US mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people

American mobile-phone subscriptions and American online-dating revenue, both climbing. The phone in the pocket is, in many cases, also the dating app. The graph is, again, allowed to mean what it says.

US mobile subscriptions per hundred people climbed from about 50 in 2003 to over 100 today as smartphones became ubiquitous. Online dating revenue grew from a few hundred million dollars in 2003 to over 5 billion by 2022 as Match.com, Tinder, Hinge, and the Match Group portfolio scaled. The relationship is partly causal: dating apps depend almost entirely on mobile, and the smartphone era is what allowed Tinder's swipe-based interface to scale. Two parts of the same machine.

Sometimes correlation is one industry's distribution channel becoming the other industry. The phone and the date, often the same product.