Match Group, Inc. Aktie

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our first ever CEO Connection event. This is a new series where we'll dive into a topic of particular interest. We're excited to have you here on webcast and live stream. On earnings calls, obviously, we spend most of our time focusing on financial performance and operating metrics. So this event gives us a chance to go deeper on the consumer insights that inform how we think about the category and our product strategy.

We get asked versions of the same question all the time, which is, has Gen Z basically abandoned dating apps? Our answer to that is no, not at all. They still want connection, but their needs around what that connection looks like have evolved. So today, we'll help frame an understanding around Gen Z.

This is not a product presentation like our Sparks event, and it's not a quarterly earnings update. It's a discussion on the future of human connection and what we're learning from younger generations, how expectations are evolving and how those insights inform how we build products across the company.

Today's discussion may include forward-looking statements. Some of those risks related to that are listed here and in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Before we get into the research, I want to introduce today's speakers. I have with me 2 of the world's foremost experts on Gen Z and on consumer insights. I'm joined by Emily Dods, who leads Global Brand Strategy at Tinder. Before coming to Tinder, Emily spent over a decade in creative advertising, where she helped brands bridge the gap between culture and data. She helped brands like Meta and AT&T connect with impact to their consumers.

And also here with me is Max Izenberg. Hello, Max. Welcome. Max leads consumer research across Match Group. He has a PhD in public policy with over a decade of peer-reviewed published research on risk perception, vulnerability and public safety. These are 2 of the people closest to how young daters are thinking, behaving and talking about relationships. They spend all their time on research, interviews, focus groups, doing original consumer work behind these insights. So my role today is to just sort of provide a canvas and highlight what their insights are and lead the discussion and then moderate Q&A. Max?

Hi, all. So Spencer noticed today is about understanding how Gen Z is thinking about relationships and connection. We'll first start with an overview of how we're listening to Gen Z across Match Group and the ways that we're collecting insights regularly. Then we'll spend a minute walking through what we're seeing in the data. Emily will walk through the 4 evolving expectations that we're seeing among Gen Z for how they want to connect. We'll connect then those insights with the product evolution that we're seeing with Tinder and Hinge in particular. And then finally, we'll look ahead at a sneak preview of the emerging insights we're seeing amongst older Gen Alpha, and then we'll open it up for Q&A.

Great. So let's start with the broader context. And before we fully get started, I want to share with you all how we collect insights that we'll be sharing today and across the Match Group to inform marketing and product development. So one of our advantages at Match Group is the amount of time we spend listening to our consumers. We are always on in conversations in so many different ways with Gen Z.

Our insights do not come from a single survey. They come through a vast array of different methodologies. This can include focus groups of various different sizes, traditional survey research techniques, ethnographies, in-person observations, intercepts. We meet them where they're at. We're not just saying who's in L.A. come to us for convenience. We go where it's often very difficult to talk to them in college campuses, in the third spaces where they like to hang out, coffee shops, social listening plays a massive role.

So we're trying to be everywhere and really take advantage of the breadth of insights that we're seeing as the multiple different ways in which people prefer to communicate and gathering our insights to paint a more holistic understanding of Gen Z attitudes and behaviors. So we're studying not just what people do, but how they feel about their own identity, ways of connection and journey of self-exploration. And that gives us an always-on window into how young theaters are evolving.

You see here that we say that we have a community-based research panel that's been going on for several years now, which we call Z Labs, which gives us immediate access to talking to various Gen Z cohorts across all our brands. Our research is also not limited to the U.S., but we have researchers across several continents and are regularly doing research in over a dozen countries at any given time.

So this -- all these different ways of collecting insights, this gives us a way to separate the short-term noise that we're seeing from deeper, more foundational behavioral shifts. So now who is Gen Z? The reason why we're all here. First and foremost, Gen Z is not a monolith. Within Gen Z, there is a lot of variation, as you can say, with any generational cohort.

From our research, we make sure that we encompass a wide range of different identities, whether it's sexual identity and sexual expression, race or ethnic identity, urbanicity, religiosity or the role of religion that plays into people's lives. The intent is not to reduce or flatten this experience by any means. However, it's important to acknowledge that there are some shared truth, which shapes people's experiences across any particular generational cohort.

For all intents and purposes here, we're going to define Gen Z as between 16 and 29 years old. And within this generational cohort, one thing that fundamentally changes them is that they are -- identifies them is that they are digital by default. They have grown up specifically consuming different forms of Internet media, whether it's through social media or community groups. This specifically was shaped through the pandemic.

These formative years during the global pandemic created limited face-to-face interaction. There was also a lot of economic instability, heightened political polarization, rapid social change, all of which has huge implications on the way they see the world, their psychological outlook and their preferences for socialization.

Gen Z are also incredibly emotionally literate. We hear this all the time with research that therapy language, understanding their boundaries, exploring their identity and how they show up in terms of like preparing for themselves and what their priorities are. This is so fundamental for the ways that they think about connecting and the ways that they walk and approach the world. We also see this specifically amongst Gen Z women.

They find that going to therapy is really important for finding a partner and that this language of establishing boundaries and even the diagnostic terms are really fluent in their lexicon, and it really speaks worlds to how readiness and emotional and psychological safety is so important when they're thinking about building new connections.

There's also a phenomenon which we refer to as milestone drift. Many researchers, external to Match Group have talked about this phenomenon in different ways is that there are these key milestones that are oftentimes prized in American society that are so emblematic of freedom and independence. So for example, getting your driver's license, moving out of your parent's house, these are still, by and large, very important to Gen Z. But what we're seeing is that they want to achieve these milestones on their own terms, perhaps in a different way and perhaps it's not linear on a different time line.

They're also craving real-life connection. So perhaps despite or because of the pandemic, they're growing up online and they hold a lot of nostalgia for a time or counterfactual that they never really knew existed. And so they are placing a high premium on these in-person connections that whether it's starting a connection offline or just having some role, they do recognize the importance of a face-to-face interaction to complement the digital experiences, which they also value and are so integrated into their lives.

Is that -- I'm going to interrupt. Is that because they're using their phones and their computers all day at work. And so then they want to put that down to connect in person? Or is it because they know that, that digital layer is sort of bad for them on some level. And so this is like eat your vegetables and they know they need to. Like where does that come from?

Yes, all of the above. It's functional. It's like I want to put my phone down, I need to take a break. I want to prioritize, preserve my time and manage my emotions and see that there is so much value to getting to meet other people. There's also -- yes, you can feel free to continue as well.

No. I mean a great example is thinking of when COVID and lockdown and the pandemic hit them in their formative years. For younger Gen Z, that's a bit older middle school, younger, lowerclassman in high school. And then for older Gen Z, it's older high school, lower cost than college. And when that is taken away from you in a really formative time, it becomes ever more present and important as you age because you recognize, oh, this does feel different, you crave it. You know you feel different after the fact. So they seek it out ever more presently.

Absolutely.

Great segue.

Perfect. So again, as mentioned earlier, Gen Z has grown up as truly the first digitally native generation. Other generations, of course, have leveraged technology in many different ways. We had Match.com. But what is different is that this has fully been native to them.

One of the reasons that they do look to put their phone down is because they've never had this counterfactual and they're wondering what would this experience be like if I didn't leverage technology as the first starting point or if it had a different role, and I'm wondering different ways to use technology in the process of making new connections, which is very exciting.

And so the Internet doesn't have just influence how they communicate, but it fully transforms and shapes the lens in which they view the world and decide to communicate, whether it's through symbols like emojis or memes. This is absolutely like a core and fundamental part of how they communicate. So the digital world is kind of defined in 3 ways and influences them. One is uncertainty is the norm.

During this era of the pandemic, which defined them, there was, as mentioned previously, a lot of financial pressure, the perceptions around the macroeconomic certainty or uncertainty that is going on and the implications on their personal lives, political instability. And so for them, uncertainty is the norm. Many Gen Z are telling us consistently that they don't know what the future is going to look like.

Sure, some of this is a part of life stage that they're placing more value on the present, but specifically for Gen Z, because they have been so inundated with its information about this uncertainty, they're not really sure who to trust besides theirselves, and that's why they place a high value on their own readiness before making the next steps and being cautious around decisions.

Just on the point about communicating through memes, I was -- for those that work on Wall Street that are watching this that maybe it's not normal in a presentation to see a meme. I remember only a couple of years ago, the first time I was in a business meeting and there was a slide deck and there was a meme in it.

And I remember thinking that's so unprofessional, like that's so weird to see some GIF in a -- and now it's like constant, right? Like every meeting I'm in, every slide basically is a meme. And I know that hasn't made its way to certain circles out in the general business community, including probably some people watching this. But like that's just the way they communicate and I mean even in the workplace.

Yes. So much can be said with a simple GIF or memes, great.

Right. Exactly. Another influence is that information for Gen Z is everywhere and it encompasses everything. So social media has really enabled Gen Z to fully absorb and also create a wide range of information, opinions, take from the world's biggest problems to problems that might not seem as big, but also still massively impactful saying how you expect your boy to show up or who pays for the first date. This also at times can create a sort of emotional whiplash. So one time, in 1 second, you're looking at a quick reel that gives you anger, another one that gives you joy.

Another element is that this is something we constantly hear from research is the feeling of being under surveillance and hyper scrutiny. Whether or not it's online of saying, I feel hesitant to share my opinion or I'm really cautious about what I'm going to share this photo of myself, so I'm going to focus a lot on curating, to being in a classroom and saying, yes, I'm around a lot of people, but I'm just worried that someone might film me giving the wrong answer to the professor or that saying, "Oh, I do want to text this person I want to be friends with," but what if they screenshot it and what if this might damage my reputation.

It might get canceled...

Exactly.

This is a big problem in academia.

Absolutely.

So students not expressing their opinion in the classroom because they're afraid they get canceled.

Totally. Yes. This is a big fear. And of course, it has implications on self-presentation and curation, both of yourself and the information that you're receiving.

Absolutely.

And another misconception that we regularly hear is that , oh, Gen Z are not open to romance, they're kind of done with dating or it's not a priority. We very much disagree unequivocally, we hear time and time again in the research that Gen Z daters absolutely do believe in human connection, but they're just defining how and when they want to get there on their own terms.

We conducted a study with the Kinsey Institute at the end of last year. And one of the key findings was that 4 and 5 Gen Z singles believe that they will find true love. And this is amazing. This is a significant majority. And what was really telling is that it was actually statistically significantly higher than total 18-plus singles. So not only do they want it, they might want it more than we look at the total single population. And so they overwhelmingly still want to find love and they're comfortable using technology as part of this process.

So if there's anything to take away that the desire for human connection absolutely remains durable. But what's evolving are their expectations for how they want to connect, when it should happen. And we're trying to evolve our tools to make sure we can support them in the ways that make sense for them and how they want to.

Love is not lost.

Definitely not lost.

Love hasn't...

Yes, very much alive. And Max has done a really fantastic job of laying out the broader context that are shaping Gen Z -- but we want to get a little bit more specific of what we at Match Group are looking at when we think about Gen Z. And there are really 4 core expectations shaping how they connect that we're going to dive into today.

The first one is agency, right? The insistence that connection must be on their own terms and on their own time lines. And another important one is realness. As a generation that we've talked about who's grown up online in the public eye, they're looking for authenticity, for humanness, for realness across everything that they do. And that leads really nicely into momentum.

Momentum is where function and emotion really meet. It's the functional desire for lower friction, but also the need for the emotional experience to be valid, to feel true and to feel like it's moving forward. And then, of course, we'll dive into trust -- this is so important that the emotional and physical safety feels present and true so that you can be your authentic self and show up with that realness that they're craving. And so held together, these 4 pillars, these themes really describe how the expectations around Gen Z are shaping and changing and evolving when it comes to connection.

Going to dive deeper into all of them. But first, we're going to dive into agency because relationship and connection, as Max was just saying, still really matters for Gen Z. They want connection, but they're demanding it fit their lives and not the other way around, which is why we see that 44% of under 30s want to spend time on my friends, instead of love or about 1 in 4 of under 30s list getting into a relationship as a primary goal for next year. So we see that they want it. But what we do see that's a little different with Gen Z is that the hierarchy of priority falls in a different order than it does in other generations.

So things like identity exploration, preparedness, friendship and community, career and personal growth are supplanting the dating sometimes here and there. And increasingly, people want connection to fit their lives rather than organizing their lives around connection. So that's an important thing that we're paying attention to is that the agency and desire and the time lines are a little bit different for Gen Z.

I want to interrupt you and ask about identity exploration. One, the percent of Gen Z that identify as seeking potential partners of either gender is fascinating and very different from prior generations. Can one or both of you talk to that and why you think that is?

Yes.

Yes. Do you want to go...

I mean we do see in the data, that especially with younger Gen Z 18 to 24, a higher instance of exploring it and figuring it out and diving a little bit deeper. And tools like that we provide actually help them explore that and poke around because it is more socially acceptable to be a bit more open to be a bit more exploratory. And this generation takes advantage of that, which is really exciting, I think, if you have new builds.

Yes, exactly. And I think it just builds on a longer trajectory of just being more openness to, for example, if we're talking about sexual identity, clear representation of the media and all these cultural artifacts help them feel more comfortable. And it's just wonderful to hear in schools all across the country that many just feel open to even questioning masculinity norms, not even just necessarily sexual identity.

And so this ties into the earlier insight on mental wellness and that for many Gen Z, there is great space and digital communities play a big role in making them feel comfortable for people like them to even question, not necessarily like change their sexual identity or explore, but just being open to the idea that things might be fluid. I'm just learning and I'm in this process of self-discovery.

And so alongside agency, which is definitely something that is more of an internal driver when you think about the human experience. We -- our next one that we want to explore is both internal and external, and that's around authenticity and realness. And one thing we hear consistently from all of the young people that we speak to is they want their experiences and their connections and their interactions to feel more genuine, to feel more real.

And with this, they want this authenticity, but there's also this pressure of perfectionism, judgment and, of course, rejection that goes alongside of this because this pressure to be perfect online is making this authentic connection that they crave a little bit harder and a lot more vulnerable. So this fear of rejection in particular, is one that we pay a lot of attention to in this category because there's this concern about how they're being perceived.

And this makes dating feel really high stakes and super high pressure because when you've grown up in a world that's online that anything can be snapped at a fingertips moment. And in these spaces, these social spaces that reward reactions and judgments and teardowns, showing up authentically becomes a really high-stakes act of vulnerability in your day-to-day.

So as a result, it's not so surprising when 81% of Gen Z want to move more slowly when getting to know someone more romantically. They want to really understand the playing board before they dive in and get vulnerable. And so there's also the fact that 1.7 -- Gen Z is 1.7x more likely than total singles to be fearful of the dating process because of others' opinions, because of that prospect of judgment.

And this reality is really why we so often hear from users that they want lower pressure, higher context opportunities to get to know themselves and to know other people because this desire for self-expression is one that opens you up for vulnerability, but also opens you up for better connection in the long run.

So we're going to talk in a moment about the implications on our product road map and sort of what we're doing about all this. But let me be devil's advocate here for a second. You're saying young people get stressed out about potential rejection because there's this need to be performative and perfect.

But dating apps sort of are all about putting yourself out there and subjecting yourself to rejection because your profile is being shown and most people are choosing no, they don't want to interact with you. So how can dating apps have product market fit then if this generation is so worried about rejection, the whole premises? Kind of rejection oriented?

Yes. I mean dating has always had rejection as a key piece of it, whether it's on the dating app or not, right? You put yourself out there to see if someone wants it and you get your answer based off of that other person. But ways to combat this is to offer Gen Z the signals in the context that they've grown up with and that they crave things like more detail like your astrology sign or your favorite music mode or campaign there, offers these signals that they're accustomed to and being more fluent in those in the experience allows them to better find a match more quickly and more efficiently and hopefully reduce that friction.

Awesome. So showing up authentically, as we said, takes effort, it takes energy and it takes time, which brings us to our next pillar, which is momentum. And for Gen Z, momentum is really twofold, right? It's this perspective of efficacy and function as well as the emotional piece of it. Functionally, people want to see results and actions as a result of their effort, right? That is just a human desire, I would say.

And so for Gen Z, particularly in this category, it's about quality over quantity. And at the same time, it's also about that feeling like you're moving forward that even though a match or a date isn't like your person, isn't your end game that you feel like you've taken -- you've learned and earned something out of it, that you've got momentum that you're moving forward, which is why I love this quote that I will read to you from a young female nonuser actually and saying that I'm really intentional with how I use dating apps.

Even if I get a lot of likes, I only respond to people who feel like they could genuinely go somewhere. I want to make sure we're actually compatible before I invest time on more -- on meeting up in person. So in this language, there's so much here, right? You've got that functional language of investing time, but there's also that emotion because this is a vulnerable space to be in of are we compatible? Do I feel like this is going to work.

So that's why momentum is something that we pay a lot of attention to and not only the experience, but in the actions that we build that they hopefully take because when it comes to this experience, Gen Z wants to see and feel the fruits of their efforts and their labors. They're not necessarily asking for more interactions, but definitely asking for better ones or ones that make sense to them no matter what.

So the goal of what we do everything here at Match Group is to move from Match to Spark to real-world interaction with less effort, wasted effort. So when we talk about momentum, we're really talking about relevance. It's quality. It's helping connections actually go somewhere. And that is a huge key piece of this experience and the emotion that sort of lays the backdrop across a bit?

If you take the really long term, say, 10-year view, is it fair to say that 10 or maybe 15 years ago, there was more novelty to online dating and the bar has been raised kind of the user expectation around product efficacy is a lot higher today because the entertainment value or the novelty has faded and now it's all about does this thing actually get me out on dates?

I mean, absolutely, like we think about the context in which we show up a lot, right? On someone's phone home screen, we're alongside things like Amazon, Uber, food order apps. So there's this expectation that in that experience, you're going to get what you ask for, you're going to get what you decide. And so those context, they're part of the groundwater. It's important that we keep that in mind that the efficacy is a piece of it and. Also just take care of the beautifully vulnerable spaces that we're operating in, too.

Right. Yes. I mean, the -- when you describe it like that and you think about the other apps where you get basically instant satisfaction, like we already have a lot of challenges in this category because the best possible case is you open the app, you got to match and you get it into a conversation right away.

But even still, there's friction to get to an in-person date that's going to take a couple of days -- like there's lot of friction.

Totally. People have lives, too.

Right. So it just increases the burden on us to improve efficacy of product with things like better recommendation algorithms or better ways to start conversations inside of chat or a more performing app or all these features that we focus on are more important than ever.

Absolutely.

Exactly. And to Emily's point, agency remains essential. People want to move at different time lines. Not everybody is on the same time line and might want to feel comfortable scheduling a date or even exchanging contact information after a week or 2 when others are prefer to do it immediately and assess compatibility and vibes more in person.

Yes, absolutely. And this is a perfect segue because none of this works without trust. Trust is the starting point for us at Match Group, but more importantly, for Gen Z, trust isn't just table stakes, right? It's the foundation for showing up as their real selves, both emotionally and physically. There's that physical safety piece of it, too.

And it's shaped everything Gen Z has navigated outside of our ecosystems, too. As you were so wonderfully stating at the top that this generation has come to be and come of age amid real uncertainty, whether it's economic pressure, political instability, rapid social change, global pandemics, it's -- this context really, really matters, and it shapes them at a very formative time of their lives.

So when the world outside feels really unpredictable and unsteady, the stakes of personal vulnerability really change. So when you think about sharing who you are risking that rejection that we were just speaking about, trusting a stranger that feels really, really high in this seemingly unstable and uncertain world.

So with this context as a backdrop, it makes sense that when we speak to these young people that around 1 in 3, 18- to 29-year-old singles have concerns about sharing their info on dating apps, right, putting themselves out there in those ways or that 35% of 18- to 29-year-old women note that they fear feeling about being misled by someone's intentions on the app or even their identity during the dating process, right?

You need to pay attention to these signals to feel comfortable. So trust and safety aren't separate from the dating backdrop. They're really truly tied to it and lay such a key piece of the foundation of showing up in order to connect and find romance. And yes, this generation can be cautious about identity, about intentions, about information that they're sharing and promoting. And as users don't feel safe or comfortable, they won't engage meaningfully. So it's a really, really important piece of the puzzle that we pay a lot of attention to.

The intersection of kind of physical safety and emotional safety is interesting and what popped into my head when you were talking Emily. I'm an alumni interviewer for my college, and I've interviewed 5 to 10 high school seniors for the last 25 years. And so I've got a pretty good longitudinal interaction. And I noticed about 5 years ago, maybe 7 years ago, these high school seniors started bringing their parents or they would say, my parent is waiting in the car outside.

And at first, that was a little surprising. That's sort of one of the tests of this is to see if they have their act together as a high school senior and they can be self-motivated and organized and I was like, I didn't think that much of it. And then in the last couple of years, increasingly, the parent is in the Starbucks with them at another table or nearby or even if I do it in my office, they ask if they can wait in the lobby. And so it's that intersection of physical safety because they know they're meeting a stranger and they want to make sure that they're safe, but also emotional safety, they know there's someone nearby that's there for them. So it's really changed in those 25 years.

No, it's a great example, and it's that crossover that makes you be you, right? So that they can hopefully energy and go to the full of their dreams.

So taking all these insights together, these are not just interesting observations, although many of them are, they really are baked into our product strategy. I think Max did a great job describing at the beginning, just how global and deeply embedded this research is.

But if research doesn't also make its way into the product and our marketing, then it's only academically interesting, it's not actually applied. So we've done a really good job of making sure that we apply these types of insights into our product development. And I'm not sure that was always the case in years past. I think one of the reasons that Match Group kind of lost its way there for a couple of years and maybe missed some of these changing consumer attitudes as Gen Z aged into our category was because we didn't -- either we didn't have the network of consumer insights and/or it wasn't well baked into the product development and marketing.

But I feel like today, we're in a much, much better place on both those fronts. So just to take through some of the products, Tinder's role is not to become Hinge. Tinder is all about possibility and discovery and lower pressure connections. So the Tinder road map that leverages these types of insights has been focused on building features like Events and Double Date, which help make dating more social and less isolated.

Astrology Mode, which gives users this lighter weight way to start a conversation and express their personality. Are you sure? And does this bother you? Which create more respectful interactions. We're really encouraged by a lot of these features and how they're doing. Hinge is approaching the same generation, but from a more -- a different relationship mindset. So the way Hinge focuses on these types of things -- if we can go to the next slide, please.

For example, is by focusing on fewer but more meaningful interactions. So Hinge features like Friends Take or Date Ideas or Signals, which is a badge that indicates whether you're there on Hinge with true intentionality or Match Note. These are all features that ladder up to helping people show that they're there with care and context. So Tinder is about lowering the stakes for discovery. So it's a more chill, relaxed environment. And Hinge is about raising the bar for intentional dating.

We think these 2 brands coexist really well. And even though they're both going after to a large extent, people in the same age demographic, we think they serve different consumer needs. The metaphor that I like to use that we've talked a lot about is the difference between a music festival and a music concert. So if you have tickets to a music concert, you know you're going to see, Ariana Grande, Sabina Carpenter or Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, whoever, now you know my musical taste.

You've got tickets for that show at a particular point in time, you know what you're going to get. In fact, I just took 5 Gen Z friends of my kids to a concert, and they were looking at the set list ahead of time, and which just posted online. I was like, don't you want the serendipity of not knowing what songs are going to -- I would never have looked at the set list when I was their age, like, no, I want to know what I'm going to get. I'm going there with intentionality. So that's a concert. That's like Hinge.

Going to a festival like a BottleRock or a Governors Ball or Coachella, that's about kind of vibing your way through the experience and the serendipity of maybe I'll watch 4 or 5 songs. And if I'm enjoying it, I'll stay for the whole set or maybe I'll leave and I'll go to this other set that's playing at the same time or I'll go check out some of the experiential brand activations and sort of vibe my way through that. And the journey is the destination in the case of the festival.

And so young people love concerts, they love festivals, but they play different roles, and that's how we think about Hinge relative to Tinder.

So I think -- next slide, please. Max, over to you for some thoughts on the next generation.

Thanks. I do love that metaphor.

My favorite.

So the category's next generation of Gen Alpha is already forming. They're coming into their own identity, and we're seeing a lot of their social and emotional behaviors. First and foremost, Gen Alpha are very young, ages 2 to 15 years old. And so for the purposes of this, when we're talking about our research of Gen Alpha, we're really referring to older Gen Alpha and some research that we conducted amongst 14- and 15-year-olds with parental consent.

And we did this research to validate that the work that we're doing right now for Gen Z and younger Gen Z for Tinder and Hinge in our products across the portfolio will resonate once Gen Alpha turn 18 are ready to start dating on our products. But from the preliminary research, which should absolutely be treated as an early signal and not at all forecast, we remain quite optimistic of some of the preliminary findings.

So for example, older Gen Alpha are less pandemic defined. They're more optimistic and even in some ways, enthusiastic about adulthood. They talk about their really thoughtful relationship that they have with technology and their phones and social media. 3 and 4 of Gen Alpha are open to dating throughout their high school experiences. So again, these are really promising signals. And what's behind it, we think are like many different underlying factors, one of which is that their parents are mostly millennials and millennials who have seen this transition and understand the counterfactual of what a life like and social interactions were pre-pandemic.

Another one is that in many jurisdictions across the country, schools, particularly public schools have implemented phone bands. And this, in particular, we've heard from these older Gen Alpha have really changed the way in which they're connecting in lunch rooms and playground, even at recess in times and what they expect and how they use their time during their extracurriculars and at home, and it really differently changes the ways in which they engage with social media and consume different forms of media.

Yes. I see this in my own situation. I have a 21-year-old who is Gen Z, and she had phones in school and missed critical years of high school and the beginning of college because of COVID. And so she is very similar to the way you're describing Gen Z, which is kind of reticent to put yourself out there.

And then I've got a 15-year-old who has no phones in school because the ban happened since then. She has positive recollections of the pandemic because that was like a fun time when I got to be at home, but it didn't kind of affect the way she forms human connection.

And she and her friends are super social. They do date, they hook up. They do like big group hangs in people's houses, like it's very, very social. It's very different between the Gen Alpha and the Gen Z. So is it fair to say -- maybe -- I mean, am I generalizing? Or is Gen Alpha a likely reversion to the mean, where from a dating app standpoint, it will, we think, look more like past generations or not sure yet? Or what do you think?

It's a little early to say because of signals. However, both might be true. We do see some -- they have some shared DNA with younger Gen Z, right? Like they have -- are also digitally native. They are very fluent with some of these mental health language as well as using these different tools for connecting online. So that is very comfortable and native to them.

At the same time, these are promising signals that potentially a lot of these milestones might go back to what they were in older generational cohorts because they were less defined by the pandemic because the face-to-face interaction that they're having is still happening in their critical times of cognitive development and social development.

So too early to see, but optimistic.

Asking the right question.

You mentioned -- or we discussed a little bit about different trends regarding sexuality and sexual preference. Another thing that occurs to me that's different than millennials is Gen Z and Gen Alpha potentially is relationship with alcohol. What -- tell us more about that and what impact you think that has on these generations?

Yes. So there's a lot of mixed information about alcohol consumption. Generally, it does appear in many ways for Gen Z to be down compared to generational cohorts. But it's not just overall consumption. It's more interesting to look at what types of alcohol are being consumed because in some ways, in some particular brands, we do see a growth. But that absolutely does impact behaviors. To your point exactly on like the festivals versus concerts, we are seeing Gen Z, again, also the mental health language, prioritizing wellness in different ways.

And one of that does mean reducing the amount of alcohol consumption. This is not a generalization. We still know that there is a lot of alcohol consumption occurring amongst Gen Z who are over 21 on college campuses and other places. But yes, to a large extent, it is impacting social behaviors and what the nightlife scene looks like. I mean, look around in L.A. as well and you...

We see the Tinder events in L.A., the dry ones are very popular.

Exactly...

It's more about self-improvement or learning or personal growth. Pottery class is as popular or more popular than the Happy Hour.

I think we're going to turn to questions.

So a number of -- we've got a lot of great questions here. Some have come in from some Wall Street analysts and some of them have included their names. I'll include their names for attribution. Some of the questions have come in anonymously, but I'll just jump in here. So Cory Carpenter from JPMorgan asks, how do younger Gen Z and older Gen Z behave? And are there major differences between older and younger Gen Z?

Yes. I mean, absolutely. So we define older Gen Z as 25 to 29. And what really defines them is life stage. We take a really close look at life stage across Gen Z because as we stated, Gen Z is not a monolith. They have a lot of nuance in detail. But what we do see with older Gen Z is because of they're older, they're more comfortable in these app spaces and leveraging dating apps in order to go on dates to find those connections, because they're less socially embedded in their networks like from university or early school places like younger Gen Z is.

Younger Gen Z, which is 18 to 24, they really find that they're socially embedded more so as mentioned, because they're in those university spaces, those early schooling...

Easier to meet new people...

It's easier to meet people by opportunity, and they are comfortable with that as we were just discussing with sort of some of the -- how COVID sort of impacted their formative developmental years. But what is really notable that across both cohorts regardless of life stage is they actually both rank #1 intent is serious relationships that they want something longer term.

But the way that they approach that and access that is different based off of the life stage that they're currently active in. And of course, that varies across life stage 2. You've got some people that may be 28 just had it broke up a very serious relationship, they might be seeking and sourcing relationships differently than someone they're seeing age who hasn't had that longer term or something more serious is a relationship breakup like that.

Totally. And I'm thinking of a conversation we had recently with like a younger Gen Z woman of 23. I believe she's in Raleigh and she says, "Oh, yes, I absolutely want a serious relationship, but I'm really going to put into high gear when I'm much older. Okay. When is that 25? It's like when the next life stage is. So to Emily's point, readiness and life stage play a massive role. But again, there is still this fundamental desire for a meaningful connection as the goal. It's just how and when they want to approach it, it looks a bit different.

Okay. This user or this listener asks, do you think Gen Z will age into more traditional dating behaviors? Or are they permanently changing the category?

I believe they will. I believe that traditional milestones will prevail and that we're seeing this again to Emily's point on the importance of life stage and readiness that, yes, we're seeing that as they're getting older, they are going into these more traditional milestones, whether it's about connection or more broadly, trends that we're seeing around moving out of the parent's home, finding a certain sense of economic or financial stability.

Yes. When I was running Zillow for a long time, we did a lot of research on this question around homeownership because as homes became less affordable and as the sharing economy grew and people were not buying cars, they were using ridesharing or they were not buying their own music, they were using streaming or not buying their own DVDs, they were watching streaming. TV and film, there was this question of are people just not going to want to own homes anymore and they're going to -- it's going to become kind of a renter nation.

And we did tons of tons of consumer research on it. And the answer was no, people still want to own homes. They're just going to do it later. Exactly. So the median age for a first-time homebuyer now is 40, and it used to be 30 about a decade ago. So they still want to own homes. It's still very, very high on their aspiration list, and they're still going to. They're just doing it later in life. So it sounds like you think something similar is applying to this category?

Absolutely. And that's why we spoke to agency. It's the time line that's shifted a little bit and how they want to get there. It's not always linear. But as stated, #1 intent is a serious relationship, they still want it. It's just a matter of the journey of getting there and when they hit that milestone.

So why -- I have a question, which wasn't submitted, but it's -- I feel like it's sort of the elephant in the room. Why do they not -- why does Gen Z not want meaningless hookups, the way millennials did when they were 18 to 25 and hookups were like, okay, and now there's a stigma against shallow, meaningless hookups. It sounds like -- all the research we've shared is that they don't want that. They want more intentionality.

What's wrong with hookups? And why doesn't Gen Z like them?

I would argue that not all millennials wanted meaningless hookups at the time, but it's more so that it was accepted as a social norm as one of the process to finding a meaningful relationship. There was a lot of social pressure and that this is one of the ways to demonstrate interest and single interest.

Gen Z, as mentioned with the prioritization and understanding of readiness and mental health said this isn't the only way to get there. There are other ways to demonstrate interest and more authentic connections that are not solely rooted on sexuality of ways to [indiscernible] and find companionship and express values. So the norms are changing, more so of express desires, the way that they see companionship. This translates to sexual behaviors, but the fundamental desire for human connection is ultimately the same.

Yes, absolutely. And it brings to mind this discussion that we had around vices and alcohol, right? There is this desire in an unstable environment of control and controlling the things that you can. And I think that's why we see a lot of reduction in some of these mind-altering vices that changes. And that goes similarly with sexual -- like actually engaging in sex. You reduce control, you reduce risk of cancellation of doing something wrong.

And so I think in that subsegment of Gen Z is also probably an emotional response to why there's some of that reduction in sex.

Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer asks, Gen Z appears to lack certain social norms that would facilitate successful dating. As such, even successful matches don't seem to convert to dates or first dates don't convert to second dates. Do you feel this is something Match Group needs to address or correct to make Tinder or Hinge successful over the long term?

I think the way we view it is that Gen Z has their own set of social norms and a lot of those exist digitally. As you were just mentioning with memes and GIFs showing up in the workspace, that is a fluency and a way and a social norm to communicate. You don't send someone a text to explain how you're feeling, you send them your favorite meme or your favorite sticker or your favorite emoji, which is a beautifully artful way to communicate your emotions, but that is the baseline social norm.

And so the way that we use that and translate that for our products and our purposes is giving and offering higher context ways to communicate, right? It's offering things like a music mode or an astrology mode on Tinder to really showcase those signals and that juicy context and details that they're craving so that those social norms can be embedded in that experience and used to find a higher quality, better match in that way.

On the research side, this is why it's important to triangulate different sources of evidence. There are so many different ways to define and interpret those norms. So for example, if you do a survey, and we do surveys like this all the time, where we say, what was your most recent date? Why does a date to Gen Z is so different from all generations?

So for the social norms of millennials, many might think of, oh, one-on-one, could be, let's get a drink at the bar, but for Gen Z, this might be the third or fourth day already. And so what might be, in some ways, traditionally constructed in a survey as a date, they're already there. And this is why Tinder is building things like Events or Double Date to reshape and meet them where they are.

Or in Double Date now where on Tinder, you can indicate your date ideas.

Exactly.

And many of the things listed there of date ideas, people of my generation wouldn't think of as a date.

Exactly.

And I was talking to a Gen Alpha person the other day, actually, and I used the term date and they kind of looked at me kind of weird and she said, "Well, it's not really a date. It's more of a low-key kickback." That's how she was describing what she and 2, 3 girls 2, 3 guys were doing. It wasn't a date. I would call that like a triple date. And that is like, oh, that's very intense.

Millennials were just hanging out.

Exactly.

Yes. Totally.

Okay. Benjamin Black from Deutsche Bank asks, within dating, authenticity is clearly very important, particularly for Gen Z. How do you preserve authenticity in a world of AI where prompts and profiles are increasingly leveraged AI editing tools and AI recommendations.

Why don't we -- Max, why don't you start with describing sort of Gen Z's perception vis-a-vis AI? And then I'll have Emily talk about how we bring it into the product.

Sure. So first of all, to a very large extent, Gen Z are already using AI in many different ways, whether it's at work, whether it's through school to help them with assignments or summarize large swaths of information. Many Gen Z are very comfortable, and they tell us and we see that they are using AI essentially in their daily lives. It looks a bit different when it comes to meaningful connections. And many Gen Z tell us that when it comes to building products or even if it's other things, not just dating apps, the internal tooling doesn't really matter. It's more important that they're getting the outcomes of the things they want.

And when it comes to our apps, it's that AI should help connect people better in the real world. They just want better dating outcomes. They want to be able to connect and make new friends in different ways and how they get there is not as important to them, more so is just getting to that destination in the way that fits for them.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think the way that we think about AI, particularly with our products, as you mentioned, it's about connecting people better, more quickly to the real world. And within that, as we were just talking about agency, we want to make sure the user is always in the driver's seat and that their choice isn't reduced, but their momentum is increased.

