How Gay Hook-Up App Grindr Is Selling Itself To Major Brand Advertisers

Gay couple on vacation at the beach

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Grindr may be a risky place to advertise, but that hasn't stopped high flying brands jumping on board.

B&T Magazine by B&T Magazine



Unless they have used it themselves, many advertisers may not know that gay geo-social networking app Grindr has a burgeoning advertising business and a potentially lucrative future data business.

Grindr claims to be the largest all-male mobile social network in the world, with nearly 10 million users in 192 countries. Those users are described in Grindr’s pitch document to advertisers (which you can see in full below) as “affluent, tech savvy men,” who mostly earn over the average income, spend more on products and services than straight people and are likely to have future travel plans: an ideal target base for advertisers.

However, it’s also a potentially risky place for brands to advertise: it’s predominantly used to organise no-strings sex, which can often be accompanied with offensive language (although Grindr does have a team of human moderators to attempt to stamp this out). In August a security glitch left users’ locations vulnerable to being discovered by third parties. The company has since disabled distance display, which showed how close a potential match was to a user’s current location.

Some people also use the app to organise drug pick-ups (many different apps are used for this too, most notoriously Instagram).

Business Insider talked to Grindr’s CEO Joel Simkhai and asked what the company is doing to ensure brands are advertising in safe environments on the app that they would want to associate themselves with.

Read the full article here.




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