Dating

Allowed, but only after asking

Dating sits in an awkward middle. It is not prohibited the way explicit content is, but it is not open either: Meta operates a permission process for dating advertisers, granted per market, and an account that starts running dating creative without it gets stopped quickly. The application is routine paperwork and it is also the single most common reason a dating launch slips a month, because nobody started it early enough.

What you cannot say about people

The rules that bite hardest are about implication rather than explicitness. Creative implying the user is lonely, single, recently divorced, of a particular sexual orientation, or that other people nearby are available for them, runs into personal-attribute policy — which is enforced strictly and by machine. Most rejected dating creative is not too racy. It is too specific about the person looking at it.

The version that works sells the product: who is on it, what makes the matching different, what the experience is like. Duller to write, and the only kind that scales.

Retention decides the budget

Acquisition cost in dating is high everywhere and roughly comparable between competent buyers. What separates a profitable app from an unprofitable one is what happens in the first week: whether the new user meets anyone, whether the ratio in their city works, whether messages get answered. Paid media can fill a city that is not ready and it will burn the budget doing it, so we would rather cap spend by geography than pretend the funnel starts at the install.

Channels

Paid social carries the volume. App-install campaigns need clean event tracking or the bidding optimises towards installs that never open. Organic matters more than most apps expect — people research dating apps before downloading, and comparison content is where that decision is made.