And AI really provides the depth and scale that allows us to do that. And one way we see that across really wonderfully is AI prompts recommendations. It's that partner and that friend in the journey with you, like just like you would text your girlfriend like, "Oh my gosh, this is what they said, this is what I'm thinking of responding, what do you think using AI as a partner in that process" because that increases your agency, makes you feel more confident and hopefully helps you land that conversation a little bit more strongly. Or I think another really wonderful way that we've been implementing AI is in that trust and safety space because, again, it gives you that depth and that scale to make sure we're considering all of the angles in this increasingly dynamic technological world that we're navigating.

So what I'm hearing is we want to make sure that AI brings people closer together, doesn't stand in between them.

Yes.

And we want to make sure that it increases authenticity, not creating superficiality. So for example, in chat, if a chat kind of slows down and people aren't flirting or talking anymore, we might use AI to make a suggestion to one of them of, hey, on her profile, she talked about these interests, they're similar to yours. Why don't you bring -- why don't you start a conversation about that. But we wouldn't likely draft that exact copy for the user because that would be crossing a line towards inauthenticity?

Yes, the user needs to be in the driver's seat. It's ultimately them that pen it and click send, but we love the partnership and the tooling to help them get to that best version of themselves. It's about amplifying them rather than replacing them.

Yes, it might be tempting to draft it for the user so they can just hit submit. But then on the receiving end, that receiver will also get offered that, and then they'll know that probably it was an inauthentic overture from the other person and then it breaks down.

And to the earlier point on scrutiny, Gen Z are always oftentimes questioning whether things are AI. And like anybody across any generational cohort, there are both positives and negatives of what we think might be AI generated, but there is the skepticism. So again, to Emily's point, preserving the sense of authenticity and ensuring agency is really crucial for the user experience across our products.

Yes. And I guess another example will be on photos. So we do provide an AI ability to improve the lighting or the clarity of a photo, but we don't let you change the background of the photo. So a picture of you in front of -- on a couch, it's not going to picture you on a couch. We're not going to put you at the beach or in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty implying that you've been to those places, that would be an inauthentic use of AI.

Exactly.

Nathan Feather from Morgan Stanley asks, with the goal of quality over quantity, how do you get users to slow down when using the product to try and encourage a more thorough analysis of any individual profile? How do you make sure to highlight the potential most relevant profiles such that they aren't skipped?

So Emily, why don't you talk about some of the ways that we're trying to improve profile quality and people's review of profile?

I mean there's a lot of ways to do this. And again, this brings up the pillar of momentum, right? We want people to feel like they're moving forward with efficacy, but there's also the right level of speed. We don't want things to be too quickly, because you might miss something, you might be making rash decisions versus being intentional and thoughtful about it.

And again, one way that I know we're doing this at Tinder is by increasing those signals. -- on profiles and apps in that way. So again, music mode when you're looking at, oh, Max and I both like this one artist, this one song, that slows things down for you. That lets you have a bit of a signal of what Max is like in real life. You can imagine driving in Max's car and us playing this song and connecting over that, right? That slows people down to pay a little bit more attention to the profile, the bio, the details therein in order to increase that efficacy and give momentum forward at the right pace.

Yes. Another example is we now -- on Tinder, we put prompt content, so that's written words, prose, into the photo carousel. So instead of just looking at photos in the photo carousel, we're kind of intermingling responses to prompts like what do you like to do on a Sunday or what's your relationship with your friends like into the photo carousel, which definitely slows you down because now all of a sudden you have to read words instead of looking at a photo, but it gives people kind of a more considered experience when assessing potential compatibility.

Absolutely.

Okay. I think -- actually, it's important also to remember that this overall topic of getting people to slow down, consider an authentic profile, this is really more of a match group initiative across brand. So obviously, Hinge does this very well already with a contextual like feature where when you are looking at a profile on Hinge, you're indicating interest in a particular element of the profile rather than just saying I'm interested in this person, you're saying I'm interested in this thing about this person.

Upward, our brand that focuses on people with traditional values has a feature called Chivalry Mode, where if you have our photo verified and you have a more complete profile and you respond to as a good actor in messaging, then you are allowed to participate in Chivalry Mode. And there, it's kind of a different experience that's more highly considered and a slower profile.

So we're taking these types of learnings across lots of our brands. Actually, Chispa, also our brand for Hispanic daters is doing is testing something similar now where it's kind of a more considered profile rather than a quick twitch photo evaluation. So these insights that we develop at the Match Group level or even at the Tinder level, we scale them across all of our brands.

Okay. Last question here from Andrew Marok from Raymond James. Andrew asks. With the shift in behaviors from millennials to Gen Z, how does that impact how to think about future generational differences? Are they assured? And what are some of the signs that you monitor for cohort shifts? How has this shift affected how the voices of different ages are heard internally?

Would it make sense to staff product orgs with employees, primarily in the core age range as well as young users and new grads in order to catch emerging shifts before they fully take hold?

Max, I'll let you take the beginning of this. I think we've already talked a little bit about how do we make sure that we're bringing insights from all ages and then maybe Emily or I will close with how we bring that into the actual room for decision-making.

Yes. So we have a lot of internal leading and lagging indicators when it comes to cultural signals. And these generational desires and changes in mindsets are sometimes very slow moving and sometimes very fast. And you can't anticipate everything that's going to be completely changing the way a whole set of society thinks.

Like it could be one social media post that fundamentally reframes the narrative around the way that people approach dating, for example, or connection. So we collect all these signals. We try to map it to the underlying cultural shift that we talked about, for example, pandemic, the macroeconomic and environmental perceptions and how that impacts long-term thinking and companionship. With these smaller cultural signals. And we also leverage historical data to look at what we have learned from the transition from millennials to present. So it's a mix. We don't have a crystal ball. There are a lot of brilliant people that we collaborate with the science of trying to understand and interpret these waves for building products.

But the best tool that we have are listening to Gen Z and understanding their desires and how they're engaging with cultural media, social content and all these different forms to make sure that the way our product develops is moving in their direction and we'll continue to do so with future generational cohorts.

Absolutely.

Yes. I mean this is definitely a benefit of Match Group's scale. There's no doubt in my mind that we have a larger team and we have more resources focused on consumer insights with respect to human connection globally across all age cohorts, than any competitor by far. So it's definitely a strength of ours. In terms of bringing these insights into the room, your teams are in the rooms when we're making these decisions on product and marketing.

We have also significantly increased our presence of younger employees. So yesterday, I spoke to our intern class of 30, our largest ever intern class. It's incredibly important that we have summer interns who are college students that are in the -- hanging out with the employees in the kitchen, doing work, contributing to decisions and helping bring those insights directly into the company. We have custom GPTs, which have been really useful. So for each of our key personas, we have AI incarnations of them that employees, including me, use constantly to talk to all these different users to get like instantaneous feedback on all of this through AI.

So there are lots of ways, including just hiring more young people who are in our primary age cohort that we bring these insights into the room. So thank you very much for joining us today for this first ever CEO connection. I hope that you walked away with a better understanding of Gen Z and how their expectations around connection are evolving and how we're thinking about the future of our category. I want to thank Emily and Max for sharing their information and thank those who submitted such thoughtful questions.

We'll continue this conversation at our Q2 earnings call. In the meantime, I share regular updates on these types of topics on my Socials, on LinkedIn, Instagram and other social channels. And I'd love to continue the conversation. So thanks for joining us today. Thank you both very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay. Good morning, everyone. And we're pleased to have Steven Bailey, CFO of Match Group here at the conference. Thanks for coming. We appreciate it.

Yes.

Just going to kick it off with Tinder. You guys called out improving in engagement metrics in 1Q, including improving declines in the Sparks metric. What do you think are the best kind of leading indicators that you're seeing at Tinder that's kind of moving more towards even a stable or potentially reaccelerating trajectory? And yes, we'll start there.

Skipping the safe harbor whole thing. Normally you do. Do you want to do that or not do that? I'll keep going. Maybe we can do it at the end. Sorry, we'll -- no problem.

So yes, so look, I think -- here's the way I'm thinking about it. One is it's not just one metric. It's actually the thesis being proven out. So it's the fact that leading indicators are improving, so that Sparks and Sparks Coverage, which is a 6-way conversation, a meaningful connection. That was always what we thought would move first. And then we said, well, the thesis was that would lead to more lagging indicators or more core user metrics improving. And so we've seen that happen now. MAUs improved from minus 10% to minus 7%. So that's proving out the thesis that the leading indicators, which is improved product experience are going to translate into more core user metrics improving. Retention has also improved. So that's a core user metric.

And then we said that, that would ultimately lead to the core financial metrics improving too, what investors ultimately care about. And so we've seen that actually start to happen, too. Payers is a great example of that. Payers improved from minus 8% in Q4 to minus 5%. So that's a pretty marked improvement in Q1. So to me, it's actually the most important thing is that the thesis is starting to be proven out that fix the product, you'll see that first in metrics like Sparks, that will lead to improving user trends. We're seeing that in MAU and retention. That will lead to better financial results. We're already starting to see that in Payers and revenue too, where our Tinder revenue is coming better than expected lately, too. So it's more that the sequencing is playing out like we had hoped. That's what I'm most excited about.

And I think it might have been March where it was the first month of new user registration growth since 2024. What demos are maybe driving that new user trend? And what do you view as the biggest driver of these gains?

Yes. That was incredibly exciting to see. First of all, registrations up 1% year-over-year. It's been many, many years since that's happened. So that's another -- a step function change in the right direction. So that's new users downloading the app for the first time using Tinder. And what's really exciting to see is that it's pretty broad-based.

I was looking at it just the other day, and it's really across almost, I would say, most cohorts. So it's both men, it's both women. It's largely speaking, both older cohorts and younger users, and it's both international and the U.S. It's not every cohort, but it's pretty broad-based, which is fantastic to see. And it's really coming from a combination of, I would say, 3 things. One, and probably the most impactful has been the shift in strategy of the marketing, which is more lower funnel now versus more brand perception shifting spend. It's still a combination of both, but we've shifted more heavily to down funnel. That's probably had the biggest impact.

More spend just in general, right? Tinder, we spent up about $50 million year-over-year. So that's helping. And then features like Double Date, really resonating with Gen Z. It's helping that word-of-mouth flywheel that's so important to the overall equation, too. So it's really those 3 things leading to better rate trends, which is fantastic to see.

Yes. That stood out to me like huge of this last quarter. Maybe on the product road map, you've mentioned a few, and we're getting towards the midpoint of the year. But I think as we get towards the back half of the year, what on the product road map is exciting? Or would you call out as something to look for?

I don't want to spill the beans on a super exciting new product road map things in the back half of the year, I'll let Spencer do that. I can talk more broadly, though. I think what I'm most excited about is there's going to be -- there's clearly -- our company, I think, broadly speaking, across the category, a push to more IRL. I think that's going to be a big theme. And we've started to trial it in L.A. It's going very well. We could talk more about that if you want. But there's -- we're going to amp up the IRL connections on Tinder, which is what Gen Z wants.

And then sort of a related theme, is more group-type features. So Double Date has just been hugely successful. 1 in 4 Gen Z women in the U.S. are using it. That's when you pair up with a partner and you swipe on other pairs and you go out on a double date. That's exactly what they're looking for. It's fun. It's lightweight. It's lower pressure. It's perceived to be safer. I think we're going to branch out into even more group type features, think beyond just a pair, that's a big opportunity for us too.

Yes. Maybe just on the IRL or in real life. So at the product event in March, you guys talked about these events and catering to the younger users that I think you just mentioned. How are these efforts going? And then like do we view this as driving significant revenue over a long period of time? Or is it part of like kind of the marketing and branding funnel for Tinder?

I think it's more the latter. It's not -- I don't think it's a big revenue growth driver, at least for now. That's not the focus. It's really changing perception for Tinder away from -- this is hookup app and I'm tired of swipe fatigue too, this is a new people app where I'm finding and making meaningful connections in real life. That we're trying to shift the sort of perception in that direction. And it's what Gen Z wants. They want more in-real-life connections. And Tinder is the largest platform in the world that can make those connections happen. And so that's how I see it.

How is it going? Extremely well. That's why I'm saying in the back half of the year, I think you'll see a lot more of it because we piloted it in L.A. with 20 events so far. I think we're going to do 30. We'll have 30 done soon, and the feedback has just been incredible. The attendance is, I think, at about 85% attendance, which is great. So that's been the problem in the past. We've tried this at like Match.com a long time ago. And the issue was like there was always like, yes, yes, yes, I'd love to go to event. But then when it came the day to actually go, people wouldn't show up, right? There's a lot of anxiety.

I think the Gen Z generation is different. It's because they've lowered the pressure of that. They want lower pressure connections. They don't need to find the love of their life at this event, right? They want to go meet new people and see where it goes. And so I think they think about events like through a different lens than prior generations. And so 20 events, really strong attendance. We surveyed everybody after the event and say, how you liked it? The feedback has been incredibly strong. We've been surveying just our broader users in L.A. about just the offering of events. And the results are great. It's something like 50% of Gen Z in L.A. is saying they're interested in going to event, which is great. So the interest is there. I think it's 40% of Gen Z in L.A. on Tinder are saying events are a really cool feature on Tinder. So the demand is definitely there, and I see us rolling it out much more broadly.

And do you have a team dedicated to this in L.A.? Or is it just...

Yes. We have a small team. We have a small team that we borrowed from other parts of the company. What we're going to do is we're not going to curate the events, right? We're going to do this in a scalable way. We want to be the technology platform that makes these connections happen, not an events business. So we're really partnering with other events businesses that already have the event set up and they're curating the event. We're sponsoring it. That's sort of the model we're using. So it actually doesn't take a lot of people to do it. And the cost has been relatively reasonable too. Actually, most of the expense has just been in marketing the event and kind of like what you said, using it as a marketing tool for the broader Tinder product experience more generally.

And we could expect maybe because it seems like it's been initially a pretty good success like maybe we would see it in other markets or something down the road?

Yes. I hope -- I think we'll talk more about it in the next earnings call, but I think we've got pretty big plans in this area.

That's great.

I think it's going to be a big unlock for how do we win over Gen Z., events is definitely part of that.

Right. That's great. Sticking with Tinder. How much progress do you think you've guys made in improving the recommendation algorithm over the last year or so? And do you see like an opportunity to drive further engagement and user experience improvements from recommendation changes?

A couple of things. One, recommendations, I would say, has been the biggest win of the year. Like, if you look at the metrics we just talked about Sparks and retention and what's driving it, I would say the algo changes is about 2/3 of that. And so that's been the biggest win. Combined with features like Double Date that's changing perception, that's sort of been -- and marketing, that's been a winning formula. But if you just look at pure A/B test, what's driving the metrics, it's retention. And it's coming from better matches and the algos. So that's great to see.

And so we get the question a lot, well, okay, was that low-hanging fruit and sort of it's over now, and now you got to come up with something new. And the answer is really no, honestly, I just asked the team and they confirmed for me, we're doing 6 algo tests right now live. So like the core algo changes are not done. We'll keep testing and keep optimizing. What other people also don't realize is it's not just 1 algo. It's many algos across the app for different parts of the experience. And so there's a lot there that can be optimized. But effectively, what we've done so far is really change the weighting of the algorithms, right? We've talked a lot about this from, likes, generating as many likes as possible to generate revenue to more keying off of user outcomes in Sparks, meaningful connections. It might be less likes, but more meaningful connections.

That's basically the work we've done so far. And what's been great to see is not only is it improving metrics like retention, but it's not having the revenue hit that we anticipated, right, less of a revenue hit than we anticipated. So that's great. Where we go from here is continued optimization, 6 tests live right now. And then I think the other big unlock that we have -- it's really super early days, is feeding these algos more data and insights so they get better. The trick -- the challenge with Tinder was always there's not a lot of data to go off of, right? Like compared to a Hinge, the profile is much lighter. That's by design, right? And so the algos are working off of a sliver of information about you and your profile and your interactions on the app, right?

But we're testing a lot of really interesting AI-driven features. For example, we talked a lot about some of the camera roll features we're doing. So there's an ongoing test right now that looks like with your permission, your camera roll, most people have got thousands of photos on their camera roll. Not only can we say these are the best photos for you, which people struggle with, and this is the right order to put them in. But here is what we -- here's insights about you that we've cleaned from your photos, you like to cook, you like to travel, and we're going to start helping people not only fill up their profile better, which is another struggle, but also think about feeding all that information like the metadata on the photos into the algos, can create much better, much better connections and so are much better matches.

So I think that's the other big lens of this is how do we get -- how do we get data to feed the algorithms still in a light fun way. With Chemistry, we've tested some of that, where it's like a back-and-forth Q&A. Let me learn a little bit about you, let me feed it into the algos. That's still a huge opportunity.

And AI has been a pretty big catalyst...

Yes. I think AI does a great job of 2 things. One, basically inference, like inferring something about you, that's not explicit, right? The old algos is very like rules based. What are you looking for? What are your rule breakers? And it doesn't infer anything. But now even in that short snippet of your profile, without you explicitly saying it, AI is better at inferring kind of what you like, what you dislike. And then two, it's what I said is, it's very good at gleaning information about users in a lightweight way. Like everybody is interacting with ChatGPT and everything else. You can have a conversation where it collects data, but it's not taxing on you as a user, whereas in the past, it was like fill out this huge profile to gather data. So I think that's the other place that AI does a really good job in.

And I have like just faster, like speed, too. Does it -- like does it help with -- from an efficiency perspective relative to if you're tuning up algorithms in the past, like when you weren't deploying AI. I'm just...

It does. It iterate on it faster and it can learn more about you more quickly, you're right. And we've got something in test right now, which is a feature in Tinder where we actually explicitly tell the user, "hey, look, take your time, go through some of these profiles, swipe right or swipe left because we're learning about you by doing that, especially for women who tend to not swipe right very often. We're asking them to take action so that AI can quickly lean insight into what they like and what they don't like, which is getting you better matches more quickly. It used to take a few days to figure it out. Now it takes a single session. So you're right.

Maybe just -- maybe 1 more on Tinder. And I think you touched on it, but I think it was probably one of the biggest issues for the platform was just the younger users, Gen Z. And maybe you've already touched on it, but do you think the perception of Tinder with that cohort has changed over the past year or so with all of the things that you guys are doing and is there more kind of room to go there with -- again, with that younger cohort?

It is changing, but the job is not done. Clearly, we have a -- we've got further to go. How we know it's changing? Well, first of all, let me take a step back. The first thing is, does Gen Z want to meet new people? Like that's the first question to ask. And so we've asked that in surveys in many different ways. And effectively, the survey results say, 80% of Gen Z -- our survey results say 80% of Gen Z want to get into meaningful connections. So the want is there. They just want to do it in a different way. And I think the sort of headline is lower the pressure a lot from where it used to be.

And so they want to get connection. They want to do a different way, and we're trying to build the products to do that. And I think what we're seeing, I'll just give you a couple of stats that we're building our confidence in it's working is I mentioned this earlier, Double Date is a feature where 25% of Gen Z women in the U.S. are using it. And they're using it at far higher rates than millennials or older cohorts of users. The other, I think, probably best stat metric that we've given so far is retention of U.S. Gen Z women or how long they're staying on the app, when we talk about good churn and bad churn, right? Good churn is you met someone you left the app. We want that all day long, because that means you come back when you're single again and you tell your friends and we get the word of mouth.

What we're trying to do is reduce bad churn, right? Bad churn is, I'm not meeting new people on this app, so I'm not going to use it anymore. And we've started to see that. U.S. women Gen Z retention is up 3 points year-over-year. That's year-over-year improvement in retention, and it continues to improve. So that's telling us that what we're doing is working. It's really 2 things we're doing. One is the app is more effective. It just works better, right? That's the algos. And two, we're starting to change perception with features like Double Date and with features like IRL. So I do think it's starting to work. We used to talk a lot about Tinder perception as well. We track this metric if you remember. It was like it's Tinder hookup app. And we use that to measure brand marketing efficacy.

And so I just looked at that the other day, that's continued to meaningfully decline. And so I do think perception is changing. And we're starting to get Gen Z to reconsider Tinder. The other good, I guess, good stat is at the survey result is that about half of Gen Z women say Double Date is a defining feature of Tinder. So these features are starting to work. But it's going to take a little bit more time to really get back to growth. I think we're on the right path.

That's great. Let's go to -- pivot over to a platform that's growing very nicely, Hinge. You recently maintained the $1 billion revenue guide for 2027. Maybe just talk about like product-led growth drivers there as we get through this year and into next year? What's kind of working? And what are the biggest growth drivers?

Yes. I mean phenomenal growth, 28% revenue growth in Q1. They're on track to deliver the full year expectations we put out earlier in the year and on the path to $1 billion in 2027 with expanding margins. So incredibly strong results there.

There's a few things. One, I think the growth is coming from a number of areas. One is there's a long runway on monetization in core markets. They still monetize far lower than Tinder. That's a misconception. I think there's some confusion because if you just look at the external results, we break it down with RPP and payers and at face value, you look at Hinge, it's like, well, RPP is double what Tinder is. So that monetization opportunity is not there. That's not really the right way to look at it. You really have to look at it from like a revenue per MAU perspective, which bakes in payer penetration and RPP.

And if you look at it that way, and the other benefit I have in looking at the internal data is, I can sort of look at it apples-to-apples, right? And I can control for the geo mix of those 2 businesses. So Tinder's RPP and payer penetration gets weighted down because it's so global and these other international markets monetizes less than the U.S., where Hinge's more concentrating in those core markets that tend to monetize higher. So basically, if you control for all that, there's still a long runway to go for monetization improvement by Hinge in core markets. So I think that's going to drive some growth.

Europe is also still pretty early days from a monetization perspective, and growing extremely strong. I don't know if we've said this -- I don't think we said this in earnings, but if you just look at revenue growth in European expansion markets, it's 100% year-over-year the last 3 quarters, which is massive growth. And still a long runway to go if you look at it relative to Tinder. And then third is -- and I think probably most importantly, at this point in its growth trajectory is it continues to resonate in every new market it enters. So it's the #2 or #3 dating app in Mexico and a couple of other countries in South America where it just entered in Brazil. And so that's just another continent that it's resonating in. And so it's building our confidence in its ability to just be a global brand, right?

And so then the question becomes, okay, well, when is it -- so it probably is going to resonate in Asia, too. It resonated in Europe. It resonated in South America. It's resonated in core English-speaking markets, it's probably going to work in Asia, too. And that's a huge market that's just completely untapped. I mean, Japan is one of the biggest markets in the world just from a dollar perspective.

And so we're, to be honest, talking more and more now about, okay, we're going to get -- we're sort of -- we're going to get to the $1 billion through basically momentum. I mean we got to keep executing. So, how do we get to the $2 billion? That's kind of where the lens have shifted, which I think is because we see, okay, this could be a global brand. So that's super exciting.

And then the last thing I would just say about Hinge that I think is important is we've -- in a way, we kind of learned from the Tinder mistakes a little bit. And they are myopically focused on product innovation. And so they're not letting their foot off the gas on, okay, we've got the user growth, so let's shift all the focus to monetization. It's a really balanced road map between monetization and true product innovation, which is necessary to keep -- to get back to category growth, right? And so you see that in this last quarter where we rolled out 3 super interesting new product features. There's a friends product -- feature friends take that brings your friends into the experience and helps them give insights about you and the profile. There's a feature called signals that we're working on, that adds basically, you could earn a badge through good behavior. That is a feature that really will resonate with women.

So we're really innovating on the product, too, I think at a really good pace to help -- so that's just -- that is the way to long-term sustainable growth. Product -- continued product innovation and investment combined with monetization and the global appeal, I think there's a long runway to go there.

That's awesome. How do we think like -- so if Tinder trends continue and things continue to improve and then Hinge has a lot of runway and great growth right now. Like over a 3- to 5-year period, how do the -- how do you see the brands coexisting within Match?

Yes. I always harp back to the gem, which we rolled out a few quarters ago, which I think is a simple way to think about it, where our brands fit on sort of 3 axes: Focus, fun and familiarity. And focus is Hinge, fun is Tinder, familiarity is a lot of the E&E brands that we talk about that are a little bit more demographically focused. And there's really a place for all of them. And we're going to ensure that remains the case.

A good example is IRL is applicable to both Hinge and Tinder, right? And they both have a Gen Z user base. But it's going to look -- it's looked very different. How that sort of manifests itself in the app looks very different, right? So there's an IRL experience, which is the third product feature that Hinge just rolled out, that basically gets you out on a date right away. It gets you in IRL with a connection. And the way -- but the way it does it is very different than the Tinder events product strategy we just talked about. It's more a drop-down, you match with someone, you get to say, do you want to go straight to a date? Where would you like to go coffee, dinner, whatever, pick a time, okay, let's meet. And let's get rid of the back and forth chatting and let's just go out on a date. That's IRL for Hinge.

That's way different than the IRL for Tinder, which is let's go to an event and sort of just hang and see what happens. And so we'll keep those paths pretty separate and distinct. And the last -- the couple of other points I would make is it's a multi-app category, right? Users are using 3 to 4 apps at a time. So there's no reason why someone can't be on Tinder and Hinge. That's actually what happens quite frequently. And we think there's a huge opportunity around cross-sell and bundling and just making better use of our portfolio of brands. It's a strategic advantage we have. We haven't done a lot on. So we do have an internal project called Mercury, which is cross sell. It's generating $20 million, $30 million a year in revenue already, which is you're on BLK, and we show you an ad for Tinder and we say, would you like to join Tinder too and it's one click profile transfer.

So I think that's the path forward is keeping these apps unique and distinct and then offering -- and then providing offerings that only we can around bundling and cross-sell that a lot of our competitors can't.

Okay. We -- I have time for a couple more questions here, so I'm going to try to go quick because I have a lot more to get through, but...

I'll try to give quicker answers too.

No, no, no, that's great. The Sniffies, just staying with like the brands. You invested in Sniffies. How should we think about it? Can you just remind people roughly, minority stake?

Yes. I'll give you the 1-minute answer. $100 million of investment, large minority stake, off balance sheet, not consolidated, #2 player in the non-heterosexual male category, which is the largest demographic segment in the category. Just look at Grindr and the market cap and how well they've done. We think there's a path to make it #1. And that's why we've invested in it. We're going to help support it with trust and safety. We're going to work together to get back in the App Store with a safe for work product. And we're super excited. It has great brand resonance, huge following, 3 million MAU, founders are great. And we're going to do it in a way where we're playing the supporting role, but we're not going to sort of mess up what all the great things they've done as being like independent founder-led business.

So that's the strategy. I think it's super exciting. We're shutting down Archer that was a bet we made, just hasn't found the product market fit that we wanted, and so this is a better bet for us.

Okay. I want to hit margin and capital allocation. On the margin, 200 bps of margin expansion guide at the midpoint. Just talk about just the drivers for margin, and then I'll finish with capital allocation?

Thank you. I think capital allocation is an underappreciated part of the story. Margin in 1 minute is, first of all, you're giving us -- first of all, there's a lot of onetime costs in 2025. So you really have -- which we've been explicit about. We're extremely clean with our EBITDA definition more so than most companies, so we try to call it out. But if you sort of strip all those onetime costs out, margins are basically flat year-over-year, 37.5%-ish. That's by design.

We could have expanded margins further through IP fee savings through the headcount reductions we've made, but we plow it back into growth, which has been a great strategy for us. We've effectively created $100 million of headcount-related savings, $125 million-ish in IP fee-related savings, $225 million that we plowed back into Tinder and Hinge product and marketing. Where it goes from here, is it's mostly structural too. It's not -- but I think ultimately, my goal is to get growth back. I'm thinking about long-term adjusted EBITDA, not necessarily margins for the sake of margins. And the way -- I always say that the best way -- the easiest way to generate margin expansion is revenue growth, right? It's just because of the operating leverage in the business.

So if we can get Tinder and the brands back to better growth, which we think we can over the next couple of years, that will give us lots of optionality to expand margins further.

That's great. Let's close with capital allocation. I mean, Match is an incredible free cash flow generator. You guys have been super disciplined with capital allocation in recent years. So just -- yes, just a couple -- like a minute on how you see capital allocation?

Yes. I mean we think of it as like the coiled spring analogy, right? What we're -- we're coiling the spring up by working hard to turn around Tinder and get free cash flows back to growth. They've been about flat for the last few years, right, which is still $1.1 billion of free cash flow. And we're buying back shares all along. And so we've reduced share count outstanding. We think we'll reduce it 5% to 7% over each year over the next few years, like a CAGR sort of rate. And when we get through the end of this, the share count is a lot lower, the cash flow starts to grow, and it's a coiled spring that just generates fantastic free cash flow per share and returns. And free cash flow per share was up in the 20% year-over-year growth last year. It will be in the high teens this year. It's just phenomenal. I think people don't appreciate it. It's a big part of the overall turnaround story.

Right. That's great. All right. So I think we're out of time. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

All right. I think we'll get started. Good afternoon, everyone. Cory Carpenter, Internet analyst at JPMorgan. Pleased to have Steve Bailey, CFO of Match Group. Thanks for joining.

Happy to be here.

So starting with safe -- Match's safe harbor. During this presentation and during the question-and-answer session, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in our periodic reports filed with the SEC.

Also today, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the published materials on our IR website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results.

Are you timing me? Okay. So let's see, go into questions. So let's start, look, I mean, I think it's no secret that dating industry has been challenged in recent years. So what's your view on the state of the industry? What would you tell investors who may still be skeptical on the growth outlook for it?

Yes. It has been challenging as a category as a whole. It's not unique to Match or unique to Tinder. It's a category problem. And I think it's a product problem, that. Really, what's happened is the needs and tastes and wants of Gen Z, which is sort of a new generation of daters, is different than what it was with millennials. And as we look back, I don't think we evolved the products fast enough, particularly Tinder, to meet those changing needs. We kind of fell asleep at the wheel a little bit, and now we're playing catch up.

The good thing is what we know from all our research is Gen Z wants meaningful connections. They want to meet new people. They just want to do it differently. They want it to be lower pressure more than anything. They want to sort of vibe their way through it. They don't want it to be a job interview. What Tinder was, novel, cool part of the zeitgeist for millennials, it's not the same for Gen Z. And we sort of lean -- level up our game, and that's what we're hard at work doing.

So even at Match, through, I think, 5 CEOs...

Six.

Six CEOs. So a number of turnaround efforts at Tinder. What feels different this time around that gives you the confidence that you're really turning the corner?

I would say two things. One is leadership. I mean, it starts at the top. And yes, I've been through -- Spencer is my sixth CEO. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. But I think Spencer, more than anything, is by far the most experienced. He's the first, I think -- the first real public company experienced CEO. He ran Zillow for 10 years. He's also a founder, right? He founded Zillow, he founded Hotwire. He's got -- so he's got a lot of sort of chops, street cred and a lot of experiences to build up over time.

And what -- how that shines through is a level of decisiveness. And he brings certain principles that he's came in day 1 with that he's now executing, like a focus on user outcomes, for example. His whole -- the whole notion of it starts with building the right team, that ends with the stock price, not the other way around. And so because he came in with effectively a mental framework for how to run a tech company, he's just been able to move very fast with a lot of confidence. So that's different -- clearly different than before.

And then the second thing is the strategy. And so our focus away from purely revenue and profit and EBITDA, which we're very good at, Tinder is very good at monetization, more towards user outcomes and user experience, I think, gives me confidence that we're building this turnaround from the ground up. And so that means it has staying power.

Okay. So we'll spend a good chunk of time here on Tinder. I think first, high level, you framed the Tinder turnaround as a 3-step process: Reset, Revitalize, Resurgence. Could you elaborate on these 3 phases and where you're at in the process?

Yes. I think Reset is people and culture, and that was the focus of 2025. We did a little bit more of it in Q1. We merged Match Group Asia with E&E, but that's largely behind us. And so to my earlier point, in Spencer's framework, it starts with the right people, the right team, and I think we're largely there.

The Revitalization phase is what we're clearly in the middle of now, which is all around product innovation. So now that we've got the right people, the right team, we've restructured the management layers, we've built a culture of urgency and accountability. Now we're building products, particularly at Tinder and at Hinge.

And so what we think is through product innovation, that will get us to the Resurgence phase, which is back to growth at Tinder and for the company as a whole in 2027. So what we've said is revenue growth and payer growth by Q4 of 2027, that's the goal we've set. And I think we're on a pretty good path to get there.

Okay. So a few quarters ago, you started giving stats showing Sparks metrics improving. I'll let you explain what that is. But you built on that this quarter with registrations and retention both returning to growth for the first time in a couple of years. So what's driving these improvements? And how do you think about the sustainability?

Yes. So Sparks are a 6-way conversation. That's our proxy for a meaningful connection. That's the focus of Tinder and the company. No longer is it a focus of just getting people likes that we can monetize. It's actually getting users into real meaningful connections, which is why they're on the app in the first place.

So that's the focus and everybody asked for. And we needed one internally too, like a metric that we can track progress against, and that's where we came up with Sparks and Sparks Coverage. And for the last few quarters, that's been improving, which is great to see. You're right, Sparks Coverage, which is of the users we have, how many of them are getting into meaningful connections, that was up about 6% in Q1 year-over-year. And even Sparks itself, which is the volume of 6-way conversations we have, which is basically a function of MAU times the coverage, is nearing flat year-over-year. It was down 1% in Q1. So we're making a lot of progress on the early indicators.

And then the question was really, well, will that sort of carry through to the more core financial metrics that investors really care about. And I think the answer to that is yes. The metrics, you mentioned a couple, retention, which is a really hard metric to move for our business and most sort of consumer tech businesses, is up 1% year-over-year globally. It's up 3% year-over-year for young females in the U.S., which is our core demographic we're going after.

And so what that's saying is the thesis is proving out that more Sparks and better outcomes for our users is leading to better user retention, lower what we call bad churn, less people leaving because they're not finding success in the app. And actually, it's -- and what that's leading to, combined with improving registration trends, is, while not yet positive, improving MAU trends too and payer trends as well.

So the thesis is holding out. It's bearing fruit. And I think we're probably a little bit ahead of where we thought we'd be, but we're clearly not at the finish line yet.

Okay. So you -- Tinder hosted their first ever product event a few months ago. I was there. Very nice.

Thanks for coming.

Where -- and you announced a number of new features there. Kind of which of the product launches have been the most impactful thus far? And what can you tell us about the product road map in the second half of the year?

Yes. Actually, the single most impactful change we made was with algorithms, so more on the back end. And what that meant was largely moving away from algorithms that optimize for likes distribution to moving towards algorithms that operate -- optimized for outcomes for Sparks. And we've seen a lot of success with that. I would say that, that's 2/3 of the benefit we've seen is really in the area of algorithms, which I think does bode well for the sustainability of the turnaround in that, that's so core and fundamental to the product. It's not a fancy bell or whistle that gains some excitement and then fizzles out. It's the core crux of the product experience.

When you combine that with a new marketing strategy, which is a focus on further down the funnel, not just brand marketing and new innovative features like Double Date, for example, that's really resonating with Gen Z. 1 in 4 Gen Z females in the U.S. is using Double Date, which is, for those of you who don't know, pairing up with a friend, swiping other pairs and going out on double date -- we did? The combination of those things is leading to sustainability of the turnaround.

Okay. So I told you this. My goal of today is for everyone to walk out understanding the giveback concept. So we get -- okay. We've got a lot of questions on this. So you've talked about the concept of a $60 million user giveback budget for this year because you didn't use as much as you thought you would use in the first half of the year. Could you just clarify exactly what this is and why you did not end up utilizing those givebacks in the first quarter?

