Dating apps in Korea overflowing with men, but women use them more: data

(123rf)

Roughly 80 percent of major dating app users in South Korea are men, but women use the services for nearly twice as long as their male counterpart, a report showed Sunday.

The most popular dating app here was Tinder, where 84.2 percent of the users were men, according to local consumer data analysis service Wise App. Among other popular applications, Wippy users were 78.8 percent men, Glam was 86.1 percent men, and 90.3 percent of the people on Yangting were male.

Tinder had the most number of users with 420,000, followed by Wippy, Glam and Yangting, at 330,000, 280,000 and 170,000, respectively.

The report was based on figures as of August 2023.

While the dating apps are generally male-dominant, it was women who used them for longer periods of time. On average, women used dating apps for three hours and 56 minutes a month, while men used them for two hours in the same period.

The 20-something age group spent the most amount of time on the apps, two hours and 49 minutes, followed by 40-somethings at two hours and 23 minutes, and 30-somethings at one hour and 58 minutes.

Considered among the most wired countries in the world, South Korea has seen a significant surge in those using dating applications to meet new people, while the number of romance scams via mobile applications also saw a similar surge as well.

The state-run Korea Legal Aid Corp. in November said there were 88 requests for counselling related to romance scams in 2023, compared to 22 in 2019. In the same month, local police arrested a woman in her 40s who scammed some 3 billion won ($2.3 million) from seven men that she met via dating apps.

By Yoon Min-sik(minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)