Viber Dating: the Philippines becomes the biggest market for dating inside the messenger
More than half of new dating profiles on Viber are created in the Philippines. The messenger is betting on dating directly inside the chat app – kept separate from contacts and phone numbers.
Symbolic image · Photo: Yuri Samoilov / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped and resized)
Messaging service Rakuten Viber reports strong growth for its dating feature in the Philippines. The country accounts for 56 percent of all new Viber Dating profiles created worldwide so far this year, Viber's Asia-Pacific senior director David Tse told journalists in Makati on 13 October, Esquire Philippines reports. According to the industry site Global Dating Insights, monthly active users there rose 96.9 percent year on year – compared with 44 percent globally – while year-to-date revenue – no region given – rose 95.6 percent.
Viber introduced the feature in February 2025; according to the Ukrainian tech site AIN.UA, waiting lists opened in January 2025 for the Philippines, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and shortly afterwards for Ukraine. The dating profile is separate from the regular account and phone numbers stay hidden; at the same time, each profile is tied to a registered phone number, which Viber presents as a way to ‘meet real people’. ‘Viber dating has its own mechanism to also detect undesirable accounts,’ Tse said according to Esquire.
Viber is thus following an approach also taken by Facebook: dating inside an app many people already use every day. The growth figures come from the company itself and have not been independently verified; Viber did not give absolute user numbers.
This article is for information only and is not legal, tax, financial or medical advice. Figures as of the date stated.