in place on Tinder — you know, profile verification, GPS coordinates, 4G proxies, kind of the full works — and particularly the thing about the profile verification thing is that Tinder doesn't value their own profile verification system very highly. It's quite easy to bypass. We now literally just have multiple strategies to bypass it.

So I think that Tinder is actually aware that their profile verification system isn't so good. You know, when we get a blue check mark on an account, before that would mean if an account was shadow banned and then we verify the profile and get a blue check mark on it, it would immediately become active, and I mean very active, bring in a ton of matches compared to a non-verified profile. However, we've definitely seen a reduction in there as well. And a blue checkmark profile can also lose its verification. That is something that we will deal with quite often.

So it's not an issue because we're able to re-verify the profile, but I think it kind of shows that you have verified your Face ID already and Tinder is happy to take that away and get you to redo it multiple times, which to me kind of acts as evidence that they know that their own verification system is easily bypassed, and they've kind of taken away a lot of weight from the verification system, because that was something that we used to be able to use to significantly reduce the number of bans that we have, like I said, to get accounts to come active instantly.

Now the only real benefit of having a verified Tinder profile is that you will bring in higher quality matches, and the reason for that is when guys see the profile and they see it's blue check marked they still have some faith in Tinder's verification system even if Tinder don't themselves. So yeah, that's kind of like an update from my side. Again, it's a sad video to make, but fortunately we do have an alternative channel that we can move over to, and it's delivering better results, which is the main reason here. For existing Tinder clients, we do have Tinder customers getting results, and we will continue putting the service together for them, but I just want to shut off the doors for taking on new customers because of all of the reasons mentioned in this video, and we can deliver a much much more streamlined — and that I think is everything for me.

Hopefully there was some useful information there as well. Maybe you can go and apply it into your own business as well, rather than just making an announcement. I tried to give some insight and value into what were the issues we're currently facing and kind of the reason behind our decision. As always, thank you so much for watching. Any questions, feel free to.