Right. So at the beginning of the year, as part of the strategy around optimizing for user outcomes, we realized that some of the changes we were going to need to make to the product could have a short-term negative impact to revenue. So for example, the algorithm discussion -- the example I just gave. If we were concerned that if we change the algorithms that were effectively optimized to maximize revenue through likes distribution towards one that optimized for outcomes towards Sparks, we would lose revenue in the short term.

But we were prepared to do that because we knew monetizing a declining user base is not a winning strategy. Turning around users, getting it back to growth is a more sustainable strategy for long-term revenue and profitability. So that's why that was the reason behind setting up the $60 million giveback budget.

Now what we found is we started testing these things, most of the tests -- a lot of the tests is centered around algorithms -- that the outcome of that was not as bad as we expected. I'll give you just an example. We tested 2 big algorithm changes. First of all, we have multiple algorithms, not just one. We've tested 2 big algorithm changes. One kind of played out like we expected. It drove higher -- more Sparks and better Sparks Coverage, but it cost around $15 million in annualized revenue, negative revenue impact. That's kind of what we thought would happen.

But there was another algorithm change that we made that drove -- improved Sparks and Sparks Coverage, but actually also added $30 million of annualized revenue, right, which was unexpected. So when you net all these tests together, what we were left with was rolling out tests that improved user outcomes and actually added to revenue, not detracted from revenue. Now that's why we didn't use as much of the budget as we expected in the first half of the year.

So what we've done is while it's been lower than expected in the first half of the year, we're saying we expect that to increase in the second half. So we have $45 million budgeted for user givebacks in the second half of the year. And the reason for that disconnect is because what we plan to test in the back half of the year is not the same thing as what we test in the first half of the year. It won't be centered as much around algorithms. It will be centered around other feature and UX changes that we want to test. And because we're unsure of the impacts of those tests, we're keeping that budget there.

And we -- there are a few that we're ideating on that are pretty bold tests. And we don't want to constrain the product team from making really bold product tests that improve outcomes and improve the user experience because they're worried about hitting the revenue guidance. So we've left the $45 million cushion in place to see how that plays out. But if the past couple of quarters is a predictor of the future quarters, there's a chance we could come under in the back half, too.

Makes sense to me. If anyone still needs a clarification, feel free to raise your hand.

Thumbs up, thumbs down.

All right. So this is probably building on that question. But the guide you gave, it assumes the $45 million in givebacks in the back half of the year. It also assumes that Tinder -- you don't guide formally to Tinder payers, but you're roughly saying Tinder payers kind of stay around the negative 5% in the back half of the year. So why would we -- I think the question we get is if payers improved from down 8% to down 5%, why would we not see continued improvement in that metric?

And that's because of the user givebacks. Because of the back-weighted nature of the user givebacks, if we end up utilizing that $45 million, which again, on the P&L shows up as $45 million less revenue, which flows through after IP fees down to EBITDA, right? And it also shows up in the payer number. Because that's where -- that's -- it's not really a pricing or RPP thing, it's more a payer thing. We're giving a better experience for the collective user base, most of which are free, and for the ecosystem as a whole, but it could be -- but it could cost us some revenue and payers in the short term.

And so if you did the -- think about it as the impact to payers is proportional to the impact to revenue. And so if you think about the $45 million as a percentage of the second half revenue for Tinder and take that as a percentage, think about it similarly on the payer side. And so if you play that math out, basically, what's happening is the improvement in MAU and overall business trends that has been leading to improved payer trends will continue, but could be offset by the user givebacks. And that's what's netting us out to about down 5% each quarter. If the user givebacks don't happen, then we should continue to progress more towards flat by the end of the year. Still probably down, but meaningfully better than the negative 5% we are at today.

Makes sense. Okay. We'll move on. So let's talk about AI a bit. I think first, from a product perspective, how is AI impacting the Tinder user experience? And what role do you see it playing in dating more broadly?

I think it has broad applications. The few places that it's showing up in Tinder is, one, algos, which we've talked a lot about. It's just so much better than the old rules-based algorithms. It can use more unstructured data, more nuanced data.

The word is probably inference. It could infer things about you that the old rules-based algorithms could not. So we found a lot of success there at Tinder and at Hinge. And I think it's still early days. And the -- like I said before, the crux of the product experience is the algorithms. So that's one.

The other one is more forward-facing features. And Chemistry is a good example. Still pretty early, but that is a curated drop or match, highly curated match that's completely different than the core swiping experience. So think of it as AI gets to know you a little bit better through a like sort of lightweight back and forth. And it can, therefore, because it knows more about you, it can give you a better match. And that's something that is resonating with Gen Z, too. They don't want to just go on the app and swipe. So that's another area.

And then the third area will be trust and safety. There's a lot of really cool applications with AI around trust and safety like Are You Sure? Does This Bother You? These are nudges within the app that help improve the trust and safety experience across the app.

And then just from a cost perspective, a lot of conversations this week around token costs and all of that. So how do you expect AI to impact headcount and expenses across the company?

Yes. We're embarking on a huge AI enablement push. We've got our AI Day internally this week. We gave -- we announced a week ago now that every employee in the company would get access to cutting-edge AI tools. So we think this is a big opportunity.

And the way we're effectively paying for it is by slowing down hiring. I think you see that across the tech industry. Folks are taking 1 of 2 paths. I mean I think for everybody, the AI costs are coming in higher than they expected. You hear that time and time again. We did not budget for what could be $5 million to $10 million in tooling costs for our business on an annualized basis, which is meaningful. That was not in the budget.

But we see the benefit of it. So the way we're paying for it is effectively slowing down hiring. Companies are either slowing down hiring or they're reducing the size of their headcount. We're not -- we're doing -- we're slowing down hiring instead. We had gone through a big RIF last year. We feel pretty good about where our headcount is. And so that's effectively how we're paying for it. The reason is twofold. One is not only because we need to sort of find a way to pay for these tools, but also because we want to see the needs of the organization, what roles we need, what roles we don't need as we infuse AI through all the departments in the company.

So sticking with expenses, you outlined a few areas of cost savings at earnings a few weeks ago. You have -- app store fees are a good tailwind for you this year, assuming they don't change again. Maybe could you talk about your -- the big expense initiatives that you're doing this year? And I think more broadly, like how much more -- you're pretty profitable, 40-ish percent margin. So how much more opportunity do you see on the expense side?

Yes. I think there's 2 pockets that I'm focused on right now. We generate about $100 million in savings on the headcount side. We've generated over $100 million in savings on the IP fee side. So I feel good about -- I think that's pretty optimized. And we fed that back into the business for further investment in growth instead of dropping it down to the bottom line, but it gives us a lot of flexibility.

The areas we've spent a little less time in, one is cloud costs. So we've got an initiative particularly at Tinder to reduce cloud costs through dev optimizations. That was a code base that was built up over 10 years, really hadn't been a focus. So it's not going to be as big as IP fee savings. Our cloud costs are, round numbers, call it, $100 million per year, but I think we can chip away at that. We've got a plan to do it. And the teams are executing against some goals there.

And then the second probably bigger one is really around marketing. And so we talked about in the last call a couple of weeks ago that we merged the performance marketing team into one team that sits across all brands of the company. We spend $600 million a year in marketing, rough numbers. It's been done in a somewhat siloed way. So now we've got a whole new approach to marketing, which we call Prism, which is a framework we use that shows marketing ROI on an apples-to-apples basis across all our brands. And then we've also now merged the teams into one performance marketing team that I think will unlock a bunch of efficiencies.

The way I think about it is, can we optimize the $600 million by 10%, right, given the fact that it was kind of run by -- in a siloed way before? Probably. So that's $60 million. Now you can drop that down to the bottom line or you can keep spending the $600 million, but get 10% more for it, 10% more regs, 10% more payers, 10% more revenue. We'll probably go that direction because we think marketing is working for Tinder, but I think that's a big area of optimization for us.

Okay. So moving to your other brands. So Hinge continues to track towards your $1 billion revenue target for next year. Where do you still see the most opportunity for growth at Hinge?

I think there's really 2 big -- there's 3 big pockets of growth. One is monetization in core markets. They're still undermonetized relative to Tinder if you look at it on an apples-to-apples basis. I know folks get confused, like the RPP of Hinge is so much higher than the RPP of Tinder. You're only looking at one side of the equation really. It's really RPP and payer penetration that matter, both of them matter.

And if you just look at revenue per MAU, for example, which nets the two together and control for the geography mix and the gender mix, there's still runway for Hinge to monetize better in core markets. I think bringing a better value proposition to females is another big lever for them in core markets where females are undermonetized. That's a category-wide thing that they have some really interesting plans to address.

Then the second is just more room for growth in the existing expansion markets. Europe is still -- while they've been there for 2 years, it's still a pretty small percentage of total revenue. And if you just look at it in proportion to the U.S., we've got other benchmarks. Like Tinder, for example, there's still a long runway to go there. I think that will come naturally through just sheer momentum. I mean, the revenue was up 100% in the last few quarters there year-over-year in Europe for Hinge.

And then the third is expanding to new markets. And so I think what I'm excited to see is not that South America is a massive market from a revenue perspective, but what it's showing is the continued global appeal of Hinge as a product. And what that tells me is it builds my confidence in can we take it to Asia? Can we take it to bigger countries like Japan where there is a lot -- really high TAM and revenue base? I think the answer is clearly yes there, and that will provide a long runway, too. We don't need a Japan to get to $1 billion, but we need a Japan to get well beyond $1 billion. And I think we're all really confident in the progress we're making there.

So I think one question we've started to get now that Tinder is stabilizing is, do you have any concern that a Tinder resurgence could perhaps come partly at the expense of Hinge?

No. I mean, what we've seen is cannibalization has not been an issue. It's, again, a category issue. When we enter new markets with Hinge, like when we entered Mexico and Brazil, we looked at it really closely to see is Hinge's early success there taking away from Tinder? And the answer was clearly no. Tinder's trends held up quite well. Hinge added downloads, and Match Group as a whole grew in those regions.

And I think the opposite holds true. I mean, one of the things we're really focused on is the gem we talk a lot about, which is where our brands fit within our portfolio. And clearly, Hinge is in the focused part of the gem. And directly across from that is the fun part of the gem, which is where Tinder lies. So as long as we keep those products distinct and the brand positioning and the product positioning unique, I don't see a problem. It's a multi-app usage category. Users using 3-plus apps at a time, I think there's a use case for both. So I mean, that -- what we want to do is keep the Hinge growth going and get Tinder back to user growth. That's the formula to get the Match Group stock price up and the company back on the right footing.

I want to ask about -- you've made 2 minority investments. Sniffies, very recent, and then also Overtone from the Hinge founder. Could you talk about these 2 businesses and just how you're thinking about the -- why the minority investment route and how you're thinking about the optionality to build that ownership over time?

Yes. There are a little bit different use cases. Overtone, we made a minority investment in -- or sorry, Sniffies, we made a minority investment in. It was a founder-led start-up that we've invested in. I think the reason behind that is it's the biggest segment of the category, the non-heterosexual male segment of the category that we don't really play in.

And we tried to do that with Archer. They built a great product. It's been a couple of years. We've invested a bunch in marketing and in people, and it hasn't gained the product market fit that we had hoped. So we've pivoted the strategy. We've shut that business down. We're going to save on OpEx, on headcount, on SBC, which helps the P&L. And we're making a minority investment in Sniffies, which is the #2 player in that space, and we think a path to #1. They'll benefit a lot from our trust and safety know-how, just our institutional knowledge of the category.

But at the same time, a minority investment has a couple of things. One, it keeps it off our P&L, although it's a profitable business and growing quite nicely from a revenue and EBITDA perspective. But it also lets them continue to be a start-up founder-led organization. so it doesn't sort of lose the magic created by coming in and being part of a larger public company.

And so the idea is leave it founder-led, give it more support, the support that it needs to reach its full potential, and then we have the option to buy it down the road, which is a similar approach to what we took at Hinge, and that's worked out phenomenally well. We bought Hinge for $20 million, $30 million back in 2017, and look at it now. So if we could repeat that playbook, that would be great.

Overtone is a little bit different. Overtone, we incubated internally and then spun out, and we have a minority investment there. That is because it's a new bet on the category, right? It's a truly AI-native experience. We think there's room for that in the category. Nobody has really cracked the code yet. I think Justin, given his experience in the category, has a leg up against other start-ups. But it also is going to take a while, and it's going to accumulate losses. And there's a low probability of ultimate success. So I'd like to do those things sort of off balance sheet in a minority investment way with the option to buy it. To the extent it does gain product market fit, we think it's a good long-term fit for the portfolio.

I think that's a good segue to just capital allocation. You kind of laid out your capital allocation framework at your Investor Day 2 years ago, maybe at this point. Maybe refresh on...

December 2024.

Yes. Refresh us on the capital allocation strategy. And are there any changes that you're making to it?

The short answer is no. Look, I think Sniffies is a big bet, but at $100 million out of the $1.1 billion in free cash flow for the year, like from my perspective, it's very manageable, right? So doing a Sniffies deal does not take away from our commitment to return 100% of free cash flow to shareholders through largely buybacks and also a dividend. So that hasn't changed.

And I think going forward, we don't have any plans to do large-scale acquisitions. We'll continue to do this tuck-in approach. But the primary objective will be -- really, our first and foremost objective is invest organically in our businesses, right? So we're investing in marketing and in product at Tinder and Hinge to keep Hinge growth going and the turnaround at Tinder. We feel like they have the right levels of investment.

Second is returning cash flow to shareholders through buybacks and the dividend. And I think it's a really powerful formula given where the stock price is at. We bought back about 5% of shares over the last year. So we're buying down the shares outstanding while turning around free cash flow. Those two things compound on each other. And free cash flow per share, for example, grew, I think, 23% last year. So that's a powerful formula if we can keep it going.

Before I ask about app store fees, any questions in the audience? All right. I'll bore you with app store.

Okay. So you've talked about, I think, over $100 million of savings from lower app store fees this year. I think two questions. One, now that you're kind of fairly advanced in your rollout of alternative payments, like what have been your key learnings? And then secondly, what are the key pieces of legislations or trials that you're watching that could impact fees in the future?

Yes. It all comes down -- a couple of learnings. One, friction is the most important thing. So as we've improved the experience to make it more and more frictionless, that has led to better financial results. And as we said, we're about 10% ahead of expectations against that $110 million in savings. So a lot of that is through is just optimizing the flows. Like one win was just improving the tech around web payments that increase the time, the checkout time. Fractions of a second adds up to real dollars.

And then two, I mean, using Apple Pay, payment options that are pretty frictionless because it's different than -- Apple Pay is different than IP. Apple Pay is more like a credit card, but the adoption of Apple Pay is very high. So folks already have their credit cards with Apple. They don't have to get their credit card out and fill out -- in a credit card form. It's those types of things that have led to real benefits. And then we have started to test discounting a little bit and found that, that was not a big lever. So it's really about optimizing the flow more than anything.

And then the court cases that we're watching. Really, there's two: Apple versus Epic and Google versus Epic. They're both going through the courts. Apple versus Epic is in appeal, and we're waiting to see how those both play out to ultimately see where the fee structures land. Google did recently roll out a new fee structure, but people should note that the U.S. component of that is still subject to court ruling. The judge has essentially said that he doesn't agree with it. It's not fair enough to developers. So we're watching how that all plays out. We expect probably, a ruling on the Apple. It's hard to tell, but the lawyers internally think within the next few quarters, likely this year. In the meantime, what we're doing is just maximizing all payment savings to the greatest extent possible.

All right. Last one, and we'll get you on time for your flight.

Right. That's great.

So you're hosting a CEO connect event on June 11. I think it's the first time you've done an event like this. So what type of sneak peek could you tell us in terms of what investors should expect around that event?

Yes, this is going to be a really interesting one, and it goes back to a lot of questions I get around the consumer, around Gen Z. So it's all about Gen Z insights. It's us sharing all the research that we have on what Gen Z is looking for, what their dating habits are, what they're looking for in a dating app.

And it also goes into Gen Alpha too, where we're getting some early reads on how Gen Alpha is similar or different than Gen Z. So you're going to get to hear from our data scientists, our researchers, our product experts all around Gen Z and Gen Alpha and dating.

Great. One question, okay.

The question is this -- okay. Great, thanks. With regards to competitive landscape, Bumble has had their issues. They've made some changes. I think they just got rid of the swipe, kind of going...

If you're saying they're going to get rid of the swipe, yes.

Yes. And so I'm just wondering if you think 3 to 5 years from now, how you would expect the competitive landscape to look different vis-a-vis 3 to 5 years ago? Is it going to be -- is Bumble -- is it still going to be sort of you and Bumble? Is it going to be AI-enabled, different players with a different model? Is Facebook going to kind of encroach on someone's turf? How do you see that all playing out?

Look, I mean, we'll have to see. I think Tinder is still by far the largest dating brand in the world by a multiple. And I think it has real staying power if we can improve the product experience. And so what we're doing is we're not throwing out the swipe, we're evolving it. I think Double Date is a great example where it just totally transformed the experience from swiping to matching with pairs, going out on a double date is exactly what Gen Z wants. It's safer, it's more fun, it's lower pressure. We've got new modes like Astrology that is totally in the Gen Z zeitgeist. So I feel like Tinder is going to continue to evolve.

I think another space I see as fertile ground for the next -- forget 3 to 5 years, the next few years is really a focus on IRL. So I think apps are going to start to blend in Tinder, in particular, online versus offline. The line is going to get blurred. And Tinder is going to become a way you can -- a tech platform or a conduit for meeting people in real life. So less about swiping and chatting and more about those IRL connections. That's what Gen Z wants.

We've got a pilot in L.A. We've done 30 events there. We're doing it in a way that's scalable and doesn't affect our margin profile. We don't want to be an events company. We want to be a technology company. But you can -- these events are already out there. What the events need are the singles, and what we need is a means for people to connect in real life. And I see a huge opportunity there. I think that's going to be a big part of the road map for Tinder going forward. So that's one area, I would say, is IRL.

The other area is I do think AI will play a role. I think Overtone is a great bet. Can someone figure out a truly AI-native approach? It will likely be more of a higher intent use case. Think of it as like more like a digital matchmaker of sorts. And I do think there's a place for that in the category.

And in terms of the competitive landscape, look, liquidity still matters, right? AI has made it incredibly easy -- I got 20 seconds left -- incredibly easy to build an app. You or I can go build an app tomorrow. But you or I cannot gain liquidity in a double-sided network effect ecosystem. We cannot -- AI cannot beat the cold start problem. And so I think that gives tremendous competitive advantage to brands like Tinder and Hinge that have built true scale. And to a certain extent, Bumble.

And in terms of Bumble itself, like we're, in a way, rooting for Bumble to win because Bumble is part of the category as a whole, too, and it's a category challenge. So Bumble levels up, does better for users, so does Tinder. Hinge keeps going and innovating, then the category as a whole grows.

There's much more room to grow the pie than there is to divide the slices. So remember, category adoption is 30% or so in developed markets and 10% -- I think it's like 6% or 7% in developing markets. So really, the long-term play is grow the pie. We're less worried about how the competitive landscape shakes out.

I think we end it, but thank you.

Thank you so much.

Welcome's to the Match Group First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tanny Shelburne, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Today's call will be led by CEO, Spencer Rascoff; and CFO Bailey. We'll make a few brief remarks, and then we'll open it up for questions. Before we start, I need to remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our outlook and future performance.

These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in our earnings release and our periodic reports with the SEC.

Also during this call, we'll discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the published materials on our IR website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results.

With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Spencer.

Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us. Macri entered 2026 with tangible progress on the 3-phase transformation we outlined last year. reset, revitalize and resurgence. We completed the reset phase in 2025, and we're now well into revitalize, focused on improving product experiences, strengthening the ecosystem and rebuilding growth. We are operating with greater focus and discipline.

The portfolio is sharper, execution is faster and we are leveraging our scale more effectively through our One MG approach. We are reinvesting where we see clear opportunities to improve user outcomes while continuing to return meaningful capital to shareholders. Our progress is showing up in 3 areas: first, leading indicators at Tinder are showing momentum. -- reflecting better product experiences for Gen Z, and that progress is increasingly translating into top line metrics like monthly active users or MAU, payers and direct revenue.

Second, Hinge continues to scale, combining strong revenue growth, rapid product innovation, particularly in AI-driven features and continued international expansion. And third, we continue to streamline our portfolio and organizational structure, simplifying how we operate and focusing resources on our highest conviction opportunities.

Looking ahead, our objective is to drive a resurgence with our audience by reestablishing Tinder as a growth business during 2027 through restoring durable user engagement and relevance at scale. And all of this is happening alongside disciplined financial execution. In Q1 2026, we exceeded our revenue and adjusted EBITDA expectations on the back of strength at Tinder. Steve will walk through the details shortly. Turning now to Tinder's product-led turnaround. From the beginning, I've said this will be a product-led turnaround, starting with user outcomes and moving up the funnel towards user growth.

Our most important leading indicators Spark and Spark coverage continue to improve. In March, Sparks, the number of users engaging in 6-way conversations were down only 1% year-over-year. a meaningful improvement from down 11% year-over-year in March 2025. Spark's coverage, which measures the percentage of our users who experienced a Spark in a given period was up 6% year-over-year in March compared to down 1% year-over-year in March 2025. These are our clearest signals of product efficacy and real connection, and they are improving.

As we've said before, our belief is improving Sparks leads to better retention and stronger word-of-mouth driving mow over time. We're now starting to see that play out. Mal declines continued to moderate in March, down 7% year-over-year, the slowest rate of decline in 31 months compared to down 10% year-over-year in March of 2025. This improvement was driven by a few factors. First, user retention increased, up 1% year-over-year in March after multiple years of decline. U.S. Gen Z women retention, a critical cohort for ecosystem health was up 3% year-over-year in March.

Second, registrations returned to growth for the first time since June 2024, up 1% year-over-year in March compared to down 12% year-over-year in March 2025. This is proof that the brand is resonating through marketing and word of mouth, driving new users into the experience. We're seeing this progress across different geographies and demographics, including in markets where we've had the most rent to recover. Progress may not always be linear, but the year-over-year trajectory of these leading indicators and user engagement underscores our confidence in the strategy, and we expect it to translate into revenue growth over time.

Let me highlight a few of the efforts driving these improvements, many of which we showcased at our Tinder Sparks event in March, which is available on our IR website. First, recommendations. We've sharpened how Tinder understands what users are looking for and how we deliver matches across the ecosystem. I learning preferences earlier, showing more relevant profiles and better serving both active and returning users. We're helping people find matches faster and driving more conversations with particularly strong gains for women. Next, product innovation. Features like the strology mode and music mode are gaining traction with Gen Z following their mid-March launch, reaching 19% and 8% adoption, respectively.

We're also seeing encouraging early signals on user outcomes. For example, in our early read, women who swipe on astrology cards are more likely to reach a spark than those with non-Astra cards. Like double date, these signals show new modes are resonating by making discovery more expressive and lower pressure, which is exactly what Gen Z users have been asking. And finally, trust and safety. We continue to scale FaceCheck into more regions including the recent launch in the U.K. and Singapore. FaceCreck is improving authenticity and user trust with particularly strong trends in the U.S., where Net Promoter Scores have been trending higher.

Importantly, the revenue impact from our ongoing user experience tests remain within the range that we planned. Simply put, Tinder works better now. We're not at the finish line, but the turnaround is clearly underway. Turning to Hinge, where product-led growth continues to scale. Hinge continues to build thoughtful, best-in-class experiences for highly intentioned daters. The team remains focused on a key objective, helping users get out on great dates. That clarity is driving its product road map, which is both rapidly advancing the core experience and introducing new and compelling features.

Starting with the core experience. hinges strengthening profile quality through a redesigned onboarding experience that encourages users to slow down and reflect on what they're looking for before viewing profiles. Structured prompts help users more clearly communicate their relationship goals, their personality and preferences from the start. The experience is also more interactive, giving users more visibility into how they are represented and improving confidence during profile creation. We plan to expand this globally by the end of Q2.

In parallel, Hinge continues to strengthen trust within the experience with [indiscernible], which is now fully rolled out in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, Brazil and Mexico, with additional markets planned for Q2.

In these markets, the feature has reduced interaction with bad actors by 20% to 30% with minimal impact on revenue. Originally developed by Tinder, Facecheck showcases portfolio-wide innovation, enabling King to quickly iterate and bring the feature to market faster. Building on its stronger core experience, Hinge is introducing a set of category-first features designed to better express intent and help users move from connection to date.

First, hinges reducing friction in getting to great dates with bad ideas, a feature formerly known as Direct to date, which allows users to propose a date idea and time upfront to clarify intent and move matches to real-life meetings faster. Early feedback has been encouraging with nearly 9% adoption in testing, 1 of the highest rates we've seen for a new profile feature and users expressing genuine excitement on social media.

So far, users are defaulting to familiar low-effort data ideas like dinner, drinks and walks, while custom data ideas skew toward light conversational activities like Bowling, arcades, Newseum and Mini Golf. Second, Hinge is expanding the role friends play on daters profiles with friends take, which addresses 2 core tensions, representing yourself authentically and navigating dating alone without community. Building on Hinge's prompt native format, the feature allows users to invite trusted friends on offing to contribute short reflections to their profiles, adding credibility and helping users get to know 1 or other more deeply.

Friends take will begin testing by the end of Q2 with broader rollout expected in Q3. We see potential for it to be a top of funnel driver similarly to voice prompts a couple of years ago. Third, Hinge began testing signals a new feature designed to make effort and intentionality more visible. When users consistently demonstrate thoughtful participation by doing things like completing their profile, responding to messages and engaging in meaningful conversations. They earn a signals badge on their profile. This badge signals to others on the app, their level of effort and intentionality addressing a long-standing friction point in the category, particularly for women and younger daters.

Early results show improvements in dating outcomes and user behaviors that benefit the overall ecosystem. As we invest in these types of intentional features, we are creating new surface areas to potentially monetize later. Hinge demonstrates the simple principle that when product market fit is strong and user outcomes are clear, growth follows and the model scales. Hinge continues to lead the category in product innovation through its consistent focus on user outcomes and it's led to strong financial results. We're excited to see the impact of Hanger's product road map on the business this year as it continues on its path to be $1 billion business by 2027.

Now turning to our [indiscernible] approach in action. We're continuing the work that we began last year to simplify the organization and operate more effectively as 1 match group. As part of this effort, we folded our MG Asia business unit into our E&E business unit. This brings our 2 Asia-based businesses, Azar and pairs, closer to the rest of the company, removes the management layer and improves efficiency while maintaining in-region cross-brand go-to-market capabilities.

We expect this change to result in roughly $15 million in annualized cost savings, including stock-based compensation. It also enables more cohesive portfolio management, faster execution, and to apply shared capabilities and resources. On Azar, as we previously disclosed, App will temporarily remove the app from the App Store on February 22, 2026. The team moved quickly to make adjustments, which led to the reinstatement of a new version on April 6, 2026. While still early, registrations and now are beginning to recover, but the new app experience is monetizing at lower levels than the previous burn. We're testing changes to the product to improve monetization, but expect continued pressure on the ZAR direct revenue over the balance of the year.

With the consolidation of MG Asia into E&E, we've transitioned our soul-based MG AI team of more than 20 talented data scientists and machine learning engineers to report into Tinder's CTO. This team will continue building shared 1 MG technologies, including AI-driven photo uploading and AI-enabled recommendation algorithms, but we'll now operate with closer alignment to our largest business unit. In addition, we're shifting nearly 30 product engineering and analytics employees from Azar to Tinder in full. These moves concentrate resources into Tinder at a critical moment, supported by excellent executive leadership and accelerating product road map and improving business momentum.

Following this move, we'll have a nearly 60-person team focused on Tinder in Seoul, making it our third largest tech hub after Palo Alto and Los Angeles. We've also made progress in unifying performance marketing by further centralizing teams and resources into a 1 MG organization that buys digital media across brands. We spend nearly $600 million globally across 20 or more brands. with significant efficiencies available to us as coordination wraps. We're also bringing certain areas of E&E closure with Tinder, starting with the executive layer where I now directly oversee both business units.

This has unlocked significant opportunities for better coordination and synergies, including the marketing changes I just mentioned. As I dug into E&E the last few weeks, we've identified many areas where Tinder and E&E results can be improved through tighter coordination collaboration and integration. Finally, this couldn't be a 2026 earnings call without discussing AI. We see AI as a core enabler of improving user outcomes, enhancing product experiences, increasing relevance and accelerating development and iteration across the portfolio.

To support this, we've launched a global AI enablement program that gives every employee access to leading AI tools with the goal of becoming an AI-native company. We're also reassessing our hiring plans with AI enablement in mind and plan to reduce head count growth over the remainder of the year. And we're standing up a cross-company AI leadership team to help ensure consistent deployment of capabilities and avoid fragmentation across brands. These changes are about operating more simply and more effectively. We're simplifying the portfolio, focusing resources on our highest conviction opportunities and adapting quickly to where we believe the category is going, not where it's been. That's 1 MV in practice.

Now for some final thoughts. Stepping back, we've aligned our business around distinct user intents with each brand serving a different and important role. Together, they expand our reach across a broad and growing market for human connection. Within that framework, in April, we made a $100 million investment for a significant minority stake in [indiscernible], a differentiated platform with strong product market fit and a highly engaged user base. We have the option to acquire the remaining equity in the future similar to the approach we took with our initial investment in Hinge back in 2017.

SNFs reinforces our commitment with nonheterosexual met, which represent a large and growing portion of the category. We see a clear opportunity to lend our expertise in areas like trust and safety and geographic expansion while preserving what makes the platform unique to its community. As part of this investment, we plan to wind down our Game Mail app Archer, which we expect to result in roughly $10 million in annualized cost savings, including stock-based compensation.

We built a stronger foundation and are now seeing that translate into real momentum. By improving how people connect and delivering better outcomes for users, we're setting the business up for durable growth. That's what gives us confidence in the path to resurgence.

Over to Steve now.

Thanks, Spencer. We delivered a strong start to the year, exceeding both our revenue and adjusted EBITDA expectations. The outperformance was primarily driven by better-than-expected direct revenue and payers trends at Tinder and a benefit associated with Canada's recision of its digital service tax. I'll walk through the key drivers of the quarter and then turn to our guidance. Unless otherwise noted, all amounts are on an as-reported basis and comparisons will be discussed on a year-over-year basis.

More details can be found in the financial table below and in the financial supplement found on our IR website. In Q1, Match Group's total revenue was $864 million, up 4%, flat on a foreign exchange neutral basis. FX was $3 million better than we expected at the time of our last earnings call. Payers declined 5% to $13.5 million, while RPP increased 10% to $20.90. Indirect revenue of $16 million was down 14% and largely driven by a decrease in spend from top advertisers as compared to a record quarter the prior year. In Q1, Match Group's adjusted EBITDA was $343 million, up 25% and representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 40%. Canada's recision of its digital service tax positively impacted adjusted EBITDA by $11 million in the quarter. Tinder direct revenue in Q1 was $455 million, up 2% and down 3% FXM. Q1 direct revenue includes an approximately $5 million negative impact from user experience testing in the quarter. Payers declined 5% year-over-year to $8.6 million, a marked improvement from the 8% year-over-year decline in Q4 2025.

RPP increased 7% to $17.56 and adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $237 million, up 4%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 51%. Pange maintained momentum in Q1 with direct revenue of $194 million up 28% and up 24% FXM. Payers increased 15% year-over-year to $2 million and RPP increased 11% to $33.13. Adjusted EBITDA was $71 million, up 66% year-over-year representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 36%. [indiscernible] direct revenue in Q1 was $139 million, down 7% and down 10% FX payers decreased 16% to $2 million, while RPP increased 11% to $22.97., Adjusted EBITDA was $39 million, up 37%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 28%.

The Match Group Asia delivered direct revenue in Q1 of $60 million, down 6% and down 7% FXM. Azar direct revenue was down 6% and down 9% FX. Azar Direct revenue was negatively impacted by an estimated $3 million from its temporary removal from the App Store. Hayes direct revenue was down 6% and down 4% of [indiscernible] across Match Group Asia, payers declined 9% to approximately $900,000, while RPP increased 2% to $21.74. Adjusted EBITDA was $21 million, up 11%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 35%. As a result of the organizational changes associated with MacGroupAsia that Spencer discussed, beginning with our Q2 2026 results, we will combine the Match Group Asia and E&E business units into a single operating segment called E&E and report Match Group results across 3 operating segments: Tinder, Hinge and E&E.

Now on to consolidated operating costs and expenses. Including stock-based compensation expense, total expenses in Q1 were down 5%. Cost of revenue decreased 11% and represented 24% of total revenue down 4 points as a percent of total revenue, primarily driven by alternative payment savings. Selling and marketing costs increased $6 million or 4%, but remained flat at 19% of total revenue. as a result of increased marketing spend at Tinder and Hinge partially offset by reduced marketing spend at E&E and Match Group Asia. General and administrative costs decreased 20%, down 3 points as a percentage of total revenue to 10% driven by the Canadian digital service tax reversal of $11 million and lower employee compensation, including SBC.

Product development cost decreased 3% down 1 point as a percentage of total revenue at 14%. Depreciation and amortization increased by $16 million to $48 million due to impairments of intangible assets of ZAR totaling [ 25 million, ] resulting from changes required to reinstate the app in the Apple App Store. Our trailing 12-month gross leverage was 3.1x, and net leverage was 2.3x at the end of Q1. We ended the quarter with $1 billion of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments on hand and plan to use $424 million of cash to pay off the 2026 convertible notes on or before the maturity in June. Year-to-date, through Q1, we delivered operating cash flow of $194 million and free cash flow of $174 million.

We repurchased 2 million shares at an average price of $31 per share on a trade date basis for a total of $60 million, paid $44 million in dividends and deployed $75 million of cash towards net settlement of employee equity awards, -- to 103% of free cash flow. Between April 1 and April 30, 2026, we repurchased an additional 700,000 shares at an average price of $32 per share on a trade date basis for a total of $22 million. As of April 30, 2026, we reduced diluted shares outstanding by 5% year-over-year. We also used $100 million in cash on hand to acquire a minority stake in SNFs, which we announced on April 27, 2026. Our capital allocation strategy centered on returning capital to shareholders through buybacks and a dividend remains unchanged.

Now for guidance. We expect Q2 total revenue for Match Group of $850 million to $860 million, down 2% to flat year-over-year. This range assumes a 1 point tailwind from FX. At X, we expect total revenue to be down 1% to 3% year-over-year. Q2 total revenue guidance assumes a $10 million negative impact from Tinder's user experience tests had a $20 million negative impact from lower Azar direct revenue. We expect MacCap adjusted EBITDA of $325 million to $330 million, representing a 13% year-over-year increase and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 38% at the midpoint of the ranges.

As we remain financially disciplined and continue to optimize our cost structure while making the necessary investments that we believe will drive long-term growth in the business. Now let's open it up to Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] The first question today comes from Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research.

One on the Tinder sort of turnaround and leading indicators you're seeing the March metrics you called out are very promising. Could you please talk to if you saw a continuation of these trends into April and I guess now early May, -- that's the first question. And then the second question I have is around your AI cost savings. So how should we be thinking about all these cost savings that you may have either from integrating business units and also driving productivity with AI tools. And it seems that you have greater and greater potential for margin if you wanted to, either this year or next year. So how should we be thinking about that? .

Thank you for the questions. So firstly, yes, Tinder's momentum has continued into April. Just to sort of take a step back and then I'll share some April data the product-led turnaround at Tinder is clearly well underway, and I'm feeling really good about it. So as I said in the prepared remarks, Mal declined 7% year-over-year in March, which was the slowest rate in 31 months. And then it went on to decline 6.6% in April. So it continued to improve. Dow, which I don't think we talked about in the prepared remarks, but daily active users was down 9% back in March of 2025, then down 6% in March of 2026 and was only down 4% in April of 2026.

