Covid-19: Tinder, Zoom, Paytm & Gaming Apps: At An All-Time High

There have been a lot of unemployment cases in the past few days. Companies have laid off their employees, start-ups are crashing and the big corporates are falling down drastically. Meanwhile, there are a few tech giants who are gaining a lot through this lockdown. Mainly, the companies who follow the norms of social distancing are working fine and some of them are flourishing during these times. Also, the organizations that have adapted themselves accordingly are also trying to move forward. Here is a compilation of a few companies that are on a surge right now.

Tinder And Other Online Dating Apps

It might be out of loneliness or boredom, but the online dating sphere is on a surge at the moment. There has been a rapid rise in the number of users for the online dating platforms.

Tinder has given out a few particulars about its usage in march when the whole world was under a lockdown, “Daily messages are up 10-15% compared to the prior week in the US. In places like Italy and Spain, we saw increases by up to 25% in daily conversation as compared to the week prior. Conversation length was up anywhere from 10 to 30% as compared to February in places like Europe and South East Asia,” says a Tinder spokesperson over email. Tinder is also planning to cut down the subscription cost for the gold or high-level membership so that people can make the best use of this time at home.

For a few people, the outlook of tinder isn’t just about making a romantic relationship. It is more about talking to a new set of people and to make some new relations and friends. People are going through an emotional roller-coaster. Emotions are all over the place since the people are stuck in the four falls of their house. People are also using these apps to communicate with others and find out what people all around the globe are doing.

Zoom app

All people are doing during the lockdown is having zoom calls. Even though the app isn’t really secure as per the government, still people are using it because a solid alternative doesn’t exist. People at various corporate have told that they are using this app for more than half time of their shifts to monitor the employees and to make the work from home culture a bit easy. Zoom has seen a huge increase in downloads in the world since the quarantine phase governments are also using the zoom app for their work. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom recently posted pictures of his first digital cabinet meeting on Twitter, soon a researcher pointed out that the Zoom meeting ID was visible in the picture making it exposed for outsiders to get access to the meeting. Various top-notch security personnel who are into cybersecurity have pointed out that these instances are occurring because this domain is entirely new for the people.

From a layman’s perspective who knows about marketing, zoom hasn’t gone into aggressive marketing to chase the customers. They have kept their focus on creating a brand that solves everyone’s problem.
Zoom is ranked on top of the apple play stores top free applications. Investors are also all in for the zoom app. The stock was being sold at 58 times the revenue.  The major reason for the success of the zoom app has been its easy to use strategy. Unlike the apps which are designed specifically for a system, zoom is uniform and can be used by anyone, at any time. Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan has been praised for the company’s efforts to help out schools and other organizations during the crisis.

Paytm Mall

Paytm is also one of the firms which is seeing a lot of rise in its users. They have received a lot of orders for non-essential goods like laptops and cellular phones from the people who are working from home. The demand for the mobile phones has gone up to about 200%. The parent app Paytm has also witnessed the surge in users as people are going ahead with contactless payments. 42 percent of Indians have increased the use of digital means for payments in the last three to four weeks which is highly remarkable as the digital India initiative of the government wasn’t doing very well initially. Many local kiryana stores have shifted to Paytm as the mode of transaction. Vijay Shekhar Sharma, head of the firm, feels that after this whole situation is over the company might actually turn profitable.

Online Gaming Websites

With people staying indoors and are working from home. They can manage their time effectively and finally give some time to the games. The gaming sector is at its all-time high with a lot of demand coming up. Pokkt gave out stats where there has been 39% increase in global mobile game downloads in march.  The company, Pokkt works with various companies for managing their in-app advertisements to stream some revenue for them. It also gets users for the games. They have told that there has been 31% increase in ad requests globally thereby pushing the mobile gaming industry into a stronger growth curve. While there were about 2.9 billion downloads in February 2019, there have been about 4 billion downloads in March 2020. There has been 22% increase in monthly downloads for various gaming apps and websites while earlier the growth was just at a mere 5%. Comscore reported, “Devoid of sports, travel and any social activities, many have turned to online games. Between the weeks of Feb. 10-16, 2020, and March 16-22; 2020, visits to online gaming websites or apps increased by 24%. Engagement, as measured by time spent on gaming sites or apps, increased by 21% during the same time period.”

There have been a lot of issues in the economy all over the world but some firms are still flourishing and keeping their employees happy. The best move will be if these firms help the rest and start growing together else there will be a huge issue of monopolies that the Indian government can’t handle at the moment.