To Thitiwatt “Pete” Sirasjtakorn, the gay dating app Blued offers more than hookups. Struggling with depression, a recent breakup, and the stigma that came with his HIV diagnosis in 2016, he went live on Blued to show his everyday life — eating in a restaurant, shopping in a department store, or singing while driving his car. Sometimes he even livestreamed himself sleeping. “I don’t want to be looking for sex all the time,” said the 33-year-old, from Thailand’s southern city of Hat Yai. “When I feel lonely but I don’t want to talk with anybody, I just get on livestreaming, and I feel there are many people staying with me.”
In 2018, Thitiwatt went public about his HIV status as more than 1,000 viewers tuned in to his livestream on Blued. Since then, alongside Facebook and Twitter, he has advocated for the rights of sexual minorities and people with HIV on Blued, where he has more than 60,000 followers. “This is the best way for me to reach out to people,” Thitiwatt told Rest of World.
With passionate users like Thitiwatt on board, Blued, China’s most popular gay dating app, has set its sights on becoming the world’s largest social network for the LGBTQIA community, starting with an expansion in Southeast Asia and the U.S. But back home, Blued is facing growing uncertainty due to China’s tightening control over LGBTQIA content, and growing competition for younger users from other platforms.
Launched in 2012 by entrepreneur Ma Baoli, better known by his alias Geng Le, Blued has since deftly navigated China’s precarious political environment for LGBTQIA communities to become the country’s most used gay dating app. A central part of Blued’s strategy has been to offer HIV prevention and sexual health services that align with state public health initiatives, raising awareness of LGBTQIA issues, all the while steering clear of rights-based advocacy. Blued has survived, even as other queer dating apps in China have shut down: Competitors such as Zank were forced to close, and the lesbian-focused app Rela was pulled twice from Chinese app stores.
Blued’s parent company, BlueCity, went public on the Nasdaq exchange in 2020. It failed to turn a profit, however, due to its heavy advertising costs abroad, Ma said in a recent interview. In mid-2022, Ma was pushed out of the company he founded, before Newborn Town — a Chinese company with a portfolio of social and gaming apps targeted at international users — took control of BlueCity the next year. Newborn Town said it had turned Blued profitable by improving moderation and user engagement. In the future, the company plans to focus on growing the overseas user base, while keeping the domestic business running as it is, executives told Rest of World at a media briefing in Hong Kong in August.
Li Ping, the CEO of Newborn Town, said he saw enormous potential in the global LGBTQIA market, and aimed to take Blued to the top by expanding the app’s presence in Asian countries. In a written response in October, BlueCity told Rest of World the company is targeting Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and the U.S. in this expansion. “The growth of the LGBTQ population in Southeast Asia and North America is particularly evident,” a spokesperson said.
But users and researchers have questioned the app’s prospects under its new ownership, given Blued’s past failed attempts to expand into Western markets and the difficulties it will face in differentiating itself from competitors abroad. “It’s an uphill battle. The gay dating app market in the U.S. is quite saturated,” Lik Sam Chan, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who researches the politics of dating apps in China, told Rest of World. “I don’t see Blued offering anything unique that other existing international gay apps do not provide.”
BlueCity’s two gay dating apps, Blued and Finka, a Tinder-like app oriented to younger gay and bisexual men, had a combined 7.3 million in global monthly active users by the end of 2022, according to Newborn Town. In contrast, Grindr had 12.8 million active users in the first quarter of 2023.
BlueCity said it would compete with other dating apps by offering more diverse social functions, such as livestreaming, voice chat rooms, and an Instagram-like feed. The company told Rest of World it had been promoting the app through offline campaigns, including organizing bar events in the U.S. and sponsoring a drag convention in Los Angeles this May.
The strategy shift comes as the Chinese government intensifies crackdowns on LGBTQIA-focused organizations, events, and social media accounts, making it difficult for Blued to grow its business domestically. The company shut down its surrogacy service BluedBaby, which connected gay men in China with California-based surrogacy agencies, in the wake of a headline-making surrogacy scandal in 2021.