So every month, every week, almost every day, we continue to chip away at the audience declines at Tinder. So let me just take a moment to try to talk about what's driving this and it's clearly product improvements, which are impacting user outcomes. So the big needle movers on improving user outcomes have been, first of all, recommendations. So we're just doing a much better job today of showing women the men that we think they'll want to see. And obviously, that is the most important thing for a dating app, figuring out who to show to whom, and we're much better at it than we ever were before.

We made lots and lots of changes. But for example, 1 set of changes improved women's sparks by 6%, and that improved women's down by 2% and which in turn improved men's sparks by 5% and then men's down by 1%. So that's just 1 example of 1 set of REX changes. And that plus other REX changes, we thought might hurt revenue, but actually on balance, it resulted in a $15 million annualized revenue gain because of improved women's retention, which then improve men's revenue. So it's not always a trade-off between REX improvements and revenue. Sometimes they actually work together.

The second big needle mover on Tinder product improvements was double date. So around 1 in 5 global users now 18 to 22 are using double data around 1 in 4 U.S. women 18 to 22 are using double date and it's just an important way that people are now using Tinder. Music mode and astrology mode also drove great adoption in the quarter. I think it was 8% for Global Gen Z for music and 19% for Global Gen Z for Astrology. And then the next section is a variety of things that we don't talk about very much because they're kind of mundane improvements, but this is really important blocking and tackling. These are things like improved CRM for better e-mails and notifications or better app performance. So the app doesn't crash the way it used to or better website performance and just general better operating cadence at the company and all those things really do work together.

The last 1 I'll just add is the IRL, the in real life pilot in L.A. has been successful, and we're working to expand that. And it's just another example of how we're creating these low-pressure ways to connect. I'll leave it at that if -- the last piece, I guess, is the marketing support of these products. But let me let me give it to Steve now to talk about the AI and cost savings. And then if there's interest, we can talk about Tinder marketing and how it supports those product changes.

Steve?

Yes, sure. Here's the way I would think about it Shweta. -- we're making a big push around AI enablement. We're giving every employee in the company access to all the cutting-edge tools. We're giving them the training they need to succeed. We're setting expectations. We really want to become an AI-native company, we think is a huge opportunity. So -- but these tools cost a lot of money, as I'm sure you know. And so the way we're helping to pay for that is by slowing our hiring plan for the rest of the year. So I think of that as a little bit of a cost neutral, lower head count cost, higher software expense down the road over the long term, it could result in cost savings, but it's a bit of a neutral for us in 2026.

And hopefully, it leads to not just cost savings over time, but increased productivity and ultimately, revenue growth through higher throughput and output from employees. And then on the structural changes, we talked about MacroAsia, we talked about Archer. Just know that what we quoted in the prepared remarks are annualized savings, including SBC, So I would think of that more as a 2027 savings. It's less so in '26 just due to the timing and due to some of the onetime costs that come along with it, but it certainly does give us optionality in 27 around margins.

The next question comes from Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan.

Thanks for the question. I have 2 -- Stephen, they might both be for you. Just on the 2Q guide, it implies flat revenue that you're expecting, and that's despite a $20 million headwind from ZAR -- so my question is kind of where are you seeing offsets and which brands to make up for that? And any comments you can give on your expectations for Tinder in 2Q specifically? And then Steve, looking beyond -- any update you can provide us on how you're thinking about the full year outlook. .

Yes. Sure. I can take that. Thanks, Cory. On Q2, the way to think about it is, yes, Azar is a $20 million headwind because of the changes we need to make there to get back in the App Store. -- that's being nearly fully offset by Tinder strength. That's really where it's coming from. So tend to perform quite well in Q1, and we expect that to continue in Q2. So that's where the offset is coming from. If you think about the full year, we made no changes to the full year guide, but let me just give you sort of some puts and takes to think about -- we expect the ZAR revenue pressure to continue for at least another few quarters, so I would think about it for the rest of the year.

The team is hard at work. We've got a road map. We're trying to address the added friction to improve monetization, but I think it will take some time. at Tinder, we'll have to see how things play out. One of the things I'm looking at pretty closely is we've got a $45 million user investment budget still slated for the second half of the year, spread out pretty evenly between Q3 and Q4. So I'd expect us to end up at the lower half of the full year guidance range. given a ZAR weakness if we end up using that $45 million user investment budget. Now what we've seen in the last couple of quarters is that we haven't had to. But for now, we're assuming we will, and that's kind of -- that's all baked and contemplated in the guide.

But if we don't have using it, that could offer some further offsets those are in Q3 and Q4. So that's sort of the revenue story. On the EBITDA story, the adjusted EBITDA story, I feel really good about the guide there, same with free cash flow even if revenue comes in a little softer because of a -- that's because we mitigated a lot of the adjusted EBITDA impact from the ZAR changes through reducing marketing there and reallocating head count at Azar towards other parts of the business, namely Tinder and close some open roles at Tinder in the U.S. And we've reduced costs across other parts of the portfolio, too.

Our op payment initiative, in particular, is doing better than expected. So that's helping and then the changes we just talked about at Match Group Asia as well as the shutting down of Archer is helping to. Again, there are more 2027 savings impacts, but they also benefit 2026 as well. So that's kind of the way I'm thinking about it. Tinder helping to offset Azar in Q2. We'll have to see how the user giveback budget goes for the rest of the year. and then feel really good about EBITDA and free cash flow because of some of the cost savings efforts we've made.

The next question comes from Nathan Feather with Morgan Stanley.

Thanks for the question. And really encouraging to see the progress you've been making here in Kinder -- are you just helping kind of chart the path over the end year, understanding there will be some kind of puts and takes here. But what's the hope for kind of that glide path for mouse as we kind of continue in 2Q into the back half? And then given a lot of these improvements that you talked about that are driving this outgrowth weren't necessarily just launched in 1Q, but a kind of a cumulative impact over 2025 up until 1Q.

How should we think about the kind of release cadence and how that interplays with now? And have you kind of uncovered any maybe delayed impact as the tools get released and then users start to use them and that can eventually drive 1 of those?

Nathan. So a couple of things. First of all, with respect to the product release cadence going forward, we're stepping we're not taking our foot off the gas. So -- we -- the March 12 event was a great catalyst. It generated a ton of urgency and a lot of the innovations that we've announced or that we've shipped came from that urgency, but the team has not slowed down since then. So for example, upcoming initiatives are things like video speed date, which we announced at the Spark week -- or sorry, at the Spark Tenders and we will be shipping in the next, I don't know, kind of a month or so. In real life events, expanding to other cities, rolling out Tinder Connect with partners like Duolingo and belly and a number of other features that we haven't -- that we're not ready to share publicly.

So the work is definitely not done, and I'm excited about the road map for the balance of the year. In terms of how it will play out on impact on Sparks and impact on Mal. Obviously, that's hard to predict. I think -- I think what we've been saying, we've been kind of setting ourselves up to get to flat now by the end of, I think, we said end of '27. And clearly, I'm very proud and pleased that we're already in kind of the negative 6% to 7% year-over-year range. You can argue that maybe it could accelerate the pace with which we improve now because product efficacy improves as you start to bring more people into the ecosystem because there are just more good people for you to match with.

You could also argue that the rate of improvement could slow down because we started with the low-hanging fruit first when this new leadership team took over about 6 or 9 months ago and started knocking things down. So it's very hard for me to predict how we'll get like what the path will be from the negative 7% now to flat and then mow growth?

The next question comes from Ross Sandler with Barclays.

Spencer. The 1% growth in 30-day retention that's pretty bullish. I know it's an early signal, but like could you guys just say like how long has it been since you've had growing 30-day user retention it sounds like some of the safety and product changes you mentioned on a previous question are driving this trend. But just any other details, any color you can provide on what's turning that kind of key metric up would be helpful.

Yes. Thanks, Ross. It had been years since we had retention improvements up year-over-year. I don't know how many years, but at least several. Equally encouraging is that retention among U.S. Gen Z women is actually up 3% year-over-year. So that's even better than total overall number that I put in the script, and I think in the press release. So what's driving this as I said, it's better recommendations, it's double date, it's music mode astrology mode, blocking and tackling. Changing perception of Tinder moving more towards the fun and safe way to meet new people, improving social sentiment on TikTok and Instagram. Better marketing, which is now working more effectively because when we market these types of features, our marketing budgets go further.

Prior campaigns were focused on kind of more amorphous brand reconsideration. -- sort of like, hey, Tinder's great checkout Tinder. Now we're able to actually market very specific features that have great resonance with our key user segments. And so the marketing is much more effective. So taken all together, this is what's improving retention. And as I'd like to remind people, this is a network effect business. So you're already seeing in certain countries in Asia and Latin America, where now is flat or in some countries, actually up year-over-year. we're seeing better user efficacy, better sparks, better smart coverage, better tension because more people just improves user results for everybody in the ecosystem. So it's really encouraging. And you're starting to see that in some of the retention data that we're sharing.

The next question comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

I wanted to ask about capital allocation priorities because you've now made an outside investment in SNFs, I believe you backed to Justin's venture in parallel with Match when he left Hinge to go down that road. How are you thinking about the competition for capital between outside investments that can be made versus application of capital internally to build and scale some of the platform and productive issues you're trying to accomplish? Just want to understand if there's been any evolution in the thought there.

Why don't I take that first and Spencer feel free to jump in. The way our approach has not changed. Our priority has always been first, organic growth in the business. So we're prioritizing investments in Tinder and Hinge to drive growth in those businesses. And we feel like we've got the capital needed to do that. And then number 2 is returning capital to shareholders, as you know, through buybacks and the dividends. we'll continue to be acquisitive when we find opportunities to do M&A, we will do that. We've shown a good track record of it. These are pretty small investments, right? The Stiff's investment there's a $100 million investment in what we think could be a big opportunity. overtone is a much smaller investment than that.

So this is something we can easily sort of handle while still remaining committed to returning vast majority of capital shareholders should buy back some dividends. So I don't think that's new. And I think $1.1 billion a year in free cash flow allows us the flexibility to do all those things.

Anything you'd add? .

Yes. Just in case I don't have the opportunity to address sniffs later in the call, I want to address it now. Steve is right, in the grand scheme of things, it's a relatively what you call it a small investment. I guess I would say it's -- we're so profitable and we have such a solid cash flow generation machine that we're quite easily able to fund it. But it's not a small investment. It's a big investment, and it's a big swing in a huge TAM. Arguably, the non heterosexual mail segment is the most attractive, largest and highly -- most highly engaged segment in the dating category. And this is a big investment in the #2 player that we think has the potential to become the #1 player.

This is a company that's not even in the app store right now. So SNFs, despite all their success to date has only been on the mobile web, and we expect to be able to help them create a safer work experience, which gets into the app store, which will be a huge unlock for SNF. So I'm really excited about this investment. This combined -- we've won on 2 deals since I started, 1 was acquiring her and 1 was investing $100 million in SNFs with the right to buy the rest of it. So we're very focused on these 2 segments, the Safi segment and the non-headset mail segment. We think these are huge TAMs, and I'm very excited to own the #1 player in the Safi segment and own a significant portion of the #2 player in the nonsexual mail segment with an option to buy the rest. So it's really encouraging and exciting

The next question comes from Benjamin Black with Deutsche Bank.

Spencer, you clearly have a lot of product initiatives underway right now at Tinder. If you -- so step back and look ahead to the next 12 to 18 months, I'd be curious to hear, which 1 is the most needle moving in your perspective? Or -- is this maybe a sort of a situation where smaller products initiatives sort of build on top of each other and create compounding benefits. And then quickly, Steve, I'd be curious to hear what you're embedding in your guidance for the year-on-year trends for Tinder payers and made for RPT as well. .

That's a hard 1 to choose amongst all these different product initiatives. As I said, the 1 that's driven the most improvement to date have been improvements in our recommendations algorithms. -- in terms of looking ahead there -- I'll keep it a little bit vague for competitive reasons, but basically say it's like it's kind of an expansion of double date and IRL. So kind of tapping into this light weight, lower pressure ways to connect, which is what Gen Z wants. And I'll give a little plug here on June 11, we're going to have an investor and media focused webinar. We're creating kind of a new Investor Relations product called the CEO Connection, where we're going to -- outside of earnings do like a double click on something that we think is of interest to all of you.

And the first 1 we're going to do on June 11 is on this topic. It's decoding Gen Z dating. So we're going to have a number of our social scientists who study Gen Z and Gen Alpha share our insights and learnings of how these 2 generations want to connect and how our road map informs it. So look for more information coming out of our IR team. for that event on June 11. And -- but it will be an hour webinar, and I think it will be really insightful and interesting for folks.

And I'll take the payer question. Yes, here's the way I would think about it. First of all, tender payers in Q1 were down 5%, which you probably saw, which is a huge improvement from the down 8% in Q4 and 7% the quarter before -- the couple of quarters before that. So a lot of progress there that we're really excited to see. I would think of payers as being in a similar range, maybe some small improvement, but similarly down for the rest of the year as Q1 only because of the $45 million in user investments. So for now, again, we're assuming we make those investments because we want to give the product teams the optionality to do it. But that's what's leading to similar payer trends over the rest of the year.

And then I think if we gave you Tinder full year revenue guidance last quarter, which hasn't changed, so you can kind of back into the payers' assumption. But I think would tell you is payer growth would slow a little bit over the rest of the year, too. But again, a lot of that slowdown is related to the user investments, which we'll only do if we think it's the right long-term thing to do for the business.

The next question comes from John Blackledge with Cowen.

Two questions. I thought another good signal was the new user registrations returning to growth. I don't know if you could add a little bit more color there and how things are trending with that metric thus far in the second quarter? And the second question is around face check rollout. How is it going? And should we still expect it to be about a 1 point headwind to revenue growth this year? .

Yes, let me start with base check. FaseCheck is rolled out in most markets now for Tinder. It's also now rolled out in all major markets at Hinge -- it's showing great results at Hinge to just like it has at Tinder in terms of reducing bad actors on the apps. So in terms of revenue impact, Yes, it's gotten -- it's pretty negligible at this point. It's about 1%. That hasn't changed for the total company. That's included in the guidance. And yes, that's about where it's trending now.

John, I don't have new regs from April at my fingertips, but it is a really encouraging statistic. I think the registration improvement speaks to overall improving social sentiment and our ability to drive reconsideration. I think a lot of that speaks to the product, but much of that speaks to marketing, frankly, because a new reg is basically somebody that hasn't used Tinder before or maybe perhaps they did have a tender account many years ago, but they've deleted the app. So it really speaks to general social sentiment, improving word-of-mouth, some of that's due to product, but a lot of it is due to marketing that is really resonating. So we're encouraged by it.

The next question comes from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer.

One on Hinge and then a quick 1 on in there. So matineBPis accelerating -- is that reflecting a mix within plans and user choice? Are there some headline price increases? And then is that -- obviously, in payers did decelerate. Is there any connection between price and volume there? And then just a second quick one. Spencer, how do you know that like the new product innovations have staying power, like astrology mode, music mode, double date, they're definitely cool. -- like how do we know this is not like when a new AI image generator or casual game launches get to virality and then kind of phase after a few months? .

Why don't I take the first part of that. Yes. So I mean what we've done at Hinge is optimized pricing geographically over the last few quarters. Some of that means a price up. Some of that means a price down. that's what's moving the payers and RPP numbers around a little bit. It's not really package mix shifts per se. With that said, our payer growth is still very strong in Q1. The 15% -- and I expect that to be the case for the rest of the year. I still feel that the bulk of the payer -- the bulk of the revenue growth in 2026 will come from payer growth, not RPP growth. Anything you want to add

Look, on Hinge, overall, Hinge continues to crank. It was up -- the revenue was up 28% year-over-year in the quarter, which is pretty amazing. Brazil and Mexico launches both went very well. Hings became a top 2 or 3 dating app basically right out of the gate based on the success of Brazil and Mexico, we accelerated the launch of more international markets. We quietly launched 10 more markets earlier this week. I think it was Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, in LatAm and then a couple of significant European markets like Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Iceland, Luxembourg, Czech Republic.

So we continue to march across the world with Hinge, which has terrific product market fit. There's obviously huge potential for male growth in these new markets, but also monetization potential on the path to $1 billion of revenue in 2027. Obviously hinge is now in English-speaking markets has flattened as we'd expect because those are more mature markets, but revenue growth even in those core English-speaking markets was up 17% year-over-year in the quarter. And this is very consistently the #1 downloaded app in English-speaking markets, #1 or #2. So I guess the last thing I'd add is, as I think I mentioned in the prepared remarks, the rate of product innovation at Hinge continues to impress.

So this quarter, we're -- we've got 3 great innovations, date ideas which lets people indicate what types of dates they want to go on, friends take, which brings friends into the dating experience and then signals, which lets people show if they're high intent. Those are all great features, which directly speak to Gen Z and millennial needs in the category. And again, we're going to be talking more about that at the June 11 event. So all of this is to say, I'm very confident in Hinge's trajectory and its growth. I think, Jason, your other question was about kind of staying power of these new features.

The way I would answer this is that first of all, as I've said, a lot of the improvements in our data have come from recommendation algorithm improves. So those are not specifically shiny new features. Those are just giving people -- showing people the people that would be a better match with them. But with respect to the shiny new features and might they might their appeal fade over time. Double date, I think, is a good indicator where its usage just continues to grow every month, every quarter. And as more people become aware of the feature and the same thing is happening with music and astrology so right out of the gate, for example, with music mode when nobody had music mode, there were not many people to see in music mode, but now that you start to see more users with their music connected to their tender profile, it becomes more immersive, you're more motivated to upload or to kind of connect your Spotify to your tender to bring in your music and awareness grows as the network effect kind of fills out.

So in that sense, it's quite different than other feature launches of mobile games, for example.

The next question comes from Youssef Squali with Truist.

Awesome. So Spencer, maybe a couple of questions for you. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the health of the overall online dating market both from a competitive standpoint with some of the new modalities that we're seeing off-line like run collabs and book clubs and all kinds of other clubs, but just how would that impact in the environment, the online dating environment, if it is. And then on SNFs, what makes that model so successful? And so superior to archers that you decided to invest $100 million at full Archer into it. .

Yes. So on the overall macro market, Gen Z desperately wants to connect. They know they want to meet new people. They just want to do it in a low pressure, low stakes way that doesn't feel like a job interview. And so traditional dating apps are very highly structured and can be intimidating to a user under 30. So I think the growth of these alternative ways to meet new people speaks to how Gen Z is trying to find lower pressure ways to connect. We've obviously adapted our road map to this reality and double date is was our first foray into this.

The in real life events product in Los Angeles was our next big foray into this. So we're basically at Tinder and Match Group more broadly, we are embracing this trend. -- of meeting people IRL at different -- in different modalities rather than hiding from it. Again, the June 11 event will give us an opportunity to bring a lot more data and learnings from our team of experts. -- into this conversation. In terms of the SNFs investment, SNFs is very, very different than Archer. SNFs is a -- basically the experience of sniffs is for a map-based experience for more of an instant connection.

So people that are looking to meet people right away this evening or who are nearby. -- whereas Archer was much more of a serious high intent kind of find -- helping a man find a husband type experience. And SNFs had -- it has an incredible product market fit with 3 million monthly active users, again, only on web, not even on app. And just really resonates with this community in a way that Archer did not. And because Sify's has such huge audience, the network effects are self-reinforcing.

People use NiFi because people use NiFi and people weren't using Archer because people weren't using Archer. So it's a very different product and has a wildly different level of product market fit. And so that's why we've decided to place this bed on the non-headset mail market on the SNFs team and SNF's experience. And we basically moved our Archer team who is mostly New York-based either in Hinge or Tinder or E&E. So -- that was a very talented team that had built a beautiful product that hadn't yet found product market fit. And with the Sniffy's investment, that team is now -- has found other roles at Match Group.

The next question comes from James Heaney with Jefferies.

Yes. Great. I just had one. You talked in the letter about your objective to get Tinder back to growth in 2027. When you say a growth business, do you mean revenue payers, MAUs just some other engagement metrics. Just trying to understand kind of how you're thinking about growth in 2017. .

Yes. I think -- correct me from Monty, but I think what we've kind of the sort of line in the sand that we've committed to is by end of 2027, year-over-year -- now growth and by -- for full year 2027 revenue growth or by end of 27?

By the end.

By the end of 27 revenue growth. So I guess that's Q4 2017 revenue year-over-year over Q3. So those are the stated goals, and you know where we're at on our path to achieve them.

The last question comes from Brad Erickson with RBC.

i guess just a lot's been asked here. When you think about -- you talked about kind of collaborating across brands, Spencer earlier in the call with, I guess, Hinge's had so much success, if you like, with lots of new product innovation in the last few years. I wonder if there's anything you could add or bring over to Tinder that could be impactful there. Anything you've done to date where you're seeing similar results or kind of how you think about the collaborative opportunity there.

Yes, it's a great 1 to end on. This is a huge focus of mine. And I've definitely changed the culture internally away from being siloed to being much more deeply collaborative and communicative and in some cases, integrated organizationally. Probably the most notable example of this is something that internally we call Project Mercury, which cross-sells 1 app to another. So a BLK user, for example, might get a pop-up that says, you've been invited to join Tinder and they can create their tender profile with 1 tap or an OkCupid user might get a notification that they can -- they've been invited to join Hinge and they can create a high profile with 1 tap. That's driven a lot of incremental revenue and just a lot of goodness across the different apps.

But there are many other initiatives of brewing that exact greater synergy between the brands. Pairs, for example, in Japan has been a leader in the in real life events space. So has Mitic in France. and Tinder is learning a ton from payers and Meetic and what they've built out in the event space. So that's just another example, but there are many dozens of examples around the company, and we're just getting started in terms of extracting the full benefit of the combined scale and synergies as we move away from being siloed more towards deeply integrated.

I think we'll wrap with that. Thanks, everyone, for joining. I'm incredibly proud of the team in the last couple of months of accomplishment. We are not out of the woods yet, but things are much improved and improving more every day. We will talk to you again at the June 11 event decoding Gen Z dating. And thanks, everyone, for your time today. Bye-bye.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Please welcome to the stage, the CEO of Match Group and Tinder, Spencer Rascoff.

Good morning, and thank you all for being with us here at the El Rey today. This place has quite the history. This stage I'm standing on started as a single-screen movie theater back in the 1930s. In the '80s and '90s, it reinvented itself as a club. And today, it's one of L.A.'s most iconic music venues, hosting some of the greatest acts of all time. No pressure. For nearly a century, it's been a place where people come together, and it's evolved to do that in different ways for different generations. At its core, the El Rey has been a venue that helped people create connections, and share the things that they love with other people.

Tinder plays that same role. We introduced our Swipe feature and revolutionized how people connect online forever. But in Tinder's 14 years of innovation, we've never hosted an event to talk about how we've stayed at the forefront of our industry for so long and what comes next. Today is that day.

Just over a year ago, I joined Match Group as CEO. And very quickly, I made the decision to also run Tinder directly, because Tinder matters. It's the largest dating app in the world. It's available in more than 185 countries, tens of millions of people come to Tinder every day to meet someone new. Our users make around 2 billion Swipes per day. And for millions of people, Tinder is the first app they choose to use when they start dating.

Over the past year, though, there's been a lot of noise around dating apps, headlines about fatigue and Gen Z opting out. But let me be clear, the need for human connection is stronger than ever. We are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. People are craving connection, real connection more than at any time in recent memory. And at a time when we're constantly interacting with machines and technology and with artificial intelligence, Tinder believes that humans need humans now more than ever.

We need each other for happiness, for health, for belonging, for someone to laugh with. Connection has also mattered for every generation. My parents were married for 50 years. My wife and I have been together for more than 30. My brother and sister both met their significant others on a Match Group app. So connection is not some trend. It's a primal human need. People just need a better way to spark that connection. And that's why we're here today.

The truth is that I've been looking forward to today for months, because on our Match Group earnings calls, we talk about business results and financial results and other metrics, but it's very rare for us to get an opportunity to show off what we've built and how we use consumer insights to create innovative features and to show how those changes are reshaping the Tinder experience. That's what today is all about, and that's why I'm so excited.

I'm excited for you to hear what we've been working on, and to hear it directly from the people and the teams who have been building these features. Approximately 600 people at Tinder from L.A. to New York to Ghent, Belgium to Seoul, and everywhere in between, spending every day thinking about and building new ways to spark connections for millions of people around the world.

We're going to share updates today around four key areas. Number one, we're expanding Tinder into new formats, including new Modes as well as virtual and In Real Life or IRL experiences to enable more fun, low-pressure ways to connect. The way people connect on Tinder today looks very different than even 12 months ago. Since I joined, we launched two new Modes, Double Date mode and College Mode. And Double Date is transforming how people use Tinder, nearly half of Gen Z female Tinder users in the U.S. say that Double Date is a key reason why they choose to use Tinder. So that's more than just some incremental improvement. It's a significant shift in why people use Tinder and how they use it.

And today, we're announcing two new ways to connect through shared tastes and personalities, not just photos on your profile with Music Mode and Astrology Mode. And we're also extending Tinder beyond the screen because today, we're launching IRL events, bookable in the app in Los Angeles, creating real-world moments where Tinder users can meet up in person. And soon, we'll begin testing Video Speed Dating in several cities across the U.S. because this is what we hear from young daters about how they want to connect. The blending of the digital and the physical world together in to fun, safe and low-pressure way. Together, our new modes and events have the potential to reshape how Tinder is perceived, moving us far beyond the legacy stereotypes of a decade ago.

Number two, we are redesigning the profile experience to enable more authentic expression and drive higher quality matches. We've, in fact, rethought the profile experience entirely, and we're rolling out a series of huge updates globally, introducing new tools to help people put their best foot forward.

Photo Prompts, which we launched last year, add personality directly into photos. But the new launches, which you'll learn about today like Photo Enhance will improve lighting and clarity of images and Camera Roll Scan will help surface authentic moments hidden in your old photos and create visual collages that reflect one's interest. We're also evolving the design with full-screen photos and a clear, more immersive interface. This makes Tinder more expressive, more dynamic and more modern. And with Tinder Connect, we're bringing the apps and platforms that people already love into their Tinder experience so they can bring more of their real lives into how they show up.

Area number three, we're using AI in new ways to better understand user intent and deliver more relevant outcome-driven matches because just getting matches is not the goal. They have to be relevant, and they have to lead somewhere. Over the past year, we've completely rebuilt the Tinder algorithm and how it learns using AI to better understand intent, preferences and behavior. So today, we're introducing you to Learning Mode, which helps us respond more quickly to what someone is actually looking for, so better matches show up earlier.

We're also expanding our Chemistry feature today, our AI-powered personalization layer beyond just Australia and New Zealand, into Canada and the United States. Tinder users have said that they're interested in AI, but only if it leads to better outcomes. So instead of replacing connection or standing in for authenticity, we're using AI to help move people towards better connections.

And number four, we're continuing to raise the bar for safety across the category and investing at an unmatched scale. Trust is the foundation of everything that we do at Tinder. Over the past few years, we've launched more than 20 trust and safety features globally, helping set the standard, not just in the dating category, but also in social media. We invest over $125 million every year in trust and safety across our portfolio, and that reflects the importance that we place on safety as the foundation of the product experience.

Our Face Check feature provides mandatory facial liveness verification. It has reduced exposure to bad actors and bot accounts by more than 60% and lowered bad actor reports by over 40% in key markets since we've launched it. Face Check is now live today in the U.S. and dozens of other countries, and we're continuing to expand it internationally, raising the bar on what safe real connection looks like. Because when people trust what they see and whom they see, they're more willing to start.

Taken together, all these changes mark the most significant evolution of our app in years, and they make Tinder today meaningfully different than a year ago. More social, more expressive, more intelligent, more trusted. Each of these areas matters, but what really matters is how they work together as a system. When they work together as a system, we drive better outcomes. We create stronger trust, lower pressure, richer profiles and better connections. You're going to hear more about all of these new features and updates from leaders across our team who are building this next chapter of Tinder. Mark Kantor, our Head of Product; Yoel Roth, who leads Trust and Safety, product leaders, Claire Watanabe and Hillary Paine and Melissa Hobley, our Head of Marketing.

But before that, I want to talk about an important and deliberate shift that we made 6 months ago to make all of this happen. We became a product and engineering-led organization with a founder mindset, focused on user experiences and real outcomes. And we changed how we measure success. It's not just by activity in the app, and it's not by surface level engagement and it's not short-term revenue. we measure success at Tinder by whether people are actually connecting. Because here's what we learned, for over 18% of women under 30 who told us that they stepped away from the dating app category, their reason was not a lack of matches. It was that those matches didn't actually turn into conversations. That's the gap, that moment between a like and something real.

That's what we call a Spark. A Spark is the signal we use internally to measure whether we're truly creating connection, not just matches. A spark to our users is that reply that turns into a conversation. It's the shift from maybe to, let's see where this goes. It's the butterflies when you meet someone new on Tinder. It's the feels. It's that shared energy between people. We are not optimizing for Swipes or Likes, we are optimizing for Sparks, and it's changing what we prioritize and how we build.

That's also why today's event was called Tinder Sparks: Start Something New. And to show you how we're building towards more Sparks, I'm going to hand it over to our Chief Product Officer, Mark Kantor. Mark is a startup founder and a product leader with more than 20 years of experience building consumer apps at scale. From growing apps at Zynga by millions of daily active users to creating products used by tens of millions worldwide. Please welcome Mark Kantor.

Thanks, Spencer. If Sparks are the goal, every product decision has to move people forward, not just generate activity because activity alone doesn't matter. Despite some of the external chatter about dating fatigue or Gen Z stepping away from the category, we see a massive opportunity to deliver the experience they're craving. The desire to connect is as strong as ever. What's changed is what people expect from the experience. They don't want an endless stream of random profiles, and they don't want to judge or be judged in a split second based on just a couple of photos. They want something intentional. They want authenticity and to show up as their real selves. They want to understand more about someone before they decide to match.

What they're asking for is a curated experience. The sense that people they're genuinely excited to meet are already on the app and that Tinder can help surface them. And when they invest in expressing and who they are, the app responds intelligently, learning from their behavior, understanding their intent and delivering recommendations that feel aligned. And they want help accurately representing themselves to share more of their personality through Prompts and show their hobbies through the right photos to get started with tools that make self-expression easier and more fun.

So our perspective is that the chatter about fatigue wasn't a signal that young daters don't want to date or don't need Tinder. It was a signal about where we had an opportunity, where expectations had evolved, where we needed to step up. In fact, 50% of singles under 30 have had a first date in the past 3 months. And that's up from 47% in the same time frame in 2024. The need to connect hasn't weakened, the tools required to do it have changed. That's why, as Spencer said, we shifted our approach, and we became a product and engineering-led organization focused on user outcomes, especially for today's daters.

The past 12 months have been about building based on those insights, and the early signs are encouraging. They show we're moving in the right direction. A Spark is our internal measurement. It's when two users message back and forth at least 6 times, which signals mutual engagement. And that only happens when the experience works together as a system.

So over the past year, we've aligned around 5 core principles that guide how Tinder builds today. First, lower the pressure to Spark possibilities. Dating can be intimidating. So creating lower pressure means removing friction that keeps people from starting and setting them up to connect in their own ways and on their own terms. And that matters. Because when we look at how young singles described their ideal first date, it's not about grand gestures. It's about something playful and low pressure, a walk, a coffee, something that fits naturally into their lives.

Second, create a canvas for people to express themselves authentically. When people feel like they can show who they are, connection becomes easier.

Third, personalize the user experience. When someone shares their interests, their preferences or their dating intent, the app should adapt. That's where we think AI strengthens the system. We use AI to help recognize patterns and behavior, prioritize stronger signals and improve the probability that interest turns into conversation. It helps new users see better recommendation sooner, and it helps experienced users refine what they're looking for. Matches are better and conversations start more often.

Fourth, make the experience more valuable. That means fewer stalled conversations, fewer dead ends and more moments that move towards Sparks. And most importantly, continue to reinforce trust as a prerequisite for everything that happens on and off our app. Profile realness and respectful behavior between users are requirements for connection, every launch, every test, every update runs through these principles. And if it doesn't move people towards a Spark, we don't ship it, and we're moving faster than ever.

We're shipping features at twice the pace of a year ago, with generative AI helping us build smarter and more efficiently, writing more than half of all new code, which allows engineers to spend more time on architecture, creative problem solving and building features to improve the dating experience. Product and engineering are operating differently now with greater urgency, faster iteration, stronger experimentation and better performance and stability. Consumers may not see how we work internally, but they absolutely feel the outcome, and that momentum is showing up in the features we offer.

Let's take Double Date, which has quickly taken hold. It's the most impactful product innovation we've launched in years, and it's significantly reshaping how young people experience Tinder. Double Date works because it makes dating feels social, fun and low pressure. When you show up with a friend, dating feels less like a test and more like an experience. There's energy in a 4-way group chat and fun in the shared experience of a low-pressure meetup that's not as intimidating as a one-on-one date.

As Spencer mentioned, 48% of Gen Z women on Tinder in the U.S. cite Double Date as a unique reason to use Tinder. Today, 1 in 5 female Tinder users in the U.S., ages 18 to 22 have a Double Date pair. And in Norway, one of the first countries where we launched Double Date mode. That number is nearly 1 in 2. Because we launched early there, it's had time to build real momentum. What we're seeing in Norway gives us confidence in the trajectory elsewhere.

So this isn't just a one-off spike. During peak moments like Christmas, New Year's Eve and Dating Sunday, Double Date invites surged, with women sending around 20% more invites and men around 30% more. And that momentum continued into the new year. That tells us this is a behavioral shift. Modern dating is social. Approximately 40% of young singles see their friends influence their dating lives. Group chats are part of that process. In fact, 22% of Gen Z women have heard of Double Date from a friend. Friends are their emotional copilots, and Double Date brings the dynamic directly into the product.

Conversations and Double Date matches also tend to be more dynamic with users sending more messages per match than in one-on-one chats. Across Double Date, College Mode and Face Check, our mandatory Facial Liveness Verification, one pattern shows up again and again. When we lower pressure and raise trust, connections increase. That's the path forward. Our work to make Tinder the safest way to meet new people deserves its own focus.

So I'm going to hand it over to Yoel, the Head of Trust and Safety, to talk about how we are continuing to build confidence directly into the experience. Yoel is one of the world's leading voices in online safety and as SVP of Trust and Safety at Match Group and formerly Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter. He has spent years leading global teams focused on content moderation, platform integrity, security and responsible innovation.

Thanks, Mark, and hey, everyone.

Before I dive into what's new at Tinder, I actually want to share a little bit about my own history in this space. Nearly 15 years ago, when Tinder was brand new, I was working on a PhD studying safety issues on dating apps. And along the way, I also met the guy who's now my husband on an app. I have seen first -- thank you. I've seen firsthand the incredible transformative power of this category. Then as now, one thing was clear, earning and maintaining trust is the key to success for dating apps. It has to be the foundation of everything that we do.

At Tinder, we talk a lot about how it starts with a Swipe, and I think that's true of safety, too. The double opt-in Swipe feature that Tinder invented and patented, which means that people can only message each other once both parties have opted in, was not just a product innovation that turned the online dating category on its head, it was a safety principle from the start. Two people choose each other before messaging begins. That mutuality and focus on consent changed modern dating for the better. Since then, we've built for safety across the Tinder experience.

Let me give you just a few examples of the more than 20 different features we've introduced over the years.

