Dating app culture has exploded in the past 5 years.
What was once a taboo way of meeting someone is now the norm. Today, almost half of couples meet online, and there seems to be no slow down in sight.
In other words, dating via dating apps is something people do often. It’s something they can relate to.
Now combine this explosive trend of the dating app scene with some of the most popular reality TV content like “The Bachelor”, “Love Island”, and other similar concepts, and you have the potential for an extremely viral, shareable, and engaging type of content.
I think a media company that produces a reality TV show featuring the first dates of two people who met via a dating app is a multi-million dollar business opportunity.
Here’s how I would do it.
The Show
You need to get distribution fast. The key to this is going to be creating a show that it is hyper-shareable on social media.
Of course, the main goal of this is to get a ton of buzz, press, and word of mouth as quickly as possible so that you jump start the show with hundreds of thousands of impressions in the first few episodes. Success will breed more success in this type of business, so it’s important to have success from the get go.
To generate this type of buzz, I would go extremely local with the show. Going local will make it immediately easier for people who live in the featured city to relate to, for getting press, and for getting a ton of social media shares.
For example, I live in Austin, TX. If the first version of the show was done here, I’d call it “App Dating in ATX”.
I’d recruit a good looking, hilarious, fun guy who is crazy enough to be down for this, and then we’d scour the dating apps to find the right girl for the first episode.
All of this would be documented via the film guy (I would find a gung-ho, young, talented film person on Craigslist to shoot and edit the entire first few episodes).
The video process would be set to be as raunchy, awkward, and entertaining as possible. We’d document the “pursuit” of getting a date with a girl and chop it up into a brief intro for the episode.
Then the episode would start and introduce the two people who are meeting for the first time in the typical reality TV interview type way. It would be set at a local dating spot that everyone in that city is familiar with (this is extremely important because it will lead to way more social media shares if thousands of people are familiar with the location).
The film guy would follow the couple around and capture the entire date. Also just like “The Bachelor”, the couple would be interviewed individually and queued with questions, “So how do you think the date is going?” etc which would get chopped into the episode.
Episodes would end with the “So will you go out together again?” type question to wrap it up. Sometimes it will be a yes, sometimes it will be an aggressive no.
The show would likely be extremely awkward and almost cringeworthy, and this is exactly why it would make such great content.
Time to Go Viral
I’d replicate the above process until we have 3 extremely good first episodes of the show.
Once the initial content is complete, it’s time to shift gears to focus on making sure the episode hits once launched.
I’d use Facebook for the initial driver of distribution. To do this, I’d quickly create a nice Facebook page for the show, seed it with 1,000 or so likes, and publish the first episode with an incredibly click-baity title—something like, “Dating App Reality TV Show Launches in Austin, TX – You won’t BELIEVE what happens to this couple”.
I’d put about $500 of FB ad spend behind the video to get it’s initial momentum. I’d target women between ages 22-35 who live in Austin, TX with the ad campaign and focus the campaign objective on engagement.
Just this initial budget will be enough to bring in thousands and thousands of views with the exact people who are most likely to tag their friends/ leave a comment/ and get a kick out of watching a live Bumble date go down in their hometown.
As soon as the Facebook post starts getting its initial burst of traction, I’d hit every single local media outlet’s tip line with a bunch of cold emails from randomized gmail accounts that I’d make prior:
“Hey,
Did you guys see this new Dating App Reality TV show that just launched? It’s hilarious. The whole thing is set in Austin, TX. You will die. Check it out here.”
This type of story would get picked up in a flash by local media outlets. And with every feature, the distribution of the video on Facebook would spread, generating more likes, comments, shares, which would in turn drive more word of mouth and more news and the flywheel would start rolling.
As soon as the local news outlets wrote about the new show, I’d send the articles to every major content outlet like Buzzfeed, Mashable, Huff Post etc. and focus on compounding all the press and stoking the flames.
We’d hit Twitter, reddit, and Instagram aggressively each with different campaigns all driving traffic to this video with a focus on generating as much engagement as possible.
With focus and the right execution, there’s a good chance this type of campaign would generate hundreds of thousands of views on the first episode of the show.
The best part is that once you have momentum, anything can happen. If the right outlet picks up the story, it could go extremely viral.
Initial Monetization
I’d go directly to the apps themselves for initial monetization of the show.
At this point, we’ve launched the first episode of the Dating App Reality TV Show and have two more episodes in the pipeline that we will launch over the next week or so. The initial video likely has hundreds of thousands of views.
So we have some traction, and with traction comes leverage.
It’s at this point that I would want to start to monetize the show.
To do this, I would email every major dating app player out there and pit them against each other.
I’d reach out to Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, The League etc. and ask them if they’d like exclusive sponsorship rights for the first season of the show. I’d also let them know that we are only accepting ONE sponsor, and that we are in talks with their competitors to see which dating app will be the featured dating app used throughout the entire first season of our show.
I’d show them how this show is generating hundreds of thousands of engaged viewers to their target audience, and offer them the rights to that audience.
Honestly, this likely isn’t going to be a huge money maker, but I think it’s realistic that we could bring in tens of thousands of dollars extremely quickly with this tactic.
We’d pump this money back into the marketing and production of future shows and continue to compound the whole thing and keep gaining more and more eyeballs.
The long term game is to keep producing more and more shows and build a large, highly engaged audience in cities throughout the U.S. If you can succeed in this there are endless ways to monetize and make millions of dollars.
Conclusion
This idea is pretty crazy, but that’s what I love about it. I think it could actually work.
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