“It seemed uncool to livestream on Blued. And there is no money.”
Younger, middle-class users are increasingly turning away from Blued in its home market to other, trendier platforms. Laurence Li, a gay, HIV-positive auditor in Beijing, told Rest of World he had mostly used Blued 10 years ago, but he’s now moved on to an array of other social and dating platforms. He now connects with gay communities on the lifestyle app Xiaohongshu and Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China. “[Without Blued], I can still find other gay men,” Li said.
Attempts to diversify the app’s features in China — such as introducing social games, livestreaming, and surrogacy services — repeatedly failed, according to Shuaishuai Wang, a lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester. Wang told Rest of World the app’s core function is to cater to its users’ sexual needs — to find hookups and dates — and younger users can easily find replacements for its other services, such as entertainment and health care, on other media platforms.
Some livestreamers have left Blued for more lucrative opportunities on bigger platforms. Liu Yangming, a Blued user from Guangdong, told Rest of World he started posting content on short-video platform BiliBili instead of Blued a few years ago. He said he found Blued harder to monetize, given its focus on the gay community, and its older, small-town user base. “It seemed uncool to livestream on Blued. And there is no money.”
Before its acquisition, Blued had tried for years to go global, with varying success. Although it succeeded in outpacing Grindr’s active user base in India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and South Korea in 2020, its attempts to win Western markets were less successful. Charles Fournier, who worked on Blued’s European operations from 2016 to 2017, told Rest of World the company spent heavily on marketing to users in the U.K. and France. The company even bought advertisements on the Paris Metro.
According to researchers, Blued’s current user base in North America and Europe is limited to a bubble of Chinese expatriates. Some overseas users told Rest of World they were disappointed by the people they found on the app. CJ Huang, a 46-year-old Asian American man from Los Angeles, had downloaded Blued in 2022 to meet other Asians. But he said he only found users who were advertising cryptocurrency schemes, and those who were still closeted to their families. Huang had wanted to find an openly gay partner. “I never actually ended up meeting anyone in person,” he said.
Users in China also complained that Blued has been displaying more in-app adverts but fewer news updates related to LGBTQIA rights worldwide. The app also began charging for basic privacy features. Previously, users could send disappearing photos on the app, an essential feature for those who are closeted or based in rural areas where gay men are stigmatized — the feature is now paywalled. After sending two disappearing photos, users must pay 30 yuan (about $4) per month for a premium subscription to send more.
This change has been one of the most controversial in Blued’s history, prompting many users to leave the app, according to Zhiqiu Benson Zhou, a professor of global China studies at New York University’s Shanghai campus. “People believe that it is a desperate move by the company to monetize its users because they couldn’t come up with another way to make profits,” he told Rest of World.
Blued users lashed out at Geng Le on social media after they found out about the paywall for disappearing photos. He later explained in an online post that he had already left his job, and was not involved in the decision. Without Geng Le, China’s most prominent gay tech entrepreneur, Blued is losing touch with users in its home market, said Chan, the dating app researcher.
Blued will likely face greater scrutiny over security and data privacy in its attempt to bring more Western users onto the app. After Grindr was fully acquired by the Chinese firm Kunlun in 2018, a U.S. government panel in 2020 ordered the company to divest from the dating app due to national security concerns. Li, Newborn Town’s CEO, told Rest of World the personal data of Blued’s overseas users was stored on cloud services separate from its Chinese business.
“If Blued grew very quickly in the U.S. — if it had a lot of influence over the U.S. gay community — then I think the U.S. government would step in,” said Wang, the University of Manchester lecturer.
In the meantime, the company’s short-term focus on its Southeast Asia expansion is likely a strategic stepping stone — Thitiwatt has noticed an increase in in-app advertising over the past two years. Other Chinese tech monopolies that have reached a ceiling on growth domestically, including Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, have first found success in neighboring markets before expanding globally. “Where Chinese big tech monopolies go, Blued goes there as well,” said Wang. “As a smaller app for LGBTQ people, Blued may think it’s good business to follow in their footsteps.”