Share My Date, lets you easily share your plans with a trusted friend or family member, giving people even more confidence when they take the step of connecting IRL. Traveler Alert, proactively helps clear people on the road understand if there might be risks associated with their identity and helps them manage their visibility on Tinder. And optional ID verification gives folks powerful ways to confirm their matches are authentic. We have helped define the standards for this category.

But my two personal favorite features, Are You Sure? and Does This Bother You? are a really meaningful step towards guiding conversations in real time and are powerful examples of how technology can help change human behavior for the better. So let me break down a little bit about how they work.

A lot of times, we talk about trust and safety as being about punishing people when they behave badly. But I believe we need to turn that dynamic on its head and try to get ahead of content that might be inappropriate. Are You Sure? does exactly that. By prompting someone to reconsider language that might be over the line before they send a message. Does This Bother You? is on the other side of that dynamic. Connecting is deeply personal and a message that's over the line for one person might be totally fine for someone else. With Dose This Bother You? we proactively check in with users about messages that we think might be inappropriate and give them immediate agency to report problematic behavior.

These systems work. We consistently see users revise messages after a prompt. Taken together, these are small interventions that improve the tone of conversations across the platform. We first introduced these features in 2021, and today, we're announcing the biggest update they've received in their history. We're using the power of large language models to make both features even more effective. These updates move us beyond rule-based detection to context-aware understanding. Instead of relying primarily on a list of inappropriate keywords, the LLM based system can better interpret tone and conversational context and help get a content that might be too much too soon or otherwise contribute to the ick factor that can sometimes go with first messages.

The result, we believe, are better, smarter speed bumps, interventions that are better timed, more precise, less intrusive. And on the recipient side, we want to give people even more control upfront, and we will flag and hide potentially inappropriate messages in real time. If you're okay with something a little bit spicier, no problem, you can see it. But Does This Bother You? will help keep things even safer by default. And our new LLM-powered version has shown a more than 10x improvement in the accuracy of our detections. Together, this reinforces respectful behavior as the foundation of the Tinder experience steps that are critical to expanding category usage among Gen Z female users and frankly, all other user groups, too.

But conversation safety is only one part of trust, and that's where Face Check comes in. Face Check is our mandatory facial liveness verification for new users. During onboarding, users complete a quick video selfie to help confirm they're real and that their photos accurately represent them. Once complete and if their video selfie matches their profile, users earn a badge that signals authenticity. From the perspective of our users, Face Check is built to be quick and easy. Most people can complete the process in just a few seconds and get back to what they're on Tinder to do, find Sparks.

But there's real magic that comes from strengthening our identity checks at the front door. Since introducing Face Check, we've seen significant measurable decreases in bots, impersonation and repeat bad actors. As Spencer mentioned, we've seen more than 60% fewer views on bad actor profiles and a 40% drop in reports in regions where Face Check is live. This is, by far, the most impactful trust and safety feature I have seen in my career. And the results are real. There's less annoying spam and more trust. In the U.S., we've pushed Face Check even further and are using this technology to help keep serious bad actors and scammers that have previously been banned from Tinder off the app, and the results have been striking. Since we rolled out this functionality in January, more than 80% of repeat bad actor accounts are removed within the first day of reregistering compared to less than half previously.

And Face Check is just one part of our approach. A secure video selfie is a quick and easy way to verify authenticity, but we also are giving people access to a wide range of tools to confirm they're legit. In Japan, we've launched an industry-leading integration with World ID, which makes Tinder the first dating app to use their pioneering biometric humanness verification. Our team in Seoul have built advanced AI to help keep underage users off Tinder and ensure that photos are appropriate. And we've been working with leading companies like Reality Defender to try to stay ahead of issues like deep fakes and AI-generated profile pics.

All of this is in service of one goal, earn our users' trust. We know that when people trust what they're seeing, they're more willing to engage. And on the flip side, if people hesitate because they doubt who they're talking to, sparks do not happen. On Tinder, trust should feel built in, consistent, proactive, present from the moment you open the app because when trust is strong, people start and starting as everything.

To show you how we build on that foundation, I'm going to hand it over to one of our incredible product leaders. Claire Watanabe leads Tinder's end-to-end product experience as VP of Product, overseeing the teams behind onboarding, Swipe, Chat and Modes. She's the product leader behind Double Date, bringing a more social immersive energy to the app.

Thanks, Yoel. Yoel talked about trust as infrastructure. That's the foundation. But trust gets people in the door. Expression is what gets them through it. A Spark starts when someone sees something real in another person, not just a photo, but a signal of who they actually are, a song they love, a shared sense of humor, something that makes you curious. That's what we're building towards with Modes. Each one designed around a different form of self-expression to start a different context. Today, I'm thrilled to announce that we're launching Astrology Mode, alongside a redesign of Music Mode that will help people connect based on their interests.

So let's talk about music. Music is personal. It makes you feel something. And that feeling changes, which profiles you actually like. When your favorite song comes on right as someone's profile of appears, something clicks. It's not a thought, it's a feeling. It's simple, but it's powerful. And in fact, more than half of matches in the U.S. involve at least one person that has a Spotify anthem on their profile.

So we took a fresh look at Music Mode, which hadn't been meaningfully updated in nearly 5 years, and we redesigned it to better reflect how people actually use music when dating. This is a sound-on experience. It's immersive, it's visual, it's full screen. It's kind of experience modern daters already expect from the apps they live in. And we're bringing that energy to dating.

So Music Mode, lets you select up to 20 songs. In this case, let's add my new favorite song, Something New. And I'll add a few others to round out the vibe. Visually, the mode now feels more modern and integrated with the rest of Tinder. As we discover people in this new dedicated space, you'll hear a snippet from one of their songs.

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You see shared artists overlapping genres, you're taking in someone's photos and their music at the same time. There's something about hearing someone's music that makes them feel closer. It gives this sense of depth to the person in a surprisingly effective way. And behind the scenes, the algorithm is matching you based on shared music taste. So the people you're discovering are already share your vibe.

When you Match, the song you connected on shows up in chat. The conversation starts from something you already share. We soft launched in select markets last month and already, we're seeing that 1 in 10, 18 to 22 year olds have adopted it. And there are signs of long-term positive sparks for women. These are strong signals that this drives both engagement and the kind of context that leads to real connection.

We are also launching a brand-new mode, Astrology Mode. If Music Mode is about a shared feeling, Astrology Mode gives you a lens on compatibility. It's not just that someone's a Leo, it's about how your sign and their signs come together. For Gen Z, astrology has become a shared language for talking about personality and chemistry. We hear it constantly from our users, our focus groups, and our younger employees. From our early testing, we see women like 17% more profiles in Astrology Mode. This is a big deal. It tells us that women are finding real value and real reasons to connect when they otherwise would have said no.

We worked with professional astrologers to ensure our content is thoughtful and credible while still keeping it lighthearted. When you enter Astrology Mode, your sun sign is automatically populated with your birth date, which we already have from your profile. If you choose, you can add your birth time and place and unlock your moon and rising. In astrology, these are known as your big 3. And honestly, onboarding is kind of fun itself. You learn something about yourself before you even start browsing. I already knew I was a Cancer, but I didn't know my moon sign reflects my emotional side or that my rising is in Leo.

As you begin to browse, you see your big 3 for your potential matches. Luca here is a Leo sun, Libra moon and Cancer rising. And right away, I can see our compatibility. If you want to dive in further, I tap into the full breakdown. Our cosmic sparks, across the vibes, communication, emotion and sizzle. Even our element mix, Luca and I are 50% water. So the emotional connection could be strong. It's not just here's who they are, it's here's what could happen between you two.

So I'm swiping right on Luca, and it's a Match. And right away, I'm reminded why Cancer, Leo, different styles but opposite attract. That insight follows us straight into chat and Luca has already got something to say. So we're pretty different. And just like that, the conversations started. No awkward opener, just context that makes it easy to begin.

We quietly launched Astrology Mode in Australia and selected European markets last month, and the response has been incredible. Nearly 1 in 6 of our 18- to 22-year-olds have adopted it. For a brand-new feature, this is a super strong signal. It tells us this is the kind of context that daters have been looking for. We see both Music and Astrology Mode resonating strongly with our young daters, shared context, cultural relevance, lower pressure. We found a formula, and we're just getting started.

I'm going to hand things over to Hillary Paine, Tinder's SVP of Product, who leads the teams behind Tinder's recommendation algorithms, premium subscriptions, and international growth and expansion. She spent her career building mission-driven human-centric products that meet real-world needs at a massive scale. And she's going to share some of the other ways we're helping people connect.

Thank you, Claire. What you've seen so far are exciting new formats that we're ready to scale globally. But we believe in starting small before we build big, testing in real markets, learning in real time, and scaling only when something proves, it creates real Sparks.

That discipline is how we move faster. So alongside our global launches, we are also running smaller format tests in select markets. These are ideas designed to explore entirely new ways to start. And I'm excited to share two of these with you today.

First, I'm excited to announce IRL events. Instead of defaulting to a one-on-one first date, which can be too narrow an outcome for young daters. We are creating low-pressure group experiences with shared interests and activities at the center. I want you to think about coffee shop raves, speakeasy bowling, trivia nights, pickleball tournaments, art workshops. We're focused on creating more environments where these kinds of connections can happen, because your dating life and your social life can and do happen in the same spaces.

Beginning today in Los Angeles, users will see a new Events tab in Tinder. As our beta market, Tinder users in L.A. can open that tab and browse through curated events that are happening over the next month. We're working with favorite local spots to represent a variety of different ways to connect and offer meet-ups across different L.A. neighborhoods so that attendees can start somewhere if that feels familiar.

So let's say you're interested in the coffee and cold plunge event. Once you opt in, you'll see the details, the venue and other people who have expressed interest. They're all Photo Verified. Everyone there has opted in. That clarity removes social uncertainty before the first conversation even begins.

Now we wanted to solve for this IRL need as quickly as possible. We went from ideation to proof of concept to a beta that is live in the app today in just 10 weeks. And we're continuing to expand on elements of the experience, and we'll soon be introducing new features like the ability to connect with somebody who is at the event in the app after the event. We're starting in just one city, but we see meaningful long-term potential. Experiences like IRL events, along with Double Date and other social features offer completely new ways for people who are new to Tinder or returning to Tinder to Spark something new with someone new.

And when connection feels social and intentional, it becomes easier to start. Now we know that the fastest way to create that Spark is meeting face-to-face, but you can't always do that IRL. So that's why we're also excited to announce that we are exploring a new speed dating experience that is designed to help people form real-time connections on Tinder sooner.

The short interaction style relieves the pressure of committing to a full date, while still giving you the sense of your chemistry with somebody. Users we've spoken to have really enjoyed the spontaneity and intentionality of connecting with someone in real time and getting to know the person behind the profile. We decided to offer an experience that covers both of those needs. Making it virtual means that more daters can spend their time on the app, talking directly to other people face-to-face.

Video Speed Dating events will also live in the Events tab, and it will require Photo Verification. At a set date in time, users will join a live video meet-up, where they're introduced to people who match their Tinder preferences. They will be set into a series of short 3-minute conversations.

Now in just 3 minutes, you can really start to get a feel for someone's energy, and you'll know if the vibe is right. If it isn't, you can skip. If the Spark is real, you can both choose to add more time and keep chatting. For many people, the hardest part of dating is investing time, getting ready, energy, getting to the place and showing up, only to know that within minutes, it's not a match. So these virtual sessions are giving you a preview of what a real date could feel like, and it's bringing back that adrenaline of meeting someone new, but in a way that feels controlled, safe and intentional. Video Speed Dating will start testing in L.A. in early June with the intention of rolling out to additional markets in the near future.

Now Claire is going to come back on and talk about how we are reimagining profiles.

We talked about new places for a Spark to start in a mode, via Events, but the moment -- those moments depend on the same thing, a First Impression. At the core of every First Impression on Tinder is a profile, and we're fundamentally redesigning profiles from the ground up, how you build them, what they show, and how they feel. The goal of a profile isn't just something to display their details, but to actually represent them. Historically, Tinder profiles have been almost all photos, but not the kind that tell you much, a polished selfie, a group shot where you're trying to guess which one is your potential match.

But Gen Z really wants to be perceived authentically. They're not looking to perform, they're looking to be seen. A profile shouldn't feel like a resume, it should feel like a real taste of someone. So let's walk through how we're making that happen.

This is Jamie. Here's what Jamie's profile looked like a year ago. Photo Verified. Here's a selfie of Jamie. And another selfie of Jamie, that's a start. He has a nice smile, but I just can't really get a read on him. So let's rebuild Jamie's profile in this new era of Tinder profiles.

We're introducing Photo Enhance that make your pictures look at touch better. We brightened Jamie's dark photo, so I can actually see his face, but it still preserves the integrity of the photo. He can also add captions to his photo, showing off his sense of humor and giving me something to respond to. Jamie says, I should guess where this photo was taken. Well, I see the New York Skyline so it's kind of a layup. What a gentleman.

If he's stuck and doesn't know which photo to add, he can opt in to our Camera Roll Scan. It looks at his photos and surfaces the best ones that best reflect how we actually spend his time. Eventually, he'll be able to display those interests as photo collages, turning a text label like travel into something you can actually see and feel. But Jamie still thinks something is missing in his profile, some important sides of him, maybe is wit, a cute quirk.

Photos can't be the only and primary modality for expression. It just doesn't work that way for everyone. That's why we're putting a much greater emphasis on the written parts of a profile, bios and prompts. But Jamie is not a writer, so we're going to give him some prompts to help him out. So Jamie says, he is a bit of a passenger princess. Luckily, I prefer the driver seat, so this could work. When Jamie joins Tinder today, he's encouraged to add a bio and prompts during onboarding. They're no longer buried in the depths of this profile. They're elevated, sitting alongside his photos in the main carousel. So people engage with who Jamie is, not just how he looks.

And what about Jamie's interest? Right now, they're a text list at the bottom of his profile, that's easy to miss. We're going to change that. Interests are especially the ones you have in common, are some of the best conversation kindling there is. Now let's see. Jamie says he's interested in food, sports and movies. And through our partnership with Clue, we can see The Sandlot, Dune, Batman and his all-time favorite and mine, Wicked. These show up alongside visually the rest of his photos. Again, they're playful, scannable and give you that instant read. Interests stop being an afterthought they go from footnote to First Impression.

And to make this a lot more about Jamie and less about Tinder, we're redesigning the experience itself. Photos and content go full screen. Navigation fades into the background, with a glossy minimal look. The UI gets out of the way so that Jamie, the person comes through. So now with all of this, Jamie's profile is richer now. We've got better photos, more personality, more conversation starters. But there's a whole side of Jamie that lives outside of the app. Through Tinder Connect, we're making it possible to bring that in. We're partnering with apps people already love to add a new dimension to how they show up.

We already talked about our partnership with Spotify for the music category, but wait, there's more. For the learning category, we're launching with Duolingo. Duolingo has over 130 million users globally and taps into Gen Z's growing importance of continual self-development. We see this in research with roughly 70% of Gen Z skill building at least weekly, compared to 59% of Millennials. Tinder partnering with Duolingo makes it easier to connect over what you're both learning. After all, what's more fun than flirting with someone who's just beating your Duolingo streak in Hindi. It's another dimension of authentic expression and may even remove one less barrier to connecting with someone.

For the restaurant category, we're launching with Beli. Where you eat can say a lot about you? And Beli has become the food app in cities. Whether you're the person who knows every hole-in-the-wall Ramen Shop or the one with a running list of places to try, your food taste tells someone what a Saturday night might actually look like with you. Beli is the social hub for exactly this, rankings, reviews, list that reflect how you move through your city. Through connect, that becomes a part of your profile.

These aren't just integrations. Jamie doesn't need to rebuild his profile from scratch. He connects the apps he already uses and loves and his profile gets richer on their own. We are so honored and excited to be working alongside these partners to give people more ways to show who they are, more context to connect and more reasons to say, yes. That's how you create Sparks.

Hillary is going to dive into how all this feeds into better outcomes for our users.

Lowering pressure and expanding expression is only half the equation. The experience also has to feel responsive. App fatigue comes from effort that doesn't lead anywhere. Tinder starts by understanding your intent. What you say you're looking for matters, and every like and every profile update adds another signal. Over time, Tinder learns what you care about, and it adapts. It starts servicing people who are more aligned with your preferences.

The result, stronger, more personalized recommendations faster. For you updates quickly and reflects mutual compatibility more clearly. Over the past year, we've completely rebuilt how Tinder learns from your very first likes, introducing personalization earlier in your journey so that recommendations become relevant sooner. Now within just seconds. When you download Tinder, a new Learning Mode begins gathering feedback in real time to refine your recommendations. Instead of endless browsing, you start seeing better recommendations right away.

For new women joining Tinder, Learning Mode increases the likelihood of returning within the first week, and of getting into real back-and-forth conversations that Spark something meaningful. And if you come back after a break, Tinder quickly relearns your preferences. So you spend less time reexplaining what you want and more time getting into great conversations within just a few likes.

We recognize that some daters can feel frustrated by paywalls in the category. And we believe that premium features should feel like added value, not a requirement for success. So over the past year, we've identified the features that matter the most for driving momentum, and we've made more of them free in the core experience. That shift supports better outcomes for users while maintaining strong revenue performance.

For You, Learning Mode and richer profile tools all reflect the same shift, building the product around helping users get to better outcomes faster. Spark should be experienced by everyone.

When effort feels rewarded, people show up more consistently, and their engagement provides us the signals that our system needs to work harder on their behalf. And those changes are working. After a year of investing in better recommendations, we've driven meaningful growth in the share of people who get a Spark on Tinder. It is up 7% compared to this time last year. That is what happens when recommendations work the way that they should, less guessing, more alignment, more Sparks.

When someone -- when you ask someone what personalization looks like for them, there's a high chance that their answer is different from the next person you ask and the next person and the next person. We are each unique, and we're looking for something that makes sense for us. That's why we believe that data should have different opportunities to shape their recommendations. There are different levels to this.

So for daters looking for even more curation, there's Chemistry. Chemistry is an AI-powered personalization layer, which leverages insights from Camera Roll Scan and responses to in-app questions. It's designed to reduce fatigue with a few highly tailored recommendations daily. Chemistry is already live in New Zealand and Australia, and it expands today to test in parts of the U.S. and Canada. With Chemistry, we can surface even better recommendations by getting to know the users themselves. Earlier, Claire walked through how Camera Roll Scan can lead to better expression. Now I'm going to show you that it can also surface insights that lead to better matches.

Donny's Camera Roll shows that he prefers to keep things real and relaxed. And his answers to Q&A share that he's into books and memes. Now we can introduce him to someone who shares that same energy, the same values and the same interests. It reduces the need to endlessly browse because the first profiles feel like the right ones.

Even as they're looking for connection, Gen Z singles cited mental drain and app fatigue as a leading reason to not try dating apps. They over-index more than any other group. Chemistry moves us from volume to compatibility. And in a study in Australia, we saw that users who were familiar with Chemistry were 11 points more likely to think that the profiles they saw felt relevant to them, and 10 points more likely to view the experience as thoughtful and intentional. For these dates, Tinder starts to feel worth it. And when it feels worth it, people have meaningful experiences that match their expectations. When it feels worth it, we are fulfilling a very real human need.

Now to bring it all together from a brand and cultural perspective, I'd like to introduce Melissa Hobley, who is Tinder's Head of Marketing, leading brand, marketing, communications and partnerships worldwide. She's known for award-winning inclusive campaigns and for using her platform to champion LGBTQ+ equality and women's equity around the world.

Hi, everybody. What a great room. Okay. So you've been hearing about how we're lowering pressure, how we're strengthening trust and how we're introducing brand-new ways for people to Spark connection. I get to talk about what this means beyond the product experience.

For more than a decade, yes, decade, Tinder has expanded what dating looks like and who gets to participate. We introduced the Swipe feature. Yes, we didn't just launch a tool with the Swipe, but we reset the way people expressed interest. We made getting started a lot easier. We didn't just define a product, we defined new possibilities for connection because when you lower the barrier to starting at a global scale, you expand participation. And that's what we're doing again now. With Music Mode, with Astrology Mode with IRL events, with Virtual Speed Dating, not to mention stronger trust systems and smarter recommendations, which you've heard about just a little bit ago.

These aren't just features. There are new ways to help people express who they are before they even have a chance to meet. And when millions of people experienced dating that way, we believe that the culture is going to move with them. We saw it in music a lot this year for Tinder with Bad Bunny writes one of the most talked about albums of the last decade, and writes Tinder into a song. It's not an ad, it's cultural, shorthand. When Lily Allen wrote one of the most talked about albums, all about modern relationships, Tinder is also part of that story, because Tinder is modern dating.

And Tinder isn't just present on social platforms. It's embedded in how people narrate their lives. There have been more than 24 billion views, mentioning Tinder on TikTok, 24 billion. Yes, that's a big number. Women are sharing their beige flags and their green flags and their get ready with me from my Tinder date videos, couples that met on Tinder are hard launching their relationships on TikTok and YouTube and Snap and Instagram. We're not just interrupting those conversations were a core part of them. But the cultural momentum only works if people really feel safe enough and if they feel confident enough to participate.

That's why lowering pressure really matters. That's why building the trust really matters, because when people feel lighter, they're more likely to show up and put themselves out there, and more women are likely to show up. And for women, the possibilities that Tinder is bringing to life are powerful. It creates access to people they may have never crossed paths with. It creates the ability very importantly, to disengage instantly if those vibes are off. It's made dating more transparent, it's made dating more self-directive and it's made dating more expansive.

Let's talk about the expansive part. One of my favorite things to talk about with Tinder is the significant role that Tinder has played in the lives of LGBTQ communities around the world. For many people, you may not know this, for many people in the LGBTQ space, Tinder is the first place where they will come out. It's where affirmation is critically important, and it's where they'll start to find community. Today, nearly 30% of matches on Tinder are with LGBTQ users. That is the highest in Tinder's history.

Yes, you can clap for that. I clap for that. At Tinder, we believe in creating the best experiences for queer users, but we also believe that we should play a role in supporting the fight for quality around the world for these communities. A historic step in this fight was last year -- about this time last year, when Thailand became the first country in Southeast Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. That's me. Tinder was the only company invited to be on the stage by the Prime Minister because of the role we play in supporting those communities and because of our standing around the world.

It's not just in supporting these communities around the world, but it's in our partnerships and our collaborations. When we get to partner with iconic fashion designers like Willy Chavarria, Ottolinger, EgonLab, LoveShackFancy. It's not just a logo placement or a great hoodie, although it is a great hoodie. It is about backing these communities who use Tinder every single day. It's about supporting youth advocacy around the world. It's about supporting efforts to end violence against women and efforts against violence against queer communities.

Inclusion is not trendy for Tinder. It is not seasonal. It's foundational and it's cultural. When we design safer systems, marginalized communities feel more confident starting, they feel more confident putting themselves out there. Because of marketing, I love a sizzle, let's take a look at what I mean.

[Presentation]

I feel really, really proud watching that back. I feel proud about the scale of Tinder's impact. I feel really proud about the diversity of our impact. No matter where we are in the world, you just saw in the video, our mission is quite simple, it's to Spark -- to be the most fun way to Spark something new with someone now.

I'll say this. I've been here 3 years. I have not seen this level of momentum at Tinder in my time here. It's not just the new features and the trust and safety work. It's about how we're building and it's about how we're showing up for users around the world. In the coming months, you're going to see that shift more clearly. You'll see it in the product. You'll see it in our brand campaigns and our socials and our partnerships and the nonprofits and advocates we support around the world.

And if the Sparks are working, people won't say, "Oh, Tinder added new features." They'll say, "Tinder feels different." The person that has led this focus and this pace is Spencer Rascoff, our fearless leader. Spencer, please come back up here and bring it home.

Thanks, Melissa, and thank you, Mark, Yoel, Claire, Hillary and the entire Tinder team behind the scenes.

We've shown you a lot today, but let's remember where Tinder was just a year ago. Profiles were simpler. There were fewer ways to express who you are, fewer ways to start a conversation and fewer ways to meet beyond a one-to-one match. Today, Tinder looks very different. As of this morning, Music Mode and the Astrology Mode are live globally, including launching in the U.K. and the U.S. Double Date is live worldwide and outperforming expectations, making dating more social and lower pressure. And we're bringing Tinder into real-world events here in Los Angeles in beta, creating new ways to connect through IRL. We're also launching Virtual Speed Dating to create more low-pressure ways for people to connect.

Profiles are becoming richer and more expressive. AI is working behind the scenes to reduce friction and improve recommendations, helping people find more relevant matches. And we're continuing to roll out new features and products like Chemistry, which move us from volume to real alignment. At the same time, we continue to make unmatched investments in trust and safety, with mandatory Face Check, in key countries and rolling out globally, we're well on our way to making Tinder the safest dating app to meet someone new.

These are not just incremental things. It's a platform-wide shift. Over the past year, we have fundamentally changed the Tinder experience. We aligned the company around one measurable outcome, creating more Sparks, lower pressure, stronger trust, smarter relevance. When those pieces come together, something powerful happens. Connection stops feeling complicated and starts feeling possible. A year ago, Tinder was a place where people swiped. Today, Tinder helps people connect in more ways with more confidence and with more authenticity than ever before. And if we've done all of this in just 12 months, imagine where we'll be this time next year. We are just getting started. Thank you.

Yes. Okay. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Nathan Feather, Morgan Stanley's small and mid-cap internet analyst. And I'm pleased to be joined by Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Match Group. Thank for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Now before we begin, a few quick housekeeping items. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Morgan Stanley sales representative. And please also note Match's safe harbor during this presentation and during the question-and-answer session. We may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today.

Some of these events set forth in our periodic reports filed with the SEC. Also today, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial metrics, reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics are provided in the published materials on our IR website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. With that, let's begin.

That's the fastest I've ever heard it. Nice work. That's like the airplane safety talk, and you did it really like that.

Hopefully, the airplane safety talk is a little slow, but...

So Spencer, now a year into your time here, tell us what are some of the major changes and accomplishments the team has had and how those learnings have evolved your view on the business and opportunity?

We've made a lot of progress in a short period of time. I'll start with something really important to me and really important to any product-led turnaround, which is a little squishy, maybe too touchy-feely for a Wall Street audience, but we have made a lot of progress on employee engagement and getting great people to be properly organized and motivated and to care deeply and feel that they can do their best work. And Tinder, for example, we did an employee engagement survey about 6 months ago and then about 1 month ago. And the answer to the battery of questions about would you recommend working to a friend, do you feel confident in leadership? Is this a great place to work? Those types of things, grew by between 10 and 20 points in just a 6-month period, which is really unheard of. So that's really important. It all starts with that.

The other thing that we've done really well is we've made a ton of progress on the product road map. So what we're shipping now for Tinder is innovative. It is consumer-centric. It is solving real user problems and we're seeing that in a lot of the data. We see this with double date, which is a really important feature for Tinder.

We see this in our recommendation algorithm improvements. We see this in better app stability. So we made a lot of progress there as well. And we've got a big product event next Thursday, which is the first time we've ever done a product demo of that. I'm very excited about it. And we'll have some news to announce there around the product as well.

Okay. Great. Well, you're just starting to see green shoots on Tinder, as you mentioned, with leading indicators like Sparks now down just 5% year-on-year and Sparks coverage up 4% in December. Can you help us chart the path back to stable user growth? And where are some of the key milestones you're working towards and the timeline that comes with that?

Yes. So I mean Sparks are a metric that we care a lot about. That's a conversation that goes back and forth 6 or more times. The milestones that we have to drive in order to really improve user outcomes are making Tinder a safe place where people feel they can come meet new people in a way that resonates with young users.

So let's talk about safety for a moment. So Tinder had a real spam and bot problem. And it's always going to be a challenge because at the largest dating app, we attract a lot of bad actors that come to try to take advantage of our audience. We've built a lot of important technology, including Face Check, which is a facial verification product, which significantly reduces the incidence by about 60% of people's interactions with that actor.

So made a lot of progress on trust and safety, but still more work to do. We spend about $125 million year-over-year, trying to make our apps the safest way to meet new people.

In terms of our branding and marketing, we've also changed a lot of our marketing tactics at Tinder, in particular, where previously, a lot of our marketing spend was up funnel to drive awareness of Tinder, not so much down funnel at the user acquisition level. But Tinder has no awareness problem. Everybody knows what Tinder is. The branding challenge that we have at Tinder is not around awareness, it's around reconsideration. And so we've shifted a lot of the marketing mix towards down funnel trying to make it product focused, so telling users about this feature or that feature about our safety initiatives or about double date or other product features or just very direct response associated. So a TikTok of a woman doing Get Ready With Me video saying Tinder is great. It seems like the guys there are better than ever, you should download Tinder now.

That's an example of a bottom funnel UA, user acquisition media spend that's very different from a billboard that is -- or a TV ad that's top of funnel. So we've changed our marketing mix and our marketing tactics as well.

Okay. And as you're going through this process, one of the hallmarks has been Project Aurora. Help us break down what that program is for people that aren't familiar, the goals of the program and early learnings so far?

Sure. We decided to throw everything at Australia, make Australia be the best Tinder that it could be, and we call that Project Aurora. Not sure who named it or why it's called Aurora. But it's -- that's what the Australia initiative is. And it's product and marketing related. So starting with product, there are features in Australia and -- that are not available in other countries, features like chemistry, which is an AI-driven single drop, where it connects to the consumer's camera roll. It goes through my 110,000 photos that have on my phone and it pulls out insights like I like dogs and Chinese food and the beach and hikes, things that are buried in my camera roll. It's almost like what a palm reader would do, but now we're reading the camera, and this window to my soul is telling me everything about me.

And it's driving compatible matches based on the photos that are on her camera roll. And so that's how chemistry works. That's only available in Australia right now. We'll be expanding that elsewhere shortly. So that's an example of something in Aurora. Aurora also has differentiated marketing, where that was the first market where we shifted from this top-of-funnel brand advertising to bottom a funnel user acquisition. We've also done different recommendation algorithms in Australia. We've built out a number of other features that are only -- have only been available in Australia. I think investors have been keying on it, and we've been trying to give as much transparency as possible about the green shoots that we're seeing in Australia. On the last earnings call, I gave a couple of good examples. The gender balance has improved. The Spark coverage, Sparks and MAU have improved quite a bit in Australia. And so that's very encouraging.

Yes. That's great. And coming out of that 4Q call, a lot of investors were surprised that the 4Q global trends look relatively similar to those in Australia. Is that what you expected so far? And can you help us understand the puts and takes of why Australia wouldn't be tracking substantially ahead.

And this -- the reason is that we like -- we teed up Australia and Aurora as a separate -- kind of a separate whatever play pen, but we've been impatient -- I've been impatient. And so Australia doesn't actually have as many differences as the rest of the world, as I think maybe investors think. I think investors think that Aurora is like really this walled garden that's totally separate. And a lot of the features we've been launching in other countries too. So I think that's maybe why the Australia differences aren't that radically different than the rest of the world.

Yes. Okay. Makes sense. Now thinking of that product event, you mentioned next week in Los Angeles, I'm sure we'll learn a lot more. But from a high level, as we think about the Tinder road map, what are your main priorities from a user perspective in '26? And what are the 1 or 2 features that you think could be the most material?

So one of the main priorities is helping people showcase themselves better. We look at Tinder profile -- a Tinder profile of somebody and a Hinge profile of that same person. And you wouldn't know that they're the same person sometimes. On Hinge, they look interesting and charismatic and amazing. And on Tinder, they look mediocre. And so -- and it's the same person. And the reason for that is 15 years ago, when Tinder started, it's ease of use. It's quick profile creation, was a feature, not a bug. You could, within minutes, create your profile on Tinder, and it was a response to eHarmony and Match, which had this really long onboarding. But now the results 15 years later, it's a lot of kind of incomplete or unimpressive or uninteresting profiles of people that look mediocre.

Hinge, on the other hand, has always had a really complex onboarding. And so it ends up feeling like a better place with better dating outcomes. So we've been raising the bar on Tinder profiles. We are doing products like camera roll. I already described how camera roll in Australia with chemistry is impacting your matches through the chemistry product. Camera roll is also going to be impacting your profile creation and pulling those insights from your camera roll into your profile where we're testing other ways to bring information from your profile -- qualitative information. So your answer is to prompts up into the photo carousel to give them more prominence and a number of other features including helping users indicate what about the person they're interested in rather than just I'm interested in the person. This is something that women in particular really want. They don't want to just know that a guy says, they are interested in you. They want to know what was it about me, and that is the beginning of a conversation because you then know that that's the commonality of where the conversation begins.

So we'll be showing off a lot of these things next Thursday, but there's a whole set of work around improving profile creation and in order to generate more Sparks. I'll just give -- I mean, there's so much to answer your question. I'm trying to figure out how to focus on it. The other big one I'll quickly hit is the recommendation algorithm, which is the beating heart of any dating app, right? And we've seen how important the recs algo has been to TikTok or to Snap or to Instagram or to YouTube.

I mean, in those cases, their business goal is to drive engagement and time spent because they're ad-supported, right? In the case of Zillow, its recs algo is really important, figuring out which houses to show is very important because they're trying to do it in service of generating leads to real estate agents. That's how they monetize.

In the case of Spotify, its recs algo is really important, and what they're optimizing for is user satisfaction because they're trying to drive retention of a subscription product. Our recommendation algorithm was historically quite focused on monetization because that was the priority that was set from the Board and from the leadership team that we should prioritize short-term business results.

With my joining, we've been much more focused on driving user outcomes. And we've been able to point the recommendation algorithm team more towards user outcomes and improve match quality, improve spark coverage, improve number of sparks by changing whom we show to whom. And we see that we see that impact on retention very significantly. So that's another big area of focus that we've made a lot of progress.

And with that comes your focus on user giveback. So within the '26 guidance you budgeted, about $60 million of user givebacks, largely back-half weighted. What's leading to that cadence kind of back half versus first half? And are there any specific updates that you think could cause a more material headwind, whether it's the recommendation engine or something else.

Yes. I mean, here's -- I'll give you an example from -- I was in New York yesterday for our Board meeting, and I got in late last night. And on the plane, I was reading an example of a test that we're doing right now with what we call Unblurring, see who likes you. So for those that don't use the product what does that mean? On Tinder, you -- there's a page that shows these people that like you, but they're blurred out unless you pay. And if you pay, they become unblurred. And so we're testing, giving more free value to the user, unblurring 1 or 2 or N of those to the user. And so this is an e-mail about an experiment that we're running in a couple of countries, a very small percent of users. And if we unblurred 1 or 2 of them, it drove better user outcomes. It improved retention, it improved Sparks, it improved user satisfaction, et cetera. for obvious reasons because now you're -- like you're seeing what's -- you're getting a little taste of what's behind the paywall if you -- and a taste of potentially meeting the right person without having to pay.

So it improves user results quite a bit, but it also hurt revenue quite a bit. What the team does very, very well now is now they grind. And they're like, okay, well, how can we change the -- how can we change the test -- the experiment in order to retain as much of the retention improvement and Spark's improvement as possible while mitigating and ameliorating the revenue impact.

So maybe it shouldn't be showing two see who likes you, it should be showing one, maybe it doesn't have to be every time the user opens the app, maybe it's every other time and just that is enough to drive retention, but not impact revenue as much. Maybe we should only do this for women, not for men, maybe which countries are we allowed to do that just for women not men.

There are some countries where you're not allowed to have differentiated products or differentiated pricing by country, but there are many countries. You're -- maybe it should just be certain age groups, et cetera. So they'll kind of grind and 2 to 6 weeks from now, we'll end up having a winning experiment that improves user results, but only hurts revenue a little bit, and that's where the revenue budget comes from. So we've communicated to investors that we're willing to give up $60 million of revenue annualized intentionally for things like this. I have no idea how much that particular experiment will end up eating up of that budget. What happened in Q4 was that we had, I think, a $15 million budget, I think we spent about $9 million of it.

