Sometime in April, Grindr’s famously yellow logo turned hot pink, and a profile appeared dead centre with pop icon Madonna’s face on it. She had a new song out. Whether you heard it or not, you couldn’t hide, remove, or block the logo. One entire tile on the precious grid—already down to a dozen rows in the app’s free version—was permanently occupied by ‘mutha’. Talk about allies taking over queer spaces.
While the profile has disappeared now (small mercies during Pride Month), the logo remains pink and will likely stay so until the album, Confessions II, comes out on 3 July.
The Grindr-Madonna tie-up is in-your-face, loud, and incredibly boring. Worst of all, it has made me hate the new album with a passion. You shouldn’t have to lock the door behind your audience, Madame X. It’s embarrassing.
I admit I may not be the target audience for the collab. I know Madonna from two places: her legendary Vogue performance at the MTV Awards and the Rusical tribute RuPaul’s Drag Race put together for her back in 2021. It’s precisely why I should have been given the chance to hit the close button.
Madonna is a pioneer. She is the OG pop star who made queer culture mainstream. So it’s all the more worrying that Grindr’s first big promo tie-up is with her. What else will follow, poppers being sold on the app with Troye Sivan’s next dance hit? Lime green jumpers for a Harry Styles album, perhaps? I’m sure the community will welcome the former—so you can bet it’s never happening on Grindr.
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A year ago, yours truly had announced that Grindr is dying. I think it’s time to revise that statement. Grindr is dying alright, but only for its users. As far as the investors are concerned, all is going swimmingly.
According to a recent Wired report, the pop industry is looking for people who will buy physical albums, and “adult gay men with disposable income” are numero uno on its list. Grindr is now prime real estate for Americana’s fast-fading phantasmagoria.
“If Grindr has this unique connection to the user base, can we start capturing more of the wallet share of those users?” the company’s CEO George Arison asked in a conversation with Wired. “Can we offer them products and/or services that they currently buy somewhere else that actually maybe they should buy from us because we can do it better for them by speaking to what they want?”
Grindr’s married-with-two-kids, conservative CEO wants it to be more than just a hookup app. He calls it “The Global Gayborhood in Your Pocket™”. Think YouTube, Instagram, and Swiggy rolled into one big gay fiesta. To be fair, the app is already the gay world’s NoBroker and LinkedIn.
It is perhaps too much to ask a company that once shared its users’ HIV status information with advertisers to consider said users in its endless pursuit for cash.
The numbers, Arison told Wired, speak for themselves. The app has 15 million monthly active users. Earlier this year, it reported revenue growth of 29 per cent to $126 million, above estimates of $122 million. No matter how much the gays complain, business is booming, and more brand collabs are on the way.
Welcome to queerness in the late stages of a cancer economy. If you want a “gaybourhood”, be prepared to empty your wallet.
As if the ads and constant glitches weren’t enough, Grindr wants to add AI to the mix. Its latest paid tier, called ‘Edge’, will summarise older conversations, recommend profiles, and give you “robust signals” to help you match with someone. It will be powered by an in-house AI stack called gAI™. And no, that is not a joke. Even I wouldn’t go for such a lazy pun.
Grindr is certainly getting more dystopian. Not that I care. You see, I got back on the app a few weeks ago for research purposes (and research purposes alone). But the last three dates I’ve been on were not with men I met on Grindr—or on any dating app. One was found at a queer event, another at a house party, and the third one at Delhi’s best bar ever, Big Banana. Turns out, life can be blissful if you use Grindr as nothing more than a passing amusement. The new Candy Crush, if you will.
In the meantime, let me go watch Vogue again. One can’t let a diva suffer the consequences of corporate enshittification.
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