- Facebook is adding dating features to its platform, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday.
- Shares of Match Group, which owns Tinder, tanked after the announcement.
- It's not the first time a mega-cap tech company has decimated smaller competitors by entering a new field. Amazon, for instance, has done it to many.
Match Group, the company that owns Tinder, OkCupid, and Match.com, is tanking after Facebook announced it will launch dating features on its main platform.
Shares of the company plummeted more than 20% immediately following CEO Mark Zuckerberg's comments at Facebook's F8 conference in California on Tuesday afternoon.
This isn't the first time a tech giant has flaunted its influence in ways that hurt smaller fledgling companies. Amazon's entry into a number of industries — from shipping to groceries to healthcare — has caused headaches for competitors including UPS, Kroger, and Walgreens, who stand to be disrupted.
The new standalone feature will be separate from Facebook's main product, Zuckerberg said. The goal is to help people forge "real long-term relationships, not just hookups," he said, noting that people tell him all the time that they met their partner on Facebook.
We don't know much about the features just yet. What we do know is that opt-in features are going to be in the Facebook app. Users can make a dating profile, which can't be seen by friends, and get suggestions of other people who have opted in and suit your preferences.
Investors were clearly spooked, but at least one Wall Street analyst isn't convinced Facebook's foray into dating can be as disruptive as Tuesday's stock crash might indicate.
"We believe Facebook can do dating very well, its social graph is unparalleled and the company is highly adept at creating well-run features," Piper Jaffray analyst Sam Kemp told clients shortly after the announcement. "However, we believe getting users to engage with a dating feature will prove difficult - Facebook historically has not had a dating feature, in part because it inserted a gray-zone use case (dating and hookups) into its public broadcasting social platform."
Shares of InterActive Corp (IAC), which recently spun off Match Group, also fell more than 12% on the news.
Prachi Bhardwaj contributed to this report.
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