So what keeps happening over and over again is our team is so darn good at that grind stage of being able to retain most of the user benefit while mitigating the revenue loss that we've underspent that budget. I don't know what will happen with the $60 million this year, but that's how the sausage gets made, that's probably more information than you wanted, but that's like that's how the company actually operates.

That's very helpful. Now let's zoom a big way back here. We talked a lot about the near term. But I want to talk a little more long term. If we look out over the next 5 years, I think certainly one of the big tech changes we've seen, you talked a lot about this conference is Gen AI. How do you think generative AI/machine learning? How do you think that can revolutionize the online dating industry?

Well, I mean, it already is, not really a long-term thing, it's more of a short-term thing, I guess. But to answer your question, I think there are a couple of ways. The simple one is internal employee productivity, which I think every company is experiencing and the block news, I think, has kind of brought it back into focus, and I've been getting questions from investors of is that the new normal? Should you guys have 2,200 employees, should you have 1,100, et cetera. And what we're doing is we're obviously adopting all internal AI tools you can imagine. People are finding superpowers they didn't know they had, but no, I don't expect any massive step down in headcount at Match Group.

We're already a very tightly run company after the layoffs that we did last year, where we did do a 13% reduction. So internal productivity, yes, of course. And there are lots of examples that I could give of things that are taking -- I'll give you just one quick example because I'm excited about it. So Hinge last week, I dialed into the Hinge huddle -- the Hinge Wrapped meeting, which is every 2 weeks, we do it all hands. And at their Hinge all hands, a content manager on the social team.

So like a relatively junior employee who is not technical at all, showed something that he built with Claude code, which when one of their influencers wants to create a social asset saying, here's a TikTok of me using Hinge, and they wanted to show a screenshot of people texting, messaging back and forth in hinge like flirting in Hinge. Hinge designers used to actually create that, it would take about a week turnaround. And so instead, this nontechnical junior employee created a password-protected website where any creator can now go and create a social asset. So he just types in like, hey, how are you? What's going on? Do you want to go to date? Yes, where should we go, bla, bla, bla. So you type that and now it creates a video asset real time in the Hinge branding of showing them typing back and forth.

You can change the typing speed, do you want clicks or no clicks, do you want emojis, whatever. And now it's a social asset. So like, oh my god, this is the productivity improvement for Hinge internally just from having that is massive. So anyway, there are hundreds of examples like that throughout the company. It doesn't mean we're going to lay people off, it doesn't mean everyone is going to get superpowers.

So that's that. On the product, I think, is the bigger impact, where to begin. We're using AI for profile creation is a big surface area of this. Hinge has been a leader in this, where when you're creating your profile, let's say, what do you like to do on Sundays and if you type brunch, the AI will automatically say, like come on, Spencer, you can do better than that, tell me where you'd like to have brunch? I'll say I like to this restaurant, it's going to say, come on, mate, like tell me about a funny story that you had? Well, the waiter spilled the food on me. Well, how did you react to that? And so I'm kind of chatting back and forth with the AI and improving my profile on the way. And now if you go look at Hinge, everyone looks very funny and clever and interesting, and it's because it's all been teased out from them during the profile creation with AI.

Tinder uses AI in photo selection right now to scan my camera roll to select which photos would be good, which photos just of me or it will say -- just on my profile, it just told me that -- it noticed that I'm wearing the same jacket in 3 of the photos. And it's like -- the AI is telling me that it's giving me AI coaching saying that I would probably do better if I had different outfits in each of my photos.

So those are the ways in which it's improving profile selection on Tinder. The recs algo is massive. The whole thing is AI/ML. What else? [ Mark and Hillary and Claire], feel free who run product based here in our San Francisco office, they're in the front. Feel free to shout out other AI.

Yes. Okay. That's good. All right, sure. And does this bother you? Thank you.

So in chat, a huge problem that we have is men are terrible. And the things that they say can be extremely offensive and we call it too much, too soon, where they're they have no game. And so we've built an LLM based kind of barrier there that reads what I write, interprets it with -- as an LLM and puts up a little speed bump and says, "hey, are you sure you want to say that, that might be viewed offensively or maybe you want to change it in this way, et cetera." And then on the receiving side, we have a does this bother you, which as it comes through, it reads it. And if we think it's going to be a problem, we give the recipient the opportunity to say, "hey, I don't want to see this, it kind of blurs it," and it lets them unblur it if they want.

So it's a really important safety feature. It's a really important vibe feature, which changes people's experience on the app because we can build an amazing app with beautiful design and market it really well. But at the end of the day, this is a 2-sided marketplace, and the product is only as good as the people that are in it and the way those people behave but we can use AI to improve the way they present and the way they behave.

Super interesting. Now talk a lot about Tinder so far, a little bit of a Hinge. I really want to dig in on Hinge here continues to be a bright spot in the portfolio.

Where are my Hinge sneakers today?

I love it. So what do you need outside of sneakers to hit the $1 billion revenue target you outlined in the Analyst Day here. And what are you most excited about for Hinge as we kind of progress over the next 24 months towards that?

We need Hinge to continue doing what's doing, I guess, is a simple version. So I was in the New York office yesterday, went through the latest product road map with them. They're building a lot of innovation in that focused intentional dating space and continuing to just own that space. I mean they have run the table. There's -- they are the clear category leader in that intentional dating space, so they need to just keep doing what they're doing and continue to grow in new countries. So they launched in Mexico and Brazil last year. They're launching in 3 more Latin American countries and potentially an Asian country this year. So keep doing what they're doing and they're doing it really, really well. I don't have -- I didn't have many edits when I sit down with them.

Okay. Great. Easy enough.

I mean I'll say one other thing, actually, which is I think investors have already like accepted that, there's this path of billing like check, check, no problem. I think the interesting next phase of the conversation is trying to figure out how big Hinge can really be. And I believe that, that intentional focused dating segment is bigger than the fund dating segment that Tinder plays in. And I think that for 2 reasons: number one, it's a much wider age demographic. It's from who wants to use app that designed to be deleted someone from 25 to 65. I mean I -- college friend of mine is 50 and just got divorced and he's on Hinge and friends of mine that are in their 20s are on it. So it's a much wider age group that's interested in that type of a product. And it monetizes really well because my 50-year-old friend is willing to pay a lot, by the way, he's an MD of Morgan Stanley. Not here, but he's going to pay a lot to use an app that's designed to be deleted.

And the Tinder users generally are less well off. They tend to skew younger. So it should be a bigger audience size and more highly monetizable. So I have very big dreams for Hinge, how big it can really be globally, and there's just a lot of running room ahead for.

Yes, certainly. Now talk also a lot about a lot of the investments you're making. But as you're going through this tender turnaround continuing to build out Hinge, help us understand how you're thinking about balancing profitability with investing in the user?

Well, what we decided to do this year was to run the business at flat. We run a flat revenue, flat EBITDA. We maybe could have accelerated the rate of Hinge revenue growth or accelerated the speed with which we can turn around Tinder if we had decided to take a big step down in margin, but I decided not to do that. So that's -- that was the limiter that I gave as kind of ballpark flat on margin and revenue. We are taking some margin degradation at Tinder in order to give Tinder more budget.

But I think I like that discipline. I don't -- I get asked sometimes if there's a whole like margin step-down reset required, I do not think there is that's not in the works. I have no plans for that. But I think with enough focus on the right user segments and enough innovation and effort, I think we'll be able to accomplish what we need without a reset and how the -- and how the business is monetized.

And then looking forward, are there any factors you're monitoring that could cause upside or downside to the 39% margin here outlined for '27 or kind of beyond.

I mean there are a lot of little things, right? One is the Tinder, Tinder model improves more, revenue comes. We don't have to spend all the user giveback budget or if the marketing efficacy is better than we expect, we don't have to spend as much as the marketing budget. So those are all -- any of those things could happen. We got a little gift last night from Google with the Android decision. We are still assessing is that a small gift or a medium gift, but there's something -- there's some benefit there. So there -- I mean, they're like a dozen small puts and takes, but nothing jumps out that made big in that regard.

Okay. And you mentioned direct payments there. Obviously, the Google change last night had a lot of changes on iOS and the U.S. is that to get roughly $10 million or so of savings from direct payments this year. How are you thinking about reinvesting versus passing through those incremental savings? And then what's the plan to navigate a scenario where maybe the courts roll back some of that?

So we got this gift from the courts for Apple, $100-ish million. And then we created our own gift with our staff reductions last year, which was around $100 million. So we have this $200-ish million benefit. But as I said, we're running basically a flat margin this year. So where did all that money go? We're buying back a lot of stock, and we're also paying a lot of dividend. We get about $1 billion a year of free cash flow, and that all goes back to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. But we're basically taking this 200 -- no, but -- and we're taking the $200 million savings and giving it back to the user through increased marketing expense, Tinder has gone from $180 million to $230 million and -- of marketing expense and through the user giveback budgets.

So that's where we're spending the Apple gift. What might happen if the rules change if the court has changed? I think it's really hard to speculate because it depends how they might change. So like, for example, the higher court seems to have -- or not seems to, they said, Apple actually is entitled to something when you link out. Okay. Well, we have to figure out what something is. And then we can figure out, for example, is it going to be a different amount for subscriptions versus single purchases, for example, because then if it's higher or lower for one or the other, then we can change what we prioritize and how we incentivize these are just like one versus the other.

So it's just -- there are too many unknowns to speculate how any of this might impact us. What I can tell you is we did a great job of cranking last year to adapt and testing, and it really showed the benefits of Match Group's scale and the multiple brands because the emerging and evergreen brands, especially the evergreen brands like Match and OkCupid, which had websites with a decent percent of their business still on the web, they had web payments already, and they had 20 years of optimizing the checkout flow on a mobile website and the desktop website.

So they took the lead and the other brands learned a lot from how they iterated on this alternative payments, then Tinder benefited from that. And then Hinge, which had no web presence. So they were really at a disadvantage when the starting gun was fired.

They created their own implementation which also was terrific and actually, in some ways, even better than the others because they were starting from scratch. So it took them longer, but they ended up in a great place. So whatever happens with the Apple ruling, however, the Google decision shakes out, we'll -- I'm pretty confident that we'll adapt very well to it and recognize the benefits of scale and of different -- having these different platforms that learn from each other.

Now switching gears, you announced in the 10-K that Azar had been removed from the App Store. Talk us through what happened there and how that could impact the financials in '26 guidance?

About a month ago, Apple decided that random video chat app don't abide by their rules. They took out -- I don't know what the total number was, but I think it was 100 or more video chat apps. We are still in active negotiations or conversations with Apple, making changes to the app, so that is not random so that the user has preferences, has profiles, select specific people to feel less like you're being paired with a random person and much more like you're actually selecting the person that you're paired with.

So we're still talking with Apple. We're still resubmitting I don't know what the ultimate outcome will be. It's a small impact. I think you put out a note or a couple of sell-side analysts have put out notes estimating we put in the 10-K what the number was, and it's small, especially after expenses and stock comp. Those are basically breaks even. But we're fighting for it. So we'll see where it all nets out.

Now thinking about the broader portfolio. On the 4Q call, you unveiled the [indiscernible], which is your portfolio strategy framework. Through this initiative, have you identified any clear gaps or areas of opportunity within the portfolio? And how has that shape your view on potential acquisitions and launches from here?

Yes. So what you're referring to is we have this kind of 3-sided triangle now where we've got fun brands like Tinder. We've got focused brands like Hinge and we've got familiar -- familiarity brands like BLK for black daters or Salams for Muslim daters and then a number of our other apps like The League sit at the intersection of familiar and focus. So all of our 20-odd brands are mapped to those different user needs. In terms of white space, I do think we have some white space in some of the user segments.

The question is, like, for example, we don't have a Jewish app, just as an example, but Hinge is the largest Jewish dating app by a mile for the focus space. And for the fund space, Tinder is largest Jewish dating app. So do we need a Jewish dating app? Yes, I don't know, it's debatable. So we're assessing that now that we have this framework. What I will say is that we are very attentive to the startup landscape.

This company better than any company I've ever worked at before, has our ear to the ground and has an incredibly robust competitive intelligence function. And there are 3 areas of innovation that we see that are interesting to us. One is the in real life space where increasingly Gen Z says they want to meet in person, not on the apps and there are a number of start-ups that are in that space.

Another area of innovation is around the social graph, where increasingly, Gen Z says, "I don't want to just be shown strangers. I want to see mutual friends and friends of friends." Of course, Tinder is a leader in that space with double date where we really have a social graph. And that's where Tinder and Hinge both started right? They both started with Facebook Connect. So you would see, "Oh, these are my friends or my friends of friends or 2 degrees of separation." When Facebook Connect deprecated -- or when Facebook deprecated Facebook Connect, they lost the social graph and by then Tinder and Hinge were very big. But there are a number of start-ups in that space.

And then the last space is in the AI matchmaking space, where people are saying, "Well, hold on, why do I have to look through hundreds of profiles to get to a date? Why can't the AI just do that for me and just figure this out for me like it's going out there into the world and doing other things for me." And there are a lot of start-ups in that space, including overtone, which of course, we incubated and Justin, the founder of Hinge and I decided for it to spin out. And now we're a large shareholder of that. And then there are a number of other startups in that space.

So those are the 3 general areas of innovation that we track most closely as well as more affinity apps like other demographic or ethnic groups that we don't have discrete apps for.

Okay. Great. Well, we've covered a lot of ground here. So there've been a lot of investor conversations since you joined the seat. Can you leave us with maybe 1 or 2 aspects of the business you think are most misunderstood or underappreciated by the market?

I think we get I mean -- I had a call last week with 1 of the largest shareholders of Zillow that I've been courting to try to get to become constructive on Match Group and the way that person described it. He's like, look, I will stipulate and underwrite to your Tinder turnaround because you're saying all the right things, and you seem to have the right people in place and you're selling green shoots like good, okay. And I will stipulate that Hinge is going to conquer the focus space, et cetera. And I will stipulate that E&E has headwinds, but it's not going to really move the needle all that much and that Azar is kind of irrelevant. So let's just take all that on its face. Convince me that this category overall isn't left for dead that Gen Z hasn't just moved on and said like, not interested in dating, not interested in using dating apps because that's what the headlines keep telling me, and that's what my 23-year-old in my office tells me and so on and so forth.

So I think that is the -- that's the stink in the room. That's like what hangs over the stock in the company and the category. My retort to that is a couple of things. First of all, the research says that they still want to meet, they still want to date. That's just what -- that's true. It's just that they didn't want to be using the old Tinder, which was a hotter nut product. And you look at Hinge and Hinge has crushed it, even with Gen Z users. And so it's just that the world changed and Tinder didn't change with it.

The second thing I'd say is that help is on the way demographically because all the research that we do about Gen Alpha shows that they are a more normal generation than Gen Z that they are willing to put themselves out there to date. They -- they have girlfriends and boyfriends in high school. They enter college having kissed a couple of people. They didn't miss several years, formative years of high school and then making mistakes in early college because of COVID and the pandemic and remote school and they're not so nervous about how AI is going to take their jobs and ruin their lives, et cetera, the way Gen Z is. So they're a much more adaptive generation and that bodes well for us as well. But we're not sitting here waiting for that. We're adapting the product to suit the needs of where the daters are today, but also the weather is going to change pretty soon.

Okay. Great conversation, Spencer, really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

Welcome to the Match Group Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. Please note, this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Tanny Shelburne, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Today's call will be led by CEO, Spencer Rascoff; and CFO, Steven Bailey. They'll make a few brief remarks, and then we'll open it up to questions.

Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us. Just 1 year ago, I became CEO of Match Group. From day 1, my focus was clear, prioritize user outcomes to rebuild trust and position Match Group to lead the next chapter of human connection. Given Tinder's scale and importance, I also took direct ownership of its turnaround.

To guide this work, I laid out a simple 3-phase transformation, reset the company, revitalize the products and drive a resurgence with our audiences and over time, our financials. We completed the reset phase by putting user outcomes at the center of everything we do, rationalizing costs and shifting from a siloed organization to a more collaborative One MG approach. With that foundation in place, we are now firmly in the revitalize phase, focused on delivering clear value to users and building experiences that lead to real human connection. We have compelling 2026 product road maps across the company. And at Tinder, I'm confident that by the end of this year, the product will feel meaningfully different.

Before focusing on Tinder, I first want to highlight our financial performance in 2025 and our expectations for 2026, which Steve will then cover in more detail. In 2025, we achieved our Match Group revenue and margin goals, excluding the discrete items we've called out in prior quarters and generated over $1 billion in free cash flow, which we returned to shareholders through nearly $800 million of share buybacks and nearly $200 million in dividends, reducing our diluted shares outstanding by 7% year-over-year. And we did this while making meaningful progress on the Tinder turnaround and continuing to invest in Hinge.

In 2026, we expect Tinder year-over-year direct revenue declines to be similar to 2025 as we continue to make product changes to improve user outcomes and drive long-term sustainable growth, but with short-term revenue trade-offs. Across the rest of the portfolio, we expect continued strong direct revenue growth at Hinge, while Evergreen & Emerging or E&E and MG Asia continued to face headwinds.

We are reinvesting savings from last year's workforce reductions and alternative payments initiative into Tinder and Hinge product and marketing to drive long-term growth and shareholder value. Together, we expect this to result in relatively flat Match Group total revenue year-over-year in 2026 and adjusted EBITDA margins broadly in line with last year's, excluding the discrete items we've discussed.

Now let me go a level deeper on Tinder. The most important leading indicators we track for product efficacy are Sparks and Spark coverage. Sparks reflect the number of users engaging in a 6-way conversation, which we believe is a strong proxy for real connection. Spark Coverage measures what percent of our users get a Spark in that period. Both metrics are improving, including among Gen Z users in the U.S.

Globally, total Sparks were down 11% year-over-year in December 2024 compared to down 5% year-over-year in December 2025. Similarly, global Spark coverage improved from down 1% to up 4% year-over-year over that same period. Our product work is paying off. Our data indicates that Sparks drive retention. Retention helps stabilize monthly active users or MAU and stabilized MAU supports revenue recovery over time. It is the earliest measurable signal that the ecosystem is healing, and I'm very encouraged by these trends.

We also closely tracked new registrations as a leading indicator of future MAU growth. Globally, new registration trends have improved significantly down 5% year-over-year in Q4 compared to down 12% year-over-year in Q2, also a very positive signal.

MAU naturally lags. But again, we're starting to see some progress here as well. MAU was down 9% year-over-year in Q4 compared to down 10% year-over-year in Q3. In fact, year-over-year MAU declines in December improved by at least 2 points across 15 countries, together representing approximately 1/3 of Tinder's global MAU and in 10 of those markets we're actively testing new marketing strategies.

This momentum has continued into early 2026, driven by better retention of existing users. Much of this progress is a result of our increased focus on improving the experience for women and in turn for all users through greater relevance and stronger safety.

For example, we've been testing new AI-driven recommendation algorithms, which affect the order of profiles shown to women. Project Aurora has been an important learning engine, allowing us to test multiple high conviction product changes together in the single market, Australia. In tests, Sparks went from down 14% in December 2024 to down around 8% year-over-year in December 2025. And Spark coverage reversed declines from down 2% to up 2% year-over-year over that same period.

MAU trends have also improved in Australia from down 12% in January 2025 to down 9% in December 2025. And improvement was even more pronounced among women over that same period. Importantly, the negative revenue impact from these product changes continues to be less than we expected. This gives us a lot of confidence that the turnaround is working.

Our 2026 product road map at Tinder directly addresses the most common Gen Z pain points. They want better outcomes, so we're focusing on relevance and match quality. They want authenticity and trust. So we're further strengthening verification and safety. And they're feeling dating fatigue, so we're redesigning discovery to be more expressive and less repetitive.

The early indicators give us confidence in our strategy, and I expect more lagging indicators like year-over-year MAU trends to improve throughout the year as we execute on the product road map. Our objective is to reestablish Tinder as sustainable growth business in 2027 and beyond by restoring durable user engagement and relevance at scale.

While this approach involves making some near-term revenue trade-offs, we believe it ultimately strengthens Tinder's long-term monetization engine and will provide opportunities to increase both payer penetration and revenue per payer as user outcomes and the overall ecosystem improve.

On March 12, Tinder will host our first-ever product event in Los Angeles to showcase upcoming feature updates, AI-driven innovations and a deeper look into our road map. The event will be webcast and available via our Investor Relations website.

Turning now to Hinge. Our latest research with Harris Poll shows that roughly 80% of Gen Z singles want meaningful relationships much higher rates than older generations. And we believe our platforms will increasingly be where those connections begin. Hinge continues to be the leading app in this intentional or focused dating space with strong user growth and revenue momentum. Hinge's exceptional performance reflects clear positioning, disciplined execution and a simple north star of getting users on more great dates.

Trust and safety is the foundation for this Hinge experience, built upon Tinder's successful rollout of Face Check. Hinge is also rapidly rolling this feature out in key markets. By the end of Q1, we expect Tinder to launch Face Check globally in the majority of markets and Hinge to have rolled out in some of its major markets. On Tinder, Face Check has led to a more than 50% reduction in interactions with bad actors in markets where it's been rolled out with only a minimal impact on revenue, and we expect it to meaningfully improve Hinge's user experience as well.

In Q1, Hinge is also testing features that help users get out on great dates faster, including Direct to Date, which clarifies intent to accelerate IRL or in real life plans. And a redesigned onboarding experience to build confidence in profile creation. Hinge will also roll out an AI-driven feature, Convo Starters to more countries following its successful rollout in the U.S. in December. Hinge is poised to stay at the forefront of product innovation in the category, and it continues to show broad appeal, not only in the U.S. but also across every international market, it has entered. Hinge officially entered its first non-English-speaking market in Q2 of 2022, supported by already strong organic traction. Since then, Hinge is actively marketed in 12 European countries. Its European expansion markets where it is the top downloaded app as of December 2025.

In these markets, Hinge ended 2025 with over 3.3 million monthly active users, up from only 200,000 at launch. User growth continues to scale rapidly with MAU growing nearly 50% year-over-year in 2025. We expect Hinge to deliver over $100 million of direct revenue in 2026 in its European expansion markets with significant runway ahead.

In the second half of 2025, Hinge successfully launched in both Mexico and Brazil, where very early results have far outpaced our expectations. Hinge was already the second most downloaded dating app in Mexico and Brazil as of December 2025 and is clearly resonating with intentioned daters. Building on this momentum, Hinge plans to expand to 3 additional Latin American markets in 2026, Argentina, Chile and Peru, and into its first APAC market, India. Hinge has already built a meaningful organic presence in India with over 1 million monthly active users in 2025, growing 40% year-over-year without marketing spend.

Overall, Hinge is on track with the targets we've shared previously and demonstrates how a strong focus on product market fit and user outcomes can drive durable growth and long-term shareholder value. Taken together, the work at Tinder and Hinge gives us greater clarity on how the portfolio fits together and how we can unlock new value with focus and investment. Our robust multi-brand portfolio provides scale, rich data for multiple apps in a multi-app usage category and the ability to serve a different user intents while preserving strong and distinct brand identities.

We've introduced a simple internal framework to articulate how we position our brands based on how they solve users' needs. At one end of the portfolio is fun, where Tinder leads with social low-pressure connection. At another is focus where Hinge leads with intention and depth. And across familiarity, our affinity brands serve communities with shared intent and purpose.

Some of our apps sit at the intersection of these user needs. For example, The League, our app for intentional dating among highly ambitious people sits at the intersection of focus and familiarity. This rubric shows how we think about future growth, including M&A and incubations. It helps us identify white and gray space where unmet user needs exist and where we can build or acquire products that meaningfully expand how people connect.

Let me close with this. At the core of our vision for Match Group is a simple truth, humans need humans. In the world facing a growing loneliness and mental health crisis, we believe Match Group is uniquely positioned to make a positive impact by helping people form real connections. We believe Match Group plays a fundamentally different role in people's lives than most digital platforms. Our goal is clear, help users get off their phones and into the real world where meaningful relationships actually form.

Long-term value creation depends on delivering successful outcomes for our users. People will only use our products if they work. We believe AI is a core enabler of how we improve relevance and matching, strengthen trust and safety at scale and increase the speed at which we learn and iterate.

The early progress we're seeing in our technology, product quality and user outcomes reinforce our decision to double down on these initiatives, all while maintaining a commitment to returning meaningful capital to shareholders through buybacks and our dividend, and boost our confidence in the turnarounds already underway at Match Group.

With that, I'll turn it over to Steve.

Thanks, Spencer. Today, I'll share more details on our latest performance and discuss our guidance for Q1 and full year 2026. Unless otherwise noted, all amounts are on an as-reported basis and comparisons will be discussed on a year-over-year basis. More details can be found in the financial table below.

We finished 2025 with another quarter of strong execution. Total revenue and adjusted EBITDA both exceeded the high end of our Q4 guidance. Total revenue benefited from a smaller-than-expected impact from Tinder's user experience tests. These tests had a $6 million negative impact to Tinder direct revenue in Q4, which was $8 million less than we expected at the time of our last call, and adjusted EBITDA benefited from our ongoing cost efficiency efforts.

Diving deeper into Q4, Match Group delivered total revenue of $878 million, up 2% and flat on a foreign exchange neutral basis. Payers declined 5% to 13.8 million while RPP increased 7% to $20.72. Adjusted EBITDA was $370 million, up 14%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 42%. Excluding an $8 million gain on the sale of an L.A. office building and $2 million of restructuring costs, adjusted EBITDA margin would have been 41%.

For the full year 2025, Match Group delivered total revenue of $3.5 billion, flat both as reported and FXN. Adjusted EBITDA for the full year was $1.2 billion, down 1%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 35%. Excluding the legal settlements, restructuring costs and the sale of an L.A. office building each of which we've discussed in prior quarters, adjusted EBITDA margin would have been 38%, which meaningfully exceeded our 36.5% margin target provided at the beginning of 2025, primarily due to our restructuring efforts and alternative payment initiative.

Tinder Q4 direct revenue was $464 million, down 3%, down 5% FXN. Tinder payers declined 8% to 8.8 million and RPP grew 5% to $17.63. Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $263 million up 1%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 55%. For the full year, Tinder delivered direct revenue of $1.9 billion, down 4%, down 5% FXN. Adjusted EBITDA was $941 million, down 7%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 49%. Excluding the $61 million Candelore legal settlement charge and $5 million of restructuring costs, adjusted EBITDA margin would have been 52%.

Hinge Q4 direct revenue was $186 million, up 26%, up 24% FXN. Payers were up 17% to 1.9 million and RPP grew 8% to $32.96. Adjusted EBITDA was $67 million in Q4, up 54% and representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 36%. For the full year, Hinge delivered direct revenue of $691 million, up 26%, up 25% FXN. Adjusted EBITDA was $226 million, up 36% for an adjusted EBITDA margin of 33%.

E&E Q4 direct revenue was $145 million, down 7%, down 9% FXN. Payers were down 14% to 2.1 million and RPP grew 8% to $22.53. Adjusted EBITDA was $48 million, flat year-over-year, representing adjusted EBITDA margin of 33%. For the full year, E&E delivered direct revenue of $594 million, down 8%, down 9% FXN. Adjusted EBITDA was $140 million, down 18% for an adjusted EBITDA margin of 23%. Excluding the $14 million Federal Trade Commission legal settlement charge and $6 million of restructuring costs, adjusted EBITDA margin would have been 26%.

Match Group Asia direct revenue in Q4 was $66 million, down 2%, down 1% FXN. Azar direct revenue was up 1%, both as reported and FXN. Pairs direct revenue was down 5%, down 4% FXN. Across Match Group Asia, payers increased 3% to 1 million, while RPP declined 5% to $20.91. Adjusted EBITDA was $16 million, up 2%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 25%. For the full year, Match Group Asia direct revenue was $267 million, down 6%, down 5% FXN. Excluding the exit of our live streaming businesses, Match Group Asia direct revenue would have been flat year-over-year, up 1% FXN. Adjusted EBITDA was $66 million, up 9% and for an adjusted EBITDA margin of 25%.

Including stock-based compensation expense, total expenses in Q4 were down 7%. Cost of revenue decreased 6% and represented 25% of total revenue, down 2 points as a percent of total revenue, driven by alternative payment savings. Selling and marketing costs increased $6 million or 4% and but was flat at 17% of total revenue, primarily due to higher marketing spend at Hinge.

General and administrative costs decreased 22%, down 3 points as a percent of total revenue to 10%. And driven by the gain on sale of an L.A. office building and lower legal fees. Product development costs remained flat at 12% of total revenue. Depreciation and amortization decreased by $10 million to $21 million due to lower internally developed capitalized software costs primarily at Tinder.

Our trailing 12-month gross leverage was 3.2x and net leverage was 2.4x at the end of Q4. We ended the quarter with $1 billion of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments on hand and plan to use $424 million of cash to pay off 2026 convertible notes on or before the maturity in June.

In Q4, we repurchased 7.3 million shares at an average price of $33 per share on a trade date basis for a total of $239 million and paid $45 million in dividends. For the full year 2025, we delivered operating cash flow of $1.1 billion and free cash flow of $1 billion. Free cash flow was negatively impacted by the timing of the final Apple payment of the year, which we expected in December but did not receive until early January. For the full year 2025, we repurchased 24.7 million shares at an average price of $32 per share on a trade date basis for a total of $789 million, paid $186 million in dividends, employed $129 million of cash towards net share settlement of employee equity awards to reduce share dilution, equating to 108% of free cash flow in total.

As of January 31, 2026, we've reduced diluted shares outstanding by 7% year-over-year, a meaningful accomplishment. Our Board of Directors declared a cash dividend of $0.20 per share, representing a 5% increase from our prior quarterly dividend. The dividend is payable on April 21, 2026, to shareholders of record as of April 7, 2026. The increased dividend reflects our commitment to providing shareholders with a predictable and consistent form of capital return. The dividend is expected to be paid on a quarterly basis going forward subject to approval by our Board of Directors.

Now for guidance. We expect Q1 total revenue for Match Group up $850 million to $860 million, up 2% to 3% year-over-year. This range assumes a 3.5 point tailwind from FX. FXN, we expect total revenue to be down 1% to flat. We expect Match Group adjusted EBITDA of $315 million to $320 million representing a 15% year-over-year increase and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 37% at the midpoint of the ranges.

Q1 total revenue guidance assumes a $6 million negative impact to Tinder direct revenue from user experience tests. For the full year 2026, we expect Match Group to deliver total revenue of $3.41 billion to $3.535 billion, approximately flat year-over-year at the midpoint of the range. This year-over-year range assumes a 1 point tailwind from FX, a nearly 1.5 point headwind from Tinder user experience tests and a 1 point headwind from the planned rollout of Face Check across the portfolio. We expect full year 2026 indirect revenue to decline in the mid-teens percent. We expect total Match Group adjusted EBITDA of $1.28 billion to $1.325 billion and adjusted EBITDA margin of 37.5% at the midpoint of the ranges. As we reinvest savings into Tinder and Hinge to drive the revitalization phase of our transformation.

Our guidance assumes approximately $110 million of adjusted EBITDA savings in 2026 from alternative payments based on current app store policies. The app store fees we pay could change based on evolving litigation and regulatory changes both in the U.S. and in other jurisdictions, including the Epic Games versus Apple case, which was recently sent back to the lower court. We continue to monitor these events closely and will determine the appropriate course of action if and when there are future changes to app store policies.

At Tinder, we expect direct revenue to decline at approximately the same rate as 2025. Our guidance assumes a 3-point headwind from user experience tests and a 1 point headwind from the full rollout of Face Check. It also includes a $50 million increase in Tinder marketing spend for a total budget of approximately $230 million as we test in the marketing to support our product turnaround and user growth efforts. We expect adjusted EBITDA margins of approximately 50% with alternative payment savings helping to offset higher marketing spend.

At Hinge, we expect continued strong direct revenue growth in the low to mid-20 percents and adjusted EBITDA margins in the mid- to high 30% with robust margin expansion driven by our plan to reinvest only 1/3 of Hinge's expected savings from alternative payments. Hinge remains on track to achieve $1 billion of revenue in 2027 with continued margin expansion.

At E&E, we expect direct revenue to decline in the low double digits as we work to reinvigorate Emerging Brands growth by improving user outcomes. We expect adjusted EBITDA margins to expand to the high 20% with the completion of our platform consolidation efforts and from alternative payment savings.

And at Match Group Asia, we expect direct revenue to decline in the high single digits, reflecting Azar's ongoing block in Turkey and its global rollout of a new user verification technology, which builds upon Face Check. We also expect a 3-point FX headwind to Match Group Asia direct revenue. We expect adjusted EBITDA margins to be in the low to mid-20%. We expect free cash flow of $1.085 billion to $1.135 billion in 2026, an 8% year-over-year increase and representing 85% free cash flow conversion at the midpoint. Due in part to the Apple payment we originally expected in December but received in January.

We expect SBC expense of $250 million to $260 million and capital expenditures of $55 million to $65 million. Our effective tax rate is expected to be approximately 19%. Our capital allocation strategy remains unchanged, prioritizing organic investment in our business capital return to shareholders through buybacks in the dividend and selective M&A. We plan to continue net selling employee equity awards in 2026 to reduce dilution.

We expect to use 100% of free cash flow for buybacks, dividends and net selling employee equity awards over time. However, the percent of free cash flow used in any particular quarter or calendar year could vary due to a number of factors, including market conditions. While execution in our existing businesses remains our top priority, we may use free cash flow for selective M&A evaluated on a case-by-case basis. We will continue to target net leverage of 2 to 3x.

Taking a step back, we've reduced our diluted shares outstanding by 7% over the last year, and our plan calls for a similar reduction in 2026. While we're hard at work turning around Tinder's MAU trends, we're also aggressively reducing shares outstanding, which we expect will leave us in a very attractive spot on the other side of this.

With that, let's turn it over to Q&A.

Before we start Q&A, I need to remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today.

Some of these risks have been set forth in our earnings release or periodic reports with the SEC. Also during this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the published materials on our IR website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results.

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question today comes from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer.

I guess just to Spencer, any more details you can share around the early learnings from Project Aurora. And is the idea that -- is it one -- kind of 1 thing or the idea that you may take pieces of it and use some use all, et cetera, et cetera. So the point is like, I guess, just expand there.

And then just second, can you connect the dots with us the Tinder between the fourth quarter improvement in new registrations? And an MAU and the 4% increase in December Sparks and did Sparks improve throughout the quarter?

Thanks, Jason. So Aurora is our focus on Australia in Q4. And we gave Australia everything we had in terms of product improvements up to that point in time and marketing spend and tactics. And so I'll give you some Australia-specific data. I don't think -- I think some of this I referenced -- some of this is in the earnings script, but some of it is not.

So for example, Australia Sparks. In December of 2024, were down 14% year-over-year. In December 2025. They were down 8% year-over-year. Sparks Coverage, we mentioned went from negative 2% year-over-year to positive 2% year-over-year. Australia MAU in December 2024 went from negative 12% year-over-year to negative 9% year-over-year and female MAU improved even more. Overall MAU improved by 3 points, but female MAU grew by 5 points.

Australia, double date usage also went up quite a bit. So last quarter, I said 1 of 6 Australians 18 to 22 were using double date. This most recent quarter, it was 1 out of 4, 18- to 22-year-olds were using double date. And overall, in Australia, 10% of users are now using double date. So very encouraging results in Australia. It shows that good product road map and a lot of hard work and effective marketing can start to change these user metrics. In terms of the scope of what -- within Australia and how we roll that out elsewhere.

