sounds like the eyeglasses and sunglasses brands (and retail stores) that people might mistakenly be under the impression are independent companies, but are all part of Luxottica.
> LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Apex by Sunglass Hut, Pearle Vision, Target Optical, Eyemed vision care plan, and Glasses.com. Its best known brands are Costa, Ray-Ban, Persol, Oliver Peoples and Oakley.
Luxottica basically arm wrestles firms into being bought or else... else normally being they stop distributing them in the chains they control, which gives them a hard discount in company takeovers.
Today some Chinese brands match Luxottica in quality, and if you do some homework you'll find almost every independent brand is much cheaper and high quality (Bollé is my go to for safety/sports glasses, for example).
Andrey Andreev sold out to Blackstone, a private equity firm [1]. The parent company of those dating apps you listed is now publicly-traded [2], but still majorly owned by Blackstone.
Still doesn’t change your point that there are two major monopolies in the online dating sector.
It’s really strange to me that regulators let it happen. The UK just ruled that Facebook must divest from Giphy of all things but somehow a single company can own the majority of the online match making market.
I don’t what percentage of coupling and relationships are dependent today on Match.com et al but I bet it’s substantial at least in the major western markets.
The sheer amount of potential social engineering one achieve by cornering the market is pretty frightening.
It’s the same issue I have with the likes of Facebook and Google they really can control the lives of people far beyond what most can even imagine.
For most of us life isn’t some great plan, it’s all a series of small inconsequential events that roll into big life changing ones.
Some of your biggest moments in life can be “traced back” to a single inconsequential random moment and companies like Google and Facebook control a lot of these moments today.
> including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, Ship, and OurTime totalling over 45 global dating companies
The ones not in that list are owned (at least in part) by Andrey Andreev: Badoo, Bumble, Lumen, Chappy and Hot or Not.