There are some aspects of Aurora, which are already rolled out elsewhere. So for example, Face Check was just in Australia at some point in 2025. Now it's in much of the world. By March, it will be in most -- in most territories globally. So Face Check is not just in Australia. The marketing spend and tactics that we tested and learned our way through in Australia. That also is being rolled out globally.

Specifically, in 2026, we're focused more on user acquisition or performance marketing not top-of-funnel brand marketing. What I mean by that is, if you think of our past campaigns, such as it starts with a swipe, which generate overall awareness for Tinder, that would be an example of top-of-funnel brand marketing. But most of our marketing in 2026, following the results from Aurora are going to be bottom of funnel focus. These are things like real user-generated content on TikTok or Instagram of young users saying, I'm using double date or this isn't -- this is a totally different tender. This is not what I thought Tinder was like, check it out.

So shift in marketing tactics and marketing scale globally based on what we learned from Aurora. But there are some things that are still only in Australia. This is examples like Chemistry which we haven't rolled out into many other geographies yet, but we will -- but more to come on that soon. So that's how what we learned in Australia with Project Aurora is informing the rest of the world.

To your second question, Jason, about Q4 registration improvements where we went from negative 12%, new regs in Q2 to negative 5% in Q4 and how that ties to Sparks and MAU. I would describe it as this. If you think of our audience as a funnel, where at the bottom of the funnel, we have Sparks, that 6-way conversations. And at the very top of the funnel, you have new registrations it's easiest to impact the bottom of the funnel. And so that's where you would expect this product-driven turnaround to start showing up the most in our numbers, and that is, in fact, what we're seeing.

We can improve the user experience of the product relatively quickly with enough focus by improving our recommendation algorithms by improving the apps performance and uptime, the design of the apps, the quality of our push notifications many other things that we've done on the roadmap over the last 6 months. And so you see that in Sparks at the bottom of the funnel. It's much harder to drive top of funnel MAU growth and registration growth because that -- for that to grow, we need to drive reconsideration. We need to convince people to gift Tinder another shot. It's very encouraging. It gives me a lot of confidence that we're even starting to see any improvement yet in MAU and new registrations given how recent the start of this turnaround really is.

And the next question is from Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan.

I had 2. I know Australia has gotten a lot of focus, but you mentioned that engagement improved by 2 points in 15 countries. Maybe, Spencer, could you expand a bit on what you think is driving that and how that's trended to start of the year? And then just a second question, user experience headwinds. You called that out as coming in less than expected. If you could just give some color on maybe in particular, where are you seeing less of a headwind than you had anticipated?

Yes. Absolutely. So I'll give you some data here. For example, I think I said in the prepared remarks that countries representing 1/3 of our MAU have improved by 2 or more points. And we said it's around 15 countries. So for example, Korea went from -- in December of 2024, South Korea MAU was down by 8% year-over-year. And in December 2025, South Korea MAU was up 2% year-over-year. In December 2024, Japan MAU was down 12% and in December 2025, it was down 6%. And as I've already said, Australia went from down 12% to down 9% from December 2024 to December 2025. So really nice swings in MAU in some key countries. It's hard to put a single finger on what is driving these numbers because we've made so many encouraging product changes.

But if I had to put a finer point on it, I'd say it is a improvements to our recommendation algorithm. Number 2, it's double date. Number 3, it's Face Check, improving authenticity; and number 4, it's marketing. So those I think are the 4 biggest drivers of those MAU improvements in those countries I mentioned.

And then to think about the revenue kind of the revenue trade-offs. I'll give you a couple of quick examples to try to understand how this happens. One we've already talked about, which is Face Check. When we first launched Face Check in Canada, we saw immediate improvements in trust and safety, but it was a 10% revenue hit. Through a lot of hard work and iteration. We got that down to a 2% to 3% revenue hit, and we started rolling it out into other countries. But we kept at it. And now it's about a 1% revenue headwind but a 50% reduction in your interactions with fake accounts or bad actors. So well worth it for just a 1% revenue shortfall.

But from negative 10% hit to negative 1% revenue hit over a couple of months of iteration. I'll give you another quick example. We have a new -- we're testing some work on the week 0 experience for new users. And if we show new users a couple of free user accounts who like them, every time they open the app, we've seen a 9% improvement in Spark Coverage for Gen Z users, but it impacts revenue in unacceptably large amount.

And so now just as with the Face Check example, now we iterate. Now we see how we can mitigate that and how we can reduce it. And when we get it to a reasonable revenue hit or perhaps if we get it to revenue neutral, then we'll roll out an initiative like that, which will really improve user outcomes for Gen Z at some smaller tolerable revenue impact.

What we saw in Q4, and I think Steve mentioned this in his remarks, is we continue to underspend our revenue give back budget. I think in Q4, it was -- we spent $9 million out of $15 million?

Expecting $14 million and it came in much less than that, around $6 million.

Okay. And what we've bracketed for 2026 is $60 million, and we intend to spend that. That's not a sand bag. That's a real number. But what we have found is that we are very good at iterating as in the Face Check example to mitigate revenue impact and still retain the user benefits from these types of initiatives.

The next question is from Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research.

Let me try 2, please. On the improvements that you are talking to right now, Spencer, in the letter and in your prepared remarks, you mentioned that you saw material improvement in experiences for women, which is one of the drivers through greater relevance and safety. So could you please talk to how you're measuring relevance for women? Any quantifiable data points that suggest that, that drove relevance.

And then second is, when you -- when we think about the relationship to payers eventually, how much of a lag do you think there will be? So we start seeing new registrations Sparks and Sparks Coverage, MAUs and then eventually payers. How should we think about that time line?

Sure. Thanks, Shweta. We look at retention and Spark Coverage and user satisfaction by all types of breakdowns by age, by demo, by gender, by sexual orientation and many other factors. So I don't have at my fingertips here, specific data on female retention, for example, or improvements from it. I'm trying to sort of rack my brain here to think about how I can be responsive to your question.

I guess I'll talk about double date for a moment, which has been such an important feature to change perception of what Tinder is, and articulating that Tinder is for fun, low-pressure ways to meet new people with friends. And this is a product that really appeals to female Gen Z users. It's only been out for a couple of months in the U.S., but already 48% of Gen Z women in the U.S. cite double date as a unique reason to use Tinder. And 69% of U.S. Gen Z women say they are aware of the feature and 46% of U.S. Gen Z women say that double date is the most defining feature of Tinder.

So the other metric I'd draw your attention to, as I think I already stated that female MAU in Australia is up even more than total MAU in Australia. So actually, if you compare female MAU with male MAU, it would be quite a bit higher over the Q4 period. And that's due to several things. As I said, it's due to double date. It's due to recs improvements, and it's due to better marketing. So we're definitely seeing stronger female retention, female MAU growth as a result of our product initiatives and marketing. Steve, you had the second question.

Yes. And just how does that translate? Look, the improving -- the expectation for improving MAU trends over 2026, we do believe will also lead to improving payer trends. So we expect those to improve throughout the year. And I actually expect them to be a point or 2 better in Q1 than they were in Q4. So we do see it translating to payers, and we expect that to continue to happen throughout the year.

The next question is from Dan Salmon with New Street Research.

Great. Spencer I kind of have a 2-part question. I kind of wanted to go back and just review a little bit about the leadership transition at Hinge and maybe, more importantly, the creation of Overtone. But then kind of dovetail that into some of the comments you walked through in your prepared remarks about the refreshed look at the portfolio and sort of the areas of fun, focus, and familiarity and trying to place your bets within that framework and ultimately get to the sort of room you've left yourself here for both small tuck-in M&A and incubation.

And just to see -- obviously, your last action here was an incubated launch. But maybe just to expand on your thoughts on what the potential is there as you look at the portfolio and how it might evolve over the year?

Yes, absolutely. Good question, Dan. So Hinge didn't miss a beat when we changed CEOs in Q4 because Jackie has been running marketing and is effectively running Hinge for 2025, stepped in seamlessly to the CEO role. So the Hinge leadership team is in place, is incredibly mission-oriented, capable, incredible stewards of the Hinge business and just fantastic and really understands the end user and the product road map. So Hinge continues to march on I'm glad you brought up what we call the [ gem ], which is this portfolio strategy work.

This is one of the first things that I kicked off when I joined this company about a year ago, and I said I need to understand how all these brands fit together. And our employees were really anxious for this as well. They were saying, why do we have 20-some brands? And how do they connect with one another? And what problems are they trying to solve and where should they overlap or not? And that work that we did, which was really important work that required and utilized a lot of consumer insights and brand strategy work gave us this framework that has been really illuminating for us as a company.

I would -- I'll use that to talk just for a moment about Hinge, and then I'll answer your question about other potential additions to the portfolio. So with respect to Hinge being the leader in the focused space, Hinge's runway in that area is massive. I actually think the focus section of that gem has more total potential over the long run than even the fun side of that gem. Because demographically, it's a much bigger potential audience. It ranges from people in their mid-20s up to people in their mid-70s or mid-80s that are looking for a focus, find your soulmate, find your person an app that's designed to be deleted. And Hinge is really just getting started as it marches country by country globally. So massive potential for monthly active user growth for Hinge, and that segment, the focus segment should monetize over time better than the fun segment because people are more willing to pay for a focused outcome than for a fun outcome. And those users also have more disposable income. So the monetization potential for Hinge as the leader in the focus space is really significant.

To answer your question about other white space or gray space we might find in the portfolio based on that brand strategy work. We're always incubating new ideas. For example, we have one right now called SLIDE focused in Korea, which is a 3-on-3 dating app concept only in Korea. And so we launched something like that. We test, we learn from it. We decide whether to invest in it or to bring that feature set to other apps of ours or to stop investing in it. So right now, we have that one. We have another one, which I -- I'm not going to talk about at this moment. And we're always exploring new concepts as well as looking at potential investments or acquisitions.

The next question is from Nathan Feather with Morgan Stanley.

I want to touch a little bit more on the new registration trends and the improvement there. You mentioned a lot of changes in the marketing side. What have been the main source of those new registrations? Are you seeing improvements in registrations through organic channels, word of mouth or is it more marketing led? And then interested to hear about the learnings from Chemistry to date, what is the consumer behavior been as you've added that new surface area to the app?

Thanks, Nathan. So there have been a variety of sources of new registrations. Certainly, marketing has been an important part of it. But double date also drives new invitations because existing Tinder users invite their friends to be their double date partner. So it's been a variety of initiatives. And then actually, organic social has been a big driver. You'll see you've seen things on TikTok or Instagram today that you probably wouldn't have seen a year ago.

People talking organically, oh Tinder is back, Tinder's cool again. I don't know what Tinder did, but I'm not seeing bots or spam accounts anymore. I mean that's how Face Check makes its way into the real world, into the Gen Z language on social. So that's driving organic new regs as well.

And regarding Chemistry, Chemistry is really -- 2 things. Chemistry is an AI way to interact with Tinder and answer questions in order to then get just a single drop or 2 rather than swiping through many profiles. It's also a way to connect your camera roll to Tinder and then let Tinder draw out insights from your camera roll. And today, that's in service of driving a custom AI-driven recommendation drop. But in the future, it will have other applications. So we're learning a lot from Chemistry. We think it helps -- on the first point, we think it helps solve swipe fatigue, which is an objection that we hear from users who say, I just want to get to the good stuff faster, I want to get to a spark more quickly.

And of course, we have lots of ways to do that. We improve recommendations, we improve lots of things about the product. But another way to do that is to give people a new way to use Tinder. With this single drop. And then as I've alluded to, we have a lot of a long-term road map regarding what to do, how to integrate the camera roll insights into the user experience as well. So still learning a lot about Chemistry, more to come.

The next question is from Ross Sandler with Barclays.

Great. I thought I'd bring Steven into the Q&A here a little bit. So I guess, high-level puts and takes on the '26 guide, if there's something that could surprise to the upside, what do you think that might be. And is this 50% Tinder EBITDA margin, the new kind of right way to think about the longer term or should we head back north once the revenue starts to grow again?

Yes, happy to take this question. Here's the way I would think about the guidance. It's a little bit flat revenue in 2026, which is a little bit lower than what we had guided to about a year ago. The reasons for that are really 3 reasons. One, some softness at E&E in Asia. If you look at kind of what we were expecting those businesses do in '26 versus a year ago to what we're expecting today, that's actually about a 3-point headwind to total Match Group year-over-year revenue growth. So that's a pretty big factor.

And then the other 2 is, one, the tender user testing, which Spencer mentioned that's about 1.5 headwind and that $60 million budget to continue to test. Obviously, that's one where there could be upside if we continue to see what we've seen over the last couple of quarters where the impact to near-term revenue is less than we expect, that could drive some upside, but we think it's prudent to keep that budget in place and allow the product teams to continue to test.

And then there's another point headwind from the global rollout of Face Check more broadly across the portfolio. That's a point headwind that we think is what we're taking, like Spencer mentioned. And then there's about -- there's 1 point of FX benefit that we're getting this year. So if you add all those up, that's 4.5 points of revenue headwind and it kind of explains how we get to -- from the mid-single digits growth that we were sort of shooting for a year ago to the flat growth we were at today but we think are all necessary investments to improve the long-term prospects of the business.

If you go -- let me just take a minute to go through each of the BUs real quickly and hit the highlights. I think Hinge continues to do phenomenally well. Revenue is right on track with expectations. Margins are ahead of where we expected. Tinder we said it's going to be down about the same as it was last year, so call it 4 points. That's really the user test budget of $60 million I mentioned and the rollout of Face Check, combined, that's a 4-point headwind. So plus or minus a point of FX that kind of gets you from the flat we were expecting a year ago to the 4 points were down today.

But again, I think well worth -- worthy trade-offs to make. We talked about the payers, the one other thing I'll just -- I'll mention again is, the composition of the revenue at Tinder, we're expecting to achieve this minus 4% decline through improving payer trends on flat RPP, which is a little bit different than what we've seen in the last couple of years and sets us up pretty well for improved revenue growth in '27.

And then on E&E in Asia, that underperformance is really slowing growth within the affinity brands, particularly at E&E and Azar within the Match Group Asia BU. Spencer, do you want to touch on those 2?

Yes, I'll take this quickly and then you can hit the margin impact or the quarterly piece. So on Azar, Azar has been -- is currently not permissible in Turkey, and we think we have a path on that. We're working very hard on getting usage in Turkey restored. But that contributes to a 2026 headwind, at least for now.

Regarding E&E, the weakness on E&E is on affinity. These are our brands that are race or ethnic-specific, such as Chispa for Hispanic daters, or BLK for Black daters or Salams for Muslim daters, for example, those apps are on the focus side of the brand portfolio. And of course, the reason for that is if you're using an app just trying to find people over particular -- of a particular ethnicity or race, you're probably in that focused zone where you're looking for your spouse or your soulmate.

And so what we saw there was we saw audience headwinds starting about a year ago on the affinity apps. And rather than just focus on monetization and sort of accept that audience decline, we decided to get ahead of it and regain product market fit. So what we're doing on affinity is we're moving from the swipe model to the vertical profile model, which we think makes a lot of sense for this user type that has a revenue hit as we make that shift but we think it's the right thing to do to improve product market fit. Steve, do you want to finish the question on...

Yes. Yes, let me just give a little bit more detail on a few other things to keep in mind. One is on the cadence of revenue. We expect to be flat to down about 1 point in Q1 on an FX-neutral basis. That's what we guided to. And we expect to be down about 1 point FX neutral for the full year, if you take the flat guide in that 1 point tailwind from FX we mentioned.

And so that should be pretty stable revenue trends each quarter this year. And then on the profitability side of the equation, we're taking the savings we achieved from the workforce reductions and alternative payments, and we're investing that back into Tinder and Hinge product and marketing. We mentioned the $50 million increase in Tinder marketing spend to about $230 million. We think they're all the right decisions to make, and that puts you out to 37.5% margins for the full year.

On the cadence, on the margin side, I do think it will look a little different this year than in years past. We guided to 37% margins in Q1. I'm expecting similar margins in Q2 and Q3 and then increase in margins in Q4 as we spend down on marketing as we typically do for the 37.5% for the full year. So that hopefully gives you some better insight into the guide.

On the Tinder margin question more long term, we're not -- I'm not going to guide, I don't think we want to guide to where Tinder margins will go. I will tell you, just we do not see these user givebacks as a structural change to the profitability of Tinder. We see them as necessary to improve user growth and the ecosystem. And once we can do that, I think there'll be plenty of opportunity to improve monetization at Tinder and get back to revenue growth in 2027 and beyond.

One data point on that. Just looking at Australia of what happened in Q4. When we look at revenue per MAU in Australia as we started improving MAU there, the revenue per MAU is basically flat. So we -- to Steve's point, we're not expecting a structural change to the profitability of Tinder. We still think Tinder will have category-leading and frankly, Internet-leading margin structure but we are making these targeted user givebacks in order to improve MAU and especially certain types of MAU that help improve the whole app ecosystem's health.

Next question is from Benjamin Black with Deutsche Bank.

Spencer, can you talk about balancing the need to sort of maintain the cadence of buybacks and the dividend versus perhaps being more aggressive on the product and prioritizing user outcomes, which ultimately may create or have been creating some near-term revenue EBITDA dislocation. Do you see the potential to maybe sacrifice more on the top line to accelerate the momentum in user outcomes as we look ahead to the next year or 2? And then just one quickly on Project Prism, maybe dig into the early learnings and how is that shaping your marketing strategy going forward?

Yes. Thank you. So turnarounds are hard and being the CEO, the turnaround is hard, but I'm blessed to be turning around a company that is immensely profitable. So with our enormous profits, we're doing 5 things at the same time. Number 1, we're improving or increasing Tinder's marketing budget from $180 million to $230 million.

Number 2, we're giving users more value from Tinder by having this user giveback budget of $60 million this year. Number 3, we're fully investing in Hinge both on marketing and headcount so that Hinge can achieve its full potential. And then number 4, we're funding a significant buyback, buying back about 7% of the company this year and 7% last year. And funding the dividend, increasing the dividend.

So the fact that we're able to do all 5 of these things simultaneously is a blessing. And I think we've rightsized each of those 5 levels of investment relative to where they all need to be. So that's how I'd approach it.

Regarding Prism, Prism for those that don't know, is our first ever Match Group-wide analysis of measuring marketing efficacy across brands. So we've been able to put every single penny we spend on advertising across every single brand on an apples-to-apples basis and look at the efficacy of ad spend.

What it exposed to us was the benefits for brands like Tinder to be more focused on down-funnel advertising performance and user acquisition advertising rather than top-of-funnel brand advertising. And it informed the increased spend on Tinder from $180 million to $230 million. And it also unlocked a lot of other learnings in the E&E brands as well as the Hinge brand. The former SVP of Marketing at Tinder is now the CMO of E&E, which was a very important cross-brand way for us to bring Tinder insights over to the E&E brands and great expertise and confidence over -- across the company as well.

I think we have -- we only have a couple of more minutes and we've got a couple of more questions. So let's go to the next question. We'll see if we can get through all of them. If not, we might have follow up offline.

The next question is from Brad Erickson with RBC.

Spencer, I just wanted to follow up on that last comment on Prism. Bottom of funnel for the space hasn't been that sort of common. And so obviously, you guys are going to get a pretty good feedback loop, right, going here in '26. Is there -- I guess, the question is like, why was $50 million the right number? And if you see more success, might you ramp it up? Or call an audible midyear? How should we think about that?

Yes, good question. I mean we -- what we -- we're following the same guidance philosophy that I had at Zillow, which is we always go 1 quarter out on guidance. And then in February earnings, we also do a full year. We make the marketing decisions constantly -- I mean I do -- the Tinder marketing team is sitting down with me every 3 days to go through all of the data that we're seeing globally real time.

So what we're putting out today is what we think are the most likely scenario is for the full year. But if the ROI is not there, we'll pull back. And if the ROI is great, we'll evaluate other potential changes. But for now, this is what we think is the most likely scenario for the year. But we are watching it real time constantly, extremely hands-on this one.

The Tinder marketing team, we've moved into the open space at our building in the L.A. office, and that's who I sit with is the Tinder marketing and social media team because that's where I want to be most aware of exactly what's happening day-to-day and week-to-week.

The next question is from John Blackledge with TD Cowen.

Logan Whalley on for John. So it's good to see the Hinge rollout go well in Mexico and Brazil. Could you talk about what the time line for monetization looks like for Hinge when it launches in new markets at this point? Like how long before the app kind of reaches critical scale? And then after that, how long is it before you begin to focus on monetization. And then also, any early learnings from Mexico and Brazil that you plan to apply to the South America launches for later this year?

Why don't I take the monetization question. The short answer is, it takes time, it does. And we've seen that with Hinge in Europe. I think that's the best sort of case study. They've been at it in Europe for a couple of years now. They've done phenomenally well. Obviously, that's the playbook. We've seen the MAU growth first. We're now starting to see revenue growth it's still going to only be about $100 million of revenue in 2026 from those countries, which is a pretty small piece of the total. And if you compare that to what Tinder is doing in that region, for example, it's still far below where Tinder is at.

And so it takes time to build that liquidity to make sure the product is working at full scale. And then what we see is a couple of things. One, you can optimize monetization for that region. And two, you get a natural increase in payer penetration in RPP just as liquidity builds. And so I'd expect to see the same thing in Latin America, but I would not expect Latin America to be a major contributor to revenue in 2026 for Hinge or probably even in 2027 either. Spencer, do you want to add?

Yes. I have one thing to add, which is the way Hinge is rolling out new markets today is different than the way it did it in the past. Today, we are operating under One MG philosophy. So everything is much more coordinated between Hinge and Tinder and E&E. In fact, we have a single unified go-to-market motion in Asia and a high degree of collaboration and coordination everywhere else in the world. So that's a significant improvement as compared in the past.

I think, unfortunately, we have to leave it at that. I just want to kind of give a high level. If you take a big step back from all of this. We're doing 3 things at the same time. The first thing we're doing is a product-led turnaround at Tinder, which is underway, progressing well, off to a great start. We shared a lot of encouraging data today.

The second thing we're doing is fully funding Hinge's rollout and ramp and helping Hinge achieve its full potential. But the third thing that we're doing is we are reducing our share count meaningfully. So by buying back 7% of the company last year, by increasing the dividend and buying back another 7% this year, we are creating an environment where free cash flow per share will compound and on the other side of Hinge's expansion and Tinder's product-led turnaround, we think there'll be this kind of coiled spring as we combine these 3 things together.

So we're confident in the business. We're confident in the status of the turnaround in Hinge's global expansion, and we think investors will increasingly take notice as we put more points on the board as 2026 rolls on.

Thanks very much for joining those of you that are going to join the March 12 event in L.A. or on webcast, we will tell you more about Tinder product then. And until then, it was great speaking with everyone. Bye-bye.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

All right. We're going to get started. Excellent. Welcome, everybody. My name is Ross Sandler, so I head up the Internet team here at Barclays. We're super excited to have the team from Match back for another year. So thank you.

Happy to be here.

Just to start, I'm going to read the safe harbor for Tani, for the lawyers actually. So during this presentation and during the Q&A session, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainty.

Our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in our periodic reports filed with the SEC. Also today, we might discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation to most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in published materials on our IR website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to substitute for our GAAP results.

So with that out of the way, maybe you can just update us on like the next 3 years and how that [indiscernible]

Yes. Thank you for coming. I thought we would just start with this week's recent news. So we've had some changes at Hinge, Jackie stepping up and the creation of this new Overtone unit. So can you just talk about the transition and how this new unit is structured?

Sure. Yes. I think it's exciting. I think it's a win-win for the company. We announced that we're spinning out a company called Overtone, which is really an AI-first dating service. Think of it as akin to a personal matchmaker of sorts is the product experience. That's going to be led by Justin, who is the Founder and former CEO of Hinge. So yes, I think -- we think it's the right structure for the business...

Oh, this one? Okay, good? Here you go.

Let me just start over real quick. So we announced the spinout of Overtone and that Justin is going to be leaving Hinge. He was the founder to run Overtone, and we've elevated the President and CMO, Jackie to the CEO of the company. I think it's a win-win. I think it's the right structure.

Jackie has been with the company for 4 years now. I think she'll take over the reins without a hitch. She was the President for about the last year. So she was instrumental in running the day-to-day operations of Hinge this year, 2025, done a fantastic job. Hinge has hit the numbers, all systems go. So I think she's completely capable, fantastic leader, also very involved in the 2026 planning efforts.

So I think it's going to be a very smooth transition there. and she's a capable leader, will do great. We also have a great management team around her at Hinge. I feel really good about that. I think the timing is right, and Justin said that himself.

And then on the Overtone sort of structure, look, we've been working on this app. Justin has inside of Hinge for about the last year, made good progress, but still very early. And we came up with the structure for a few reasons. One, we really wanted Justin to be able to go, fast start-up mode as sort of a separate independent company. We also wanted to bring some VCs in to share in some of the risk associated with the start-up like this. We'll be the largest shareholder in the company.

We've got an option to buy it down the road if it's successful. And -- but these businesses often take a lot of losses in the early days. So this is a good structure. We don't have to consolidate the results, and we can participate in the upside. So again, I think it's a win-win for the company and the right structure given the situation.

Yes. I mean I think if I remember correctly, Tinder came out of assuming a similar incubator inside of Match and IAC way back in the day. you guys are good at that. Okay. So we're about a year from the Analyst Day. It was actually like the morning of this conference last year. That was a fun day for us.

But what I thought we'd do is maybe like take a snapshot of where we are today looking ahead and talk about some of the tailwinds and headwinds in the business as it relates to that multiyear forecast you guys laid out a year ago. So I guess starting with tailwinds, you've been at Match for a number of years. You've also been here from multiple CEOs. So what stands out the most about current pace, focus and operating changes under Spencer since he took over in February?

Yes. I get that question a lot. I particularly got it in the beginning when he first took over back in February, and I was talking about his energy and his experience and the breadth of fresh air and the shift in focus towards users and outcomes, and that's all still true. But I think it's an easier conversation now because we're 10 months in.

And I think the record shows what he's been able to do at the company, which has been a lot. And so just look at what we've accomplished so far, we restructured the company, reduced the size of it by 13%. We reorg Tinder into more autonomous product pods. We removed layers of management, 1 in 5 management at Tinder. We've increased product velocity going from shipping every 2 weeks to every 1 week. We've shifted the whole focus of the company really towards one of being users -- myopically focused on user success and outcomes.

So like -- he's proven that he's a seasoned, capable leader, and we've accomplished a lot. Now we're still working on the end goal, which is turning MAU around and getting Tinder back to revenue growth. But I think all the steps thus far to get there, he's done a fantastic job. I have been at the company for a long time. 13.5 years now and a lot of CEOs. And I can truly say this is the, I think, the biggest shift I've seen in the shortest period of time under any CEO of the company.

One of the jobs you have that's tough as a CFO is gearing the Street towards metrics that you find and that we can find is most important. So I know we aren't optimizing Tinder for payer growth or RPP. So how do you convince us, the investment community to move off of that metric given that we've been on it for so long? And if you had to pick one metric for us to focus on at Tinder for the next like 3 years, what would that be?

Yes. I think, look, it goes back to what I just said. RPP and payers is a little bit of a lagging indicator. What we're really looking at is -- and there's ways to improve those metrics that help short term, but maybe hurt long term. And so what Spencer has really come in and said is, yes, sure, we can increase price maybe or we can increase conversion a little bit, drive those metrics up. And we did a lot -- we've done a lot of that at Tinder over the years. But if it's not in the service of the user, if it's not increasing the value proposition or leading to better outcomes on the app, it's a little penny-wise pound foolish.

And so he's sort of shifted the narrative towards let's focus on the user first getting them more outcomes on the app. And by the way, Hinge has done this the whole time, and you've seen the success it's driven. And so the idea is Tinder should be using the same lens, too. That will then lead to a few things, improve retention on the app. We know if you're getting more outcomes, you're getting into more conversations early on in your experience with Tinder, your retention is higher. That is a fact.

And it also indirectly helps because if you have a great experience on the app, when you do get in that relationship and maybe decide to get off the app for a while, you're going to tell your friends about it, that drives reconsideration and user growth from that regard. And then the other factor in all this is because we're an episodic sort of business is when that relationship doesn't work out, which often is the case, you're going to come back to Tinder again. And so by focusing on that first -- on outcomes that will lead to MAU growth that will then give us a stable, if not growing user base to optimize around, the revenue and the RPP and the payers will come rather than just trying to optimize payer penetration and RPP on a shrinking user base, you can only do that for so long.

And so that's sort of the shift in focus. And then the metric is the Spark metric, which we talked about a quarter ago, which is effectively a proxy for outcomes. And so the Spark metric is a 6-way conversation, a 6-way back and forth, which when you run the regression on it is -- and you look at sort of the curve, the six-way point is sort of where the curve flattens out in terms of predictability and leading to an outcome, which is a real connection.

And so we went with that metric. We were using contact exchange, we talked about a couple of quarters ago. The reason we've moved away from that a little bit is because, first of all, Sparks is pretty predictive of contact exchange. And Contact Exchange had a little bit of -- some issues.

For example, in Europe, you can't use AI to read people's messages from a privacy perspective. So we can't -- we're not even allowed to see did you share a contact. And in some of our features like double date, what we were seeing in user behavior was they're not really exchanging contacts. They're actually just saying, "Hey, let's meet here because it's a group date and then dealing with the logistics off the app. So Sparks, we feel is the best metric. We're using it internally, sort of kicking the tires on it, and then we'll decide exactly how we give that to you guys externally in terms of quarterly reporting.

Got it. Okay. And back to tailwinds. So you guys mentioned on the last call, this spring event that a potentially new Tinder or some new unveil comes out. So should we look at this in the context of your multiyear plan as the start of the resurgence phase in terms of MAU and revenue growth? Or is this kind of the back half of the revitalization phase? And I mean, to the degree you can talk about the spring event.

Right. Yes. The spring -- I would think of it as an update on the progress we're making on the revitalization phase. And the reason we're doing it is because we just can't -- we're making a ton of progress on the product with a lot of new features and a lot of new tests -- and it's really hard to share all that on an earnings call, for example.

So the idea is share it in a lot more detail so all of you understand the progress being made in that second phase, the revitalization phase that we think will lead to the resurgence phase, it's still sometime in '26 or '27. That's the way to think about it.

Got it. Okay. And then shifting to headwinds or potential headwinds. So face check, we've talked about that in recent calls. This weighs on MAU by low single digits, I think you guys said. Are there other trust and safety or user outcome initiatives that could create near-term friction to MAU or headwinds to revenue? And why are these trade-offs the right long-term choice?

Yes. First of all, Face check is, I think, phenomenal. It's been hugely impactful. It's reduced exposure to bad actors by 60%. We've never seen that with a trust and safety feature before. And you're right, we think it's going to cause a couple of points of impact to revenue, but that's well -- a worthwhile trade-off. We've optimized that down from about 10 points, which is where we started out in Canada a year or so ago. So we've really done a good job there. There's not another new trust and safety feature in the road map that we think will have a similar impact. It's an ongoing battle. So it's a little hard to predict.

But right now, we're focused on rolling out Faceheck more broadly. And actually, this past -- a few days ago, we've rolled it out now across the U.S. at Tinder in its entirety. So that's a big step forward. Where we might see a little bit of MAU pressure or the revenue pressure is more likely to come from some of the other user tests we're doing.

So the Project Aurora test in Australia, features that basically drive user outcomes potentially at the impact of a little bit of short-term revenue and maybe even some users, which -- a good example would be algorithm changes that shift the weighting towards user outcomes and away from just getting likes to as many people as possible to get them to convert on the likes to paywall.

Some of that. But again, we're being smart about it. We're testing it in confined markets to understand the impacts. We'll be very clear about what we think those impacts will be. We talked about $14 million potential in Q4. The reality is we're trying to be conservative in those estimates because we don't want to hold the product teams back. In the past, they were afraid to take bold leaps because they were sort of confined by this revenue sort of objective. What we've actually seen, which I think is good, is a lot of these tests aren't as impactful as we think. There's offsetting benefits. And so we'll have to see how that plays out, but we'll be very transparent in terms of guidance and those things.

Cool. And a potential massive tailwind for you guys next year, which you talked about is we've got about $100 million potentially in the bank, so to speak, from the App Store fee changes that you could potentially redeploy in customer acquisition or product changes like you just described. How much of that do you think gets reinvested back into the business versus allowing it to drop to the bottom line?

So we said $90 million last.

A little bit from Google that.

Right. That's true. Yes, depending on how Google evolves, that's true. It could be more. Yes, look, I would think about it this way. We're going to do what we think is right. We're going to make the necessary investments to ensure Tinder's long-term success and to optimize for long-term EBITDA and free cash flow and shareholder value.

And that's the process we're going through right now as part of the 2026 annual planning process that we're sort of in the middle of. And we'll use tests like Project Aurora and other sort of tests we have going on right now to inform the 2026 plan. That's how I think about it. The good thing is it gives us a lot of optionality, obviously. So we feel like we've got plenty of optionality to do what's right for the business long term.

Okay. Another headwind, I mean, you guys get this question a lot, so I would just kind of throw it out there high level. But there's this perception that the Tinder product might need to be changed somewhat dramatically to cater to the Gen Z dating pool. You've rolled out things like Double Date, College modes. How many more new modes do we need at Tinder? And how big of a departure do you think you need in terms of the end state of the product from its user experience?

Look, I think we need to take some bold swings. Incremental improvements to the app alone are not going to be enough. But we also -- I don't see us moving away from the core swipe experience either anytime soon. I think the way -- if ever, I think the way to think about it is how can we augment what makes Tinder great, what Tinder is known for to meet the needs of -- particularly of Gen Z and Gen Z women.

And so Modes is a great example of that. Modes is not replacing the swipe. Modes is allowing more customization, an experience that's more akin to what Gen Z is looking for while keeping the core swipe mechanic that has made Tinder so popular. I do think there will be more modes, and we're working on those. We've got College. We've got Double Date. We've got more to come. There's lots you could think about. But I think it's a clever way to sort of keep what makes Tinder so great, but also provide an improved product experience that's -- what Gen Z is looking for.

I think there are a few other things we're doing, Chemistry is another great example. So Chemistry takes it one step further, right? Mode is a way to sort of filter the swipe experience. Chemistry is separate and apart from the swipe experience. And so think of it as a second tap. So I can go in the app and say, do I want to swipe or do I want a more curated set of AI-driven matches and giving -- that's a feature that Gen Z, women, in particular, I think, are going to love.

And so the goal is that is to augment what makes Tinder great, but in bold ways. And when all these little things ladder up, improved algos, better recommendations, better outcomes, together, it's a new product experience that lives up to the expectations that Gen Z has put on the dating app on Tinder and the category at large.

Got it. You mentioned this earlier, but Sparks being this key metric that you guys are going for to determine the positive user outcome. As coverage of Sparks continues to rise, when do you expect that to translate into either aggregate MAU retention and ultimately revenue?

Yes, I did talk a little bit about it. We know Sparks leads to better retention, better word of mouth. And so it will improve MAU, like we can see that today. It's difficult to say exactly when. That takes a little bit of time and depends on how quickly and how dramatically we can improve that metric. And there's sort of 2 ways we're looking at it.

One is Sparks coverage, which is of our users we have today, how many are getting into these meaningful connections as a percentage and then just Sparks overall. And so we've seen good improvement in Sparks coverage. Spencer has talked about that a little bit on the earnings calls. That's the first step.

That should ultimately lead to -- but Sparks themselves are still down, users are still down. We expect -- if we can drive user outcomes, that will translate into improved MAU trends, but we haven't sort of put a quarter on it yet. We're trying to do it as quickly as possible and in a thoughtful sort of a long-term way.

Okay. So it could potentially have a little impact on MAU.

I think -- yes, the way to think about the impact on MAU, it's a little bit nuanced. Sparks themselves leads to better retention and better MAU. But algorithm changes that prioritize sparks or outcomes over likes and revenue could actually have a little bit of a negative impact to MAU. Likely, what would happen is it would help women retention, it would improve the women experience.

Today, if we're just getting as many men as many likes as possible, the women experience on the other side is not the best. They're sort of getting flooded with men they might not want to really actually connect with. If we flip the script and we optimize more towards meaningful connections and outcomes, the women's experience improves, but some men might not get as many likes as they used to, and that retention might fall off.

And so we're willing to make that trade-off. And that's where this gets a little bit bumpy, and we need to sort of test our way through it. So I expect there to be some short-term noise, but long term, it's definitely the more sustainable approach.

Okay. And on the tailwinds, you mentioned earlier Project Aurora. Obviously, that's a big topic. sounds like it's a whole new UI, coupled with a new marketing plan and potentially like post rollout, you're driving better growth and better retention, but potentially a lower, albeit acceptable margin. Is that the right way to think about it? And just broadly thus far with Australia, what have you guys learned?

Yes. I think it's still early. We're rolling out as many features there as quickly as possible. There are more rolling out as we speak. I wouldn't think of it as an entirely new UI like there's the old Tinder and now there's the new Tinder. It's more of what I talked about a little bit ago, which is augmenting the experience, but we're doing it all in one place.

So it's adding modes. It's reimagining some of the See Who Likes You mechanics. It's adding chemistry, and it's coupling that with marketing spend because marketing can't play the lead role in this turnaround, but it definitely has a support role to play.

And I think the early signs are -- we've seen some early green shoots there, and we're happy with the progress we're making. And we're going to use it to inform our 2026 plan, and that's sort of what we're in the middle of right now.

Got it. Okay. And if we step back to MAU and we kind of talk about that relative to some of the ecosystem safety and trust initiatives that you've done, do you believe that there's still a lot more cleanup to be done within the 47 million-ish that you talked about at the Analyst Day in terms of total MAU? Or is that like we're at the right baseline?

I think the trust and safety work doesn't end. It's an ongoing battle. It's always going to be a high priority for us. It's always going to be a big area of investment because it's actually the #1 barrier for users entering the category, concerns -- perceived concerns about trust and safety.

And the bad actors don't quit. They don't go away. I do think face check is a huge leap forward. Like I said, 60% reduction and exposure to bad actors. But it's not like we have -- we can stop there. I don't expect -- I don't foresee anything in the road map or coming down the pike that's some meaningful cleanup effort like we had a couple -- a year or 2 ago, a couple of years ago. But there's always going to be this ongoing battle.

And we're never going to say tamp down on trust and safety efforts because it could create a little noise in them to do, that would be foolish. But no, there's not a Facebook -- face check version 2 alternative or other product feature coming down the pipe that I expect to have a material impact on.

Got it. Okay. And you started the conversation with Hinge and the change. I mean, Hinge's business has just been on fire, has been for a while. So I guess, high level, you guys have talked about this before, but what did they get right that Tinder has gotten wrong? And then as you look into '26, what are the biggest growth initiatives for Hinge?

Yes. I think it's this -- I guess they've done 2 things. One, a focus on the user and user outcomes. It's the app designed to be deleted. That's been a successful recipe and one that we think Tinder can learn from as we've discussed today. I think the second thing they've done really well is they've balanced the road map. They've done a really, really good job of making sure a large portion of the product road map is centered on product innovation, maybe not things that are going to drive revenue next quarter, but that continue to evolve the app and meet the needs of users.

That, I think, has been a huge recipe for success. I think Tinder, it just had such dramatic growth, no marketing spend, part of the cultural zeitgeist, biggest app in the industry. We probably focus a little bit too much on monetization and not enough on sort of laying the seed for longer-term innovation. Hinge has learned from that and not made the same mistake, and I think that's showing in the results.

And in terms of '26, it's going to be a little bit more of the same. It's going to be a balanced road map around product innovation. They're sort of at the forefront of AI in the category, and that won't change either. They've had a lot of success with features like prompt feedback and others around sort of AI coaching. And then there's room for continued optimization around monetization as long as it's increasing the value proposition there.

And then the third component is obviously geographic expansion. And so they've done a great job expanding into Mexico and Brazil, but there's more room to go there. And so we'll talk more about the ongoing expansion plans at Hinge, but that will help plant the seeds for growth, not so much in '26, but '27 and beyond.

Okay. And on the headwind side, you mentioned rolling out Face Check in other properties. Where are you on that initiative? And how material could that be to the overall business?

Yes. We're racing ahead at Hinge and at some of our other major brands, and the plan is to roll them out there as quickly as possible. We'll test it. And I don't foresee a 1-year test because that's the beauty of our portfolio, right? We can learn from what Tinder learned and expedite rollouts in other brands.

We've obviously penciled out some preliminary numbers. I expect it to have some impact on those brands, but not material. I think the bulk of it will be at Tinder, and we've kind of sized that and these other rollouts won't be sort of material to the overall company.

Got it. Okay. And then on top of funnel, you guys showed some data at the Analyst Day that had -- on one hand, it was like 220 million no app daters. And then there was 30 million of the previous Tinder, Hinge churned daters. Which do you view as the bigger opportunity in the near term between the no appers and resurrecting some of that 30 million?

Yes. Well, the numbers say the bigger opportunity is the 220 million. The nuance there -- I think they're both opportunities. I think the nuance is it's easier to drive reconsideration, right? So for the 30 million people who have been on these apps have been on Tinder and have used it, what we need to do is a lot of what we've been talking about, improve the product experience, get the word-of-mouth flywheel going and just -- and evolve the product up to where they're like, okay, it is new, it is different. It's worth reconsideration.

So I think -- and marketing can play a big role in that, too. So I think that's really the near-term opportunity. The $220 million is more of the medium, long-term opportunity that shows there's still a lot of room to go here in this.

We're -- if you look at our MAU, remember, there's duplicates in there because we've got people on multiple apps. And if you were to dedu that number, that -- the 250 million in total is a big number for us. We could double the company if we chip away at that. So yes, I think the reconsideration is the near-term opportunity. The new category entrants is a little bit of a long-term opportunity.

That is where the product innovation comes in. And that is where AI can play a role and marketing, too. I think Hinge has done some really interesting work on the marketing side that tries to explain to those who haven't tried online dating why now might be the right time.

On this topic of like the 220 million and then just non-appers, there's a theory out there that direct messaging is a format that Gen Z feels more comfortable using and is a potential competition for you guys. So how do you respond to that secular bear case that the younger demographic just wants to DM in these other social apps and not use an actual dating product?

Well, I'll tell you what our data shows. We do a quarterly survey of singles in the U.S. that get out a lot of these questions. And what we see is it's not stealing share from dating. It's actually -- it's sort of like what the bars and the church and your parents' friends were before the digital age alternative to online dating. Now social media is another alternative.

And there are some use cases that it does happen. We don't see it replacing online dating as a category. We're much more effective. We're thinking about it every day. So it happens, but it's not -- it's clear in our data, it's not stealing share that we can see.

Okay. That's great. I think we're out of time. We're going to leave it there, but thank you very much for coming.

Yes. Thank you.

Yes. Thank you again.

Appreciate it.

Well, why don't we go ahead and get started. Thank you for joining us all here today at the Raymond James TMT and Consumer Conference. I'm Andrew Marok, and I cover digital media here at RJ. And I'm thrilled to have here with me Jackie Jantos, who is the President and Chief Marketing Officer at Hinge.

Before we get started, we'll get into a quick safe harbor statement, and then we'll go ahead and kick it off. So during this presentation and during the question-and-answer session, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in our periodic reports filed with the SEC.

Also today, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the published materials on our IR website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. And so with that, before we get started, can you give me a quick overview of your role within Match Group and Hinge?

Sure. So good morning, everyone. I joined Hinge 4 years ago as Chief Marketing Officer. And earlier this year, I stepped into an added role of President. So I have been leading the day-to-day operations at the organization this year.

Great. So we're going to keep our questions mostly Hinge focused. But before we dive in there, I did want to ask maybe one broader Match Group question.

Sure.

So what have been some of the biggest changes you've experienced in how things work internally since Spencer has taken over as CEO? And what are you most excited about given what you've seen so far?

Yes. I mean Spencer has brought a real added energy and enthusiasm and urgency to the work that we need to do as a category to better serve daters today. I would say there are 2 things that are most notable about his arrival. One is a product-driven growth and really focusing on products that serve the outcomes of daters on our apps, which is incredibly important for doing what you say your app will do and also driving organic growth.

And the second thing, Spencer, like myself, has spent quite a bit of time inside of a large portfolio organization. For me, that was the Coca-Cola Company many moons ago. And with that, comes an understanding of how to orient a portfolio and how to orient all of the brands and products inside the portfolio to be playing very specific roles. And so clarifying that for Match Group has been a big piece of the work that he's done.

Great. And bringing a little bit of that founder energy as well.

Absolutely.

Great. Now turning to Hinge specifically. For those in the room who might not be quite as familiar with the app, can you please give us like a 30,000-foot overview of where Hinge fits into Match and maybe in the broader digital connections landscape?

Sure. So Hinge is what we call the app designed to be deleted. This means that the app is intended to help you actually get off the app into a great date, so you can delete the app and move on in your relationship. And this is a philosophy that guides everything that we do with the organization. So the way that we bring people into the product, for example, has a longer onboarding experience. We require more information from daters, more photos, more prompts.

Prompts is a feature, if you will, that Hinge invented many years ago. And it's a way to help people express a little bit more about who they are because daters on Hinge are deeply intentioned and they are looking ultimately for a relationship, a long-term relationship. And everything within the app experience is essentially built to help people move through the experience and to get off of the app and true to that line designed to be deleted, and we measure that. So the organization is singularly focused on that outcome. And we believe that when you build a product, particularly a dating product that works, people talk about it and the user growth, and the revenue follows. And so we are singularly focused on getting folks off the app.

And how do you build that vibe among the user base? Because the initial setup process is something that we've heard from other companies and apps around the space is a potential point of friction, like people want to be on the app quickly rather than as best as they can. So how does Hinge kind of foster that putting your best foot forward aspect?

Yes. Our growth in the early years was very, very organic. I myself met my partner on a Match property a long time ago before Hinge existed. And when you find a relationship that is the most important relationship in your life on a piece of technology, you surely tell everyone you know about it and you encourage them to also try. And I think one of the things about this category is we're not selling a simple experience, we're helping you find partnership and dating and relationships and finding a partnership is a complicated thing, and it takes time and effort.

And so when we talk about Hinge externally, we really set people's expectations about what the app is for and who the app is for. And so when you're joining the app, individuals who want to be a part of the Hinge community know that there is a level of effort involved in being part of that community. It's not intended to be a quick onboarding experience because we're going to ask you to share who you are and what you're looking for. We're going to ask you for more photographs of yourself than you need in other dating apps. And all of this is by design. We want the community to represent people who are looking for intentional relationships. And so it is a really robust space to explore yourself and explore what you're looking for and ultimately find someone and go on a date with them.

That's great. And I think you may have touched on a couple of these aspects in your previous answers here, but Hinge has been very successful in scaling users and engagement. Is there anything that we haven't discussed so far that's kind of like a lightning in the bottle element of the app that really has resonated with your core market?

Yes. I would say there are really 2 things. One is focusing on users' outcomes really is everything that has driven the success of Hinge. Truly user growth, when you are a dating product that is serving people to get out on dates, truly that focus is what drives user growth in this category. And Hinge has been doing that for many, many years now, and our growth has been consistent in all of our markets, and we are emerging as the dating app that's serving users today.

I would say the second thing is 4 years ago, when I joined the organization, I spent many of my years in brands oriented towards younger audiences, be it Coke or be it Spotify. When I joined 4 years ago, we made a very specific strategic decision to start orienting our product towards the next generation, this being Gen Z. Now this is a very unique audience, and we spend a lot of time learning and engaging with that audience in order to build a product that best serves them. And really everything within the ecosystem of how we market that product in the real world is also oriented to meet that audience in channels where they're at today. So we have a unique approach to the product that we're designing and what it's designed for. And we have a unique approach to how we go to market and how we engage with that audience in deeply credible ways.

And then maybe on Gen Z there. We've heard anecdotally, at least the younger daters in Gen Z are maybe more a little bit intentional in their relationship formation process, maybe looking for longer-term connections from the get-go. Is that a statement that you would agree with that you've seen as well? And if so, how is Hinge kind of poised to capitalize on that?

Yes. I mean dating is a really interesting category. And the way that you need to think about this more generally is dating is hard. It has always been hard. And we are living in a time period where every next generation is feeling more isolation and loneliness than the generation before them. And this is primarily for any of you who have children, I have a couple of Gen Alphas, because they spend such an extraordinary amount of their time online. And so where they're not spending their time is in person with other humans. They're spending less time with their parents, with their friends, with their teachers and certainly, they're spending less time looking for a romantic relationship.

And to compound that for Gen Z, they spent their late teens and early 20s locked down in a pandemic. So these are also peak years where you're experimenting with being in relationship with someone else dramatically. They missed that time period of experimentation and learning. And so their needs are pretty acute. And their needs are going to be -- the next generation's needs will be also quite acute. And so staying ahead of where culture is going, where dating and romance and relationships are going and building a product that's in service of those needs is really important. So I'll give you an example. Prompts is a big part of the Hinge ecosystem. Prompts is a feature that Hinge invited or invented rather and like brought to the market years ago. And these are basically icebreaker questions that people can fill out about themselves to let you know a little bit more about each individual.

And on Hinge, you're not looking at one whole profile and moving past it, you're looking at components of a profile, each of which you can engage with in very discrete ways. You can like a prompt, you can like a photo, you can add a comment to someone's prompt. So it's intended to be a much more engaging experience. Gen Z is comfortable and increasingly comfortable with AI tooling. So an example of an evolution on prompts at Hinge is a tool called Prompt Feedback. We know that great comps are specific. They offer someone else a way in to have a conversation with you that is more than just the classic, hey, hey, what's up, what's up, which is not really the best way to kick off a relationship.

And so Prompt Feedback is an AI tool that offers feedback should you want it on a prompt you've just written. It will give you guidance like, oh, you like film, what kind of films do you like? What was the last film you saw, tell us a little bit more about that? And then it will say that's a great prompt. And so there's all these ways that we can add additional product features and tools on top of what we've already got to make that experience work better for this Gen Z audience.

I definitely want to touch more on AI, I think, later in the session. But before we do, I think you talked a little bit there about how the product and the apps focus can evolve with kind of a cohort. But when we're looking at shifting relationship intentions on an individual basis, how does Hinge maybe fit in with somebody who maybe was looking for a longer-term partner, maybe now they're looking for something a little bit shorter term. I guess from an individual user's perspective, how does Hinge fit into that journey?

Yes. I would say there's an opportunity for folks to fill in what their dating intentions are within the onboarding experience. And to your point, these change over time. And also, from what I described about this generation, they don't necessarily know how to articulate what they're looking for exactly. So some level of learning and change over time is really important. And so we have sort of tools to support that. You can go back and change your dating intention. There are other tools like Match Note is a feature that we recently launched that really only exists on Hinge, where if I -- if we were to match and maybe I see what your dating intention is, and I want you to let me -- I want to let you know privately what mine is, I can send you that note. And if you decide that's not for you, then we can unmatch before even going further down the line. So I think a level of evolution and learning what you're looking for over time is really important. And those are the types of tools and insight we're also trying to offer individual daters on Hinge.

Great. Obviously, Hinge has done very, very well in the U.S. and now continuing to grow internationally as well. So I guess, how do you balance maintaining a consistent brand identity with adapting some of the different cultural context in the markets that you enter?

Yes, I would say when you look at this audience at the highest cultural attitude, there are an enormous number of similarities market to market, particularly when you're talking about core English-speaking markets, Europe and parts of Latin America. And so for sure, generationally, there is a consistency in looking for an intentional relationship and looking for a dating app that is providing the real value and help you get off the app and into a date. This generation is looking for relationships, looking to meet up in person and looking for a tool that can help them get there. So that's part 1.

And then I would say when we go into a new market, we're also looking at some of the differences between relationships and romance and how they play out at a very profound cultural level. So one example is we recently launched in Latin America. In Mexico, you're not just dating your -- a partner, you're dating their whole family. So how you consider bringing that nuance into how you communicate what Hinge can offer is really important. And there are some minor tweaks to the product that we make in order to make it work harder. And then how we talk about the product in those markets is where there's a lot of magic in working with local creators and partners on the ground to just describe what it can add -- what value it can add to you.

Got you. I wanted to talk a bit about user acquisition. So of course, a very competitive space. So how does Hinge stand out and attract new users, either specific marketing techniques or brand proposition?

Yes. I mean, this is a category where you're trying to provide deeply human value and hacking growth through performance marketing is not the mechanism that has worked for us to build our user base, particularly when you're looking for a high intention willing to put in the effort, genuinely looking to get off the app and meet someone in person on a date. The type of individual we're looking for is someone who fits within that persona and contributes to a community of people who are looking for that. So the way that we think about going to market is we look at what is happening in culture. And I often reference the most talked about romantic relationship in the U.S. last year, if you can guess who that might be.

Is it a football player and a pop star?

Yes, it is.

Okay.

And so the message that, that type of a relationship is putting into the world is one that is actually quite constrained. It's two stereotypically beautiful individuals. It's a real charming fairytale boy chases girl story. It's taken up so much space in public discourse in the past year plus. And it sets a precedent for a relationship that is entirely unattainable by most of us. And that is not what we want to encourage young people to strive for. And so I think what we do very well is we go to market and we share stories of real people, a diversity of people who have met their partners on Hinge, and we share the twists and the turns of those stories. And we do it in an interesting way is where we're using media channels and partnerships that are closer to where audiences are.

Last year, one of our biggest partners was Substack. And we told the stories of individuals who met on Hinge that were written as short stories by very well-known authors to this audience. And those authors are also on Substack. So they wrote those stories with us and we published all sorts of media around them, including a book we put some of the stories in subway ads, just teasers. And then we also publish those stories on Substack and those authors shared their stories on Substack. So it was one of our most visible programs for marketing that earned extraordinary additional media that we did not pay for and because of the quality of the storytelling, because of the relatability of the storytelling. And so this is how we do user acquisition at Hinge and how we get stories of success out there in really innovative ways. And it's partly why we're winning in the market today.

And you talked about design to be deleted. I'm sure there's a big component of -- I found my partner on Hinge. It was an incredible experience. Hey, single friend, why don't you try?

Yes, absolutely. We have our office walls covered in wedding invitations and move-in notices. We haven't been to a wedding yet, but I'm thinking about it every once in a while. We got an invitation to a wedding in Turkey a couple of weeks ago. That sounds fantastic. And so we are always paying attention and listening to what's happening. And then the one other piece I'll add around Gen Z is that the employee base of Hinge, we're based here in New York, mimics the user base on our app, which is just over half represented by Gen Z. So when you have a really dynamic team, building a fairly dynamic product, you have sort of a shortcut to doing that in a way that is genuinely in service of them. And then we measure great dates. That is a KPI, that is the North Star KPI, and there are a variety of signals we use, including surveys after people do leave the app and go out on dates to learn if the app is working. And then we are bullish on if the app works, the user base grows.

Sure. From all of those very kind of human elements that we talked about just now to AI. So you talked about AI product development a little bit earlier. I guess, how are you thinking about the balance between how AI can be helpful for the user experience versus retaining that very important human input and elements?

Yes. I mean, AI is just a tool like any other technology tool. We've been using machine learning for decades. And so for us, it's really about how are you using AI to help people through the experience on the app. We just launched a feature today called Convo Starters. This is an AI tool that gives you some guidance on how to kick off a conversation with someone. So you don't do that hey, hey, thing that I described earlier. And so how we use AI is really to build more momentum in helping people express who they are, Prompt Feedback as an example, engaging in conversation, Convo Starter is an example. And then ultimately, getting off the app into a date.

And then the second way we use AI is our algorithm. There is incredible data that Hinge has on our daters because our onboarding is so rich and people really trust us and give us a lot of information about what they're looking for. So the real unlock is in how we use that information to offer them even more meaningful recommendations. And then finally, AI plays a huge role in creating a safe experience on the app. And all of the safety tooling that is constantly improving so that we can make sure people feel psychologically safe as they're sharing quite a lot of themselves. And we can also do some real mitigation with bad actors on our app.

Great. And I think we've had a pretty great overview of the app and kind of how we've driven the process along over the course of the last couple of years. But finally, if you could choose one thing that you're really excited about that you think investors should keep in mind or focus on for Hinge in 2026, what would it be?

Yes. I mean, this category has quite deeply underserved women for a long time. And that's not that surprising when you look at the products because they haven't necessarily been designed for women by women. And so not surprisingly, women also don't really pay for dating apps. And this is something that I find really exciting to think about in a new way. We live in a world where women pay for many, many things and many, many apps in the wellness and relationship and therapy space, and they absolutely want to be on great dates. So what's going on here. So I won't share anything today, but this is a space that we're really looking at. There are more women daters in the U.S. on Hinge than any other dating app. So this is a really exciting opportunity for us. And the opportunity is really how do we add more value to their experience because we know if we're adding true value, that will be worthy of their investment.

That sounds great, something to keep an eye on. Well, Jackie Jantos, President and CMO of Hinge, thanks for joining us.

Thanks, everyone.

Good day, and welcome to the Match Group's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Tanny Shelburne, SVP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Today's call will be led by CEO, Spencer Rascoff; and CFO, Steven Bailey. They'll make a few brief remarks, and then we'll open it up to questions.

Before we start, I need to remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in our earnings release and our periodic reports with the SEC.

Also, during this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the published materials on our IR website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be substitutes for our GAAP results.

With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Spencer.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Since joining Match Group in February, my focus has been clear: Confront challenges directly, move with urgency and rebuild the company around product, excellence and long-term growth. The work on our three-part turnaround is well underway and focused on reset, revitalize and resurgence. We've successfully completed the reset phase, instilling a culture of speed, accountability and outcomes, and this shift has come to life across our products, teams and users.

That progress is reflected in this quarter's results. We delivered on our revenue expectations and exceeded our adjusted EBITDA goals, excluding a legal settlement. At Tinder and Hinge, momentum continues to build as we make progress in our revitalization phase. We're starting to see green shoots and believe continued progress will come from delivering experiences that solve user pain points, deepen engagement and improve user outcomes.

We believe our business model thrives when user outcomes improve. Better outcomes, driven by higher quality experiences, better matches and more meaningful connections, build confidence in our product and drive new users through positive word of mouth. User success builds trust in the category and in Match Group's apps.

By getting the user experience right, we will further deliver real success stories, which we use in marketing to amplify growth by driving new user acquisition and reactivations. Our marketing strategy, especially at Tinder and Hinge, is focused on fueling category consideration bringing in new and lapsed users through product-led storytelling that reflects real experiences happening across our brands.

We estimate there are roughly 250 million actively dating singles worldwide, not currently on dating apps. Reengaging the 30 million lapsed users and attracting the 220 million potential first-time entrants expands our user base, building a healthier, more efficient growth engine that compounds over time, and we are investing to capture this large addressable market.

Hinge continues to prove that with the right product experience and brand positioning, we can win with Gen Z and drive real growth at scale. Soon, we believe Tinder will too.

We'll walk through 3 proof points today: First, our product progress, where our obsession with outcomes is showing up across our brands, especially at Tinder and Hinge; second, the essential work we're doing to strengthen trust and authenticity across the ecosystem; and third, the financial discipline and operational rigor that are now showing up in how we execute.

Starting with product. Across Match Group, our brands share one goal, delivering better user outcomes. I want to highlight the progress at our 2 flagship brands, Tinder and Hinge, and how each is building affinity with users in different segments.

At Tinder, our focus this year has been to accelerate innovation, to rebuild trust and to ship great products so we can reintroduce Tinder in 2026 to our core audience of Gen Z. Our new mission statement, Tinder is the most fun way to spark something new with someone new, captures the energy and the sense of possibilities we want every user to feel.

Guided by new personas, prototypical user archetypes, that reflect real people and their motivations, we're creating experiences that feel more personal and more aligned with what users want. We've clarified what Tender stands for and who we're building it for, and that focus is already paying off.

Users are seeing and feeling the difference through updates that are reshaping the Tinder experience in the following ways: First, we're building a product and design-led culture. Our new liquid glass refresh planned on iOS this quarter will make the app more modern, fluid and visually appealing, further bringing our mission to life every time you open the app.

Second, Chemistry is redefining how people connect. Powered by AI, this interactive matching feature, now known as Chemistry, is a major pillar of Tinder's upcoming 2026 product experience. It gets to know users through interactive questions and with permission, learns from their camera roll to better understand their interests and personality.

Using deep learning, Chemistry combats swipe fatigue by surfacing a few highly relevant profiles each day, driving more compatible matches and engaging conversations. Chemistry is now live in New Zealand and Australia with plans to expand to additional countries in the coming months.

Third, Modes are powering a new social energy on Tinder. Our new Modes navigation gives users more choice in how they use Tinder, from meeting new people with a friend to connecting with their college community. Since launching Modes in September, Double Date adoption is up 30% in the U.S., while College Mode is gaining traction with 1 in 4 eligible students using it and over 8% engaging daily as of October.

Modes makes the fun part of our mission real, giving new ways to spark something together and redefining Tinder as a fun, social and low-pressure way to meet new people. We're also seeing this momentum reflected in our marketing. The Double Date Island campaign across Europe drove the highest brand consideration lift of the year, boosted downloads and particularly resonated with Gen Z. It proved that when we connect product innovation with authentic social-first storytelling, we can reignite excitement and bring new energy back to Tinder.

Fourth, evaluating profiles is becoming more meaningful and holistic. We've started testing several new features resonating with Gen Z by giving users more information to evaluate and connect with potential matches. Bio information now appears on the first photo card, and prompts content is integrated into the photo carousel. These improvements let users learn more about a potential match before deciding to Swipe Right.

We've also started testing features like contextual likes and open messaging, and we fully rolled out prompts on photos to let users share why they swiped right, making interactions more intentional and authentic.

Finally, app performance is a major focus and a key driver of user experience. On Android, Tinder startup times are now 38% faster and crash rates are reduced by more than 32%. On iOS, app stability is up more than 57%. We're also removing long running tests and unused features to make the app leaner.

As we bring load times closer to one second on iOS and Android, Tinder already feels faster and smoother. Our app performance work on iOS and Android is in service of the fun part of our mission because no one enjoys a slow buggy app.

You can feel the energy across Tinder. During our Hack Week last week, teams brought incredible innovation and creativity, building some of the most exciting products and prototypes we've seen in years. The company feels electric.

Meanwhile, Hinge continues to be one of the best and most undiscovered stories in consumer tech, powered by a clear mission, a motivated team, a leading product experience and sustained momentum. Hinge's Designed to be Deleted philosophy drives a focus on user outcomes, specifically helping people go out on great dates, our North Star. This clarity of purpose has resulted in category-leading growth in both users and revenue.

Hinge is leading the way on AI innovation in dating with category-first AI features that drive better connections and more real-world outcomes. This quarter brought both wins and learnings.

Conversation starters, which offers personalized prompts for first messages, was a clear win, driving approximately 10% more likes with comments and stronger engagement overall during the test, particularly with women. Updates to our recommendation system improved matching quality through rigorous testing and provided valuable insights that are already refining our approach.

Warm intros, designed to surface compatibility cues, didn't resonate, and we won't move forward with it. While understanding compatibility remains a key focus, Hinge continues to prioritize user outcomes over simply launching new tools, reflecting our principled approach to innovation.

As we look ahead to the next few quarters, Hinge has an exciting slate of category-first features that showcase our leadership in product innovation and user experience. First impressions help daters lead with personality. This new feature introduces prompts above photos, giving users more ways to express who they are and add depth to their profiles.

A similar experience in the standouts section earlier this year was well received, and we're eager to see how users respond as we continue making Hinge more personal and expressive.

Preferences will also become more meaningful at Hinge. Reimagined preferences will take a new look at how daters express what they're looking for, capturing compatibility with greater nuance and intentionality. This update addresses key user pain points, helping people share what truly matters and find better matches faster. These are just a few of the ways that Hinge continues to drive innovation in service of user outcomes.

The next pillar of our strategy is centered on deepening trust in the category. So turning now to trust and authenticity and the ways in which it strengthens the foundation of our ecosystem.

In dating apps, everything depends on the integrity of the ecosystem. No matter how many new features we launch, people use our apps to meet other new people, and that only works when they feel safe, respected and confident in being themselves. Building and maintaining that trust is core to our long-term success, which is why we're doubling down on trust and safety across our platforms.

Nowhere is that more evident than at Tinder, where we're integrating safety directly into the product experience like never before. The centerpiece of this effort is Face Check, our new facial verification feature that helps confirm users are real and match their profile photos. It's now required for all new users in California, Colombia, Canada, India, Australia and Southeast Asia, and will roll out to additional U.S. states and countries in the coming months.

Face Check sets a new standard for authenticity. Using only a short video selfie, it helps confirm a user is real and matches their profile photos. We built this technology with care, ensuring it delivers meaningful improvements to trust and safety, while keeping the user experience seamless. Early results are strong and reinforce our confidence in the long-term benefits to the broader ecosystem.

We have seen a 60% reduction in user views of profiles later identified as bad actors, and a 40% decrease in reports of bad actor activity. Our ongoing optimization efforts have resulted in only low-single-digits impact to monthly active users and revenue in test markets, which lessens over time.

Early Net Promoter Score results show a clear and sustained improvement in user trust and satisfaction in test markets, with scores up roughly 10 points for men and 5 points for women in key markets where Face Check has launched. This is just the beginning. We plan to expand Face Check across the portfolio, with testing on Hinge beginning in the next few months.

We're also expanding safety beyond verification into everyday user interactions. Tinder and Hinge have introduced new fairer enforcement tools to educate users and promote better behavior through faster and more consistent moderation. This approach calibrates responses based on severity, helping create a safer and more respectful community.

We are also enhancing our Are You Sure? feature, which prompts users to pause before sending potentially offensive or disengaging messages with large language models to make it smarter and more effective at encouraging better conversations in real time.

Originally developed at Tinder and later enhanced by Hinge, this LLM-powered version improves accuracy and tone. Now Tinder is incorporating those learnings back into its own experience, a great example of how our portfolio of brands innovate together, share insights and make each other stronger.

Within Hinge, these principles come together through our product design and user experience. Beyond moderation, Hinge continues to refine the onboarding experience to build confidence and trust early in the user journey. Recent updates include clear guidance during setup, refreshed community guidelines at help center and the introduction of an AI-powered chatbot that quickly answers commonly asked questions. Together, these updates reinforce Hinge's position as a dating app grounded in authenticity and safety, where people can show up as their true selves and form meaningful relationships.

Let's now turn to our financial and operational rigor and how it translates into results. The same discipline driving product innovation is also reflected in how we execute day-to-day. We are operating with sharper focus and accountability across the company, hitting deadlines, shipping Match Group-wide features such as alternative payments faster and acting like a more nimble and decisive company.

These improvements are creating operational momentum and financial optionality as we plan for 2026. You can see this strategy in action through Project Aurora, our large-scale test in Australia that brings together many of Tinder's biggest advancements into a faster, safer and more personal experience.

As part of this work, we're overhauling the recommendations engine to better align with user outcomes, improving both Match quality and overall satisfaction. We're being thoughtful with our tests prioritizing user trust, outcomes and long-term impact over quick wins. We may see some short-term revenue and adjusted EBITDA impacts from these tests, which we've included in our guidance, as we trade short-term monetization for a better user experience and improve user outcomes.

These tests will help us refine our strategy and further validate that improved user outcomes will drive more sustainable user and revenue growth over the long term, which in turn will drive increased shareholder value. We'll share more of these results next quarter.

At Hinge, momentum continues to build as the product delivers meaningful outcomes for users. Revenue, adjusted EBITDA and user growth remain strong, supported by continued innovation and disciplined execution. Hinge's international expansion remains on track with the successful Mexico launch in September and with Brazil planned for Q4. The team is actively working on plans for new expansion markets in 2026 as well.

Hinge launched alternative payments testing ahead of schedule in Q3 with strong early results. We plan to fully roll out alternative payments across our major apps, including Tinder and Hinge in the U.S. in Q4. Strong initial performance at Hinge and ongoing optimizations at Tinder and E&E have increased adoption of web payments, and we now expect to generate approximately $14 million of savings in Q4 2025 and approximately $90 million in 2026.

We have seen some impact to gross revenue in some of our tests at Tinder and Hinge, which we're continuing to optimize for. We're also seeing early success from our recent acquisition of HER, which expands our reach among queer women and gender-diverse communities. The team has already delivered strong results with algorithmic improvements and monetization optimizations driving over 20% revenue increase in test markets.

This success highlights the opportunity to scale high-potential brands across our portfolio and deepen our presence in key segments of the dating market. That same disciplined approach to growth is reflected in how we manage the business. Our financial discipline earlier this year generated approximately $100 million of annualized savings, allowing us to reinvest approximately $50 million across the portfolio to test user-first features, strengthening marketing and expanding our international footprint.

The early results from our Q3 investments are instilling confidence in our strategy, and we're executing well against our Q4 plans. The learnings from these investments and the ongoing benefits of the cost-savings efforts will help inform how we prioritize and deploy capital in 2026. Together, these steps are setting the foundation for the next phase of the turnaround and the resurgence that we expect to take hold in 2026 and 2027.

We're entering this next chapter with real progress and a clear path forward. At Tinder, our new measure of success, Sparks, tracks 6-way conversations, meaning at least 6 total messages exchanged between 2 users. This has become one of the clearest indicators that a genuine connection is forming.

While the total number of Sparks is lower year-over-year due to a smaller monthly active user base, Sparks coverage or the proportion of users in the ecosystem having these deeper conversations continues to improve and is up year-over-year. This shows that more users are having better experiences on the platform, an early but encouraging sign that our focus on improving product quality and user outcomes is taking hold.

Match Group holds a unique position in solving one of the most important challenges of our time, helping people connect in a world that increasingly feels disconnected. Our focus is on fostering genuine human connection, while ensuring technology strengthens relationships and is the social fabric that brings people together.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Steve to walk through more on the financials.

Thanks, Spencer. We're pleased with our Q3 results, as Match Group total revenue was in line with expectations for the quarter and adjusted EBITDA meaningfully exceeded our expectations excluding a $61 million charge to settle the Candelore v. Tinder, Inc. case on a class-wide basis. Candelore is a 10-year-old case involving Tinder's former age-based pricing. The parties are preparing a long-form agreement reflecting the settlement terms and will then seek approval of the settlement by the court.

In Q3, Match Group's total revenue was $914 million, up 2% year-over-year, up 1% year-over-year on a foreign exchange neutral basis. FX was $4 million better than expected at the time of our last earnings call. Payers declined 5% year-over-year to 14.5 million, while RPP increased 7% year-over-year to $20.58. Indirect revenue of $18 million was up 8% year-over-year, driven primarily by strength in our third-party advertising business.

Moving to total company profitability. In Q3, Match Group's adjusted EBITDA was $301 million, down 12% year-over-year, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 33%. Excluding the $61 million settlement charge and $2 million of restructuring costs, included in the $25 million of restructuring costs announced in May, adjusted EBITDA would have been $364 million, up 6% year-over-year, representing adjusted EBITDA margin of 40%.

Tinder direct revenue in Q3 was $491 million, down 3% year-over-year and down 4% year-over-year FXN. Q3 direct revenue includes an approximately $3 million negative impact from user experience testing in the quarter. Payers declined 7% year-over-year to 9.3 million and RPP increased 5% year-over-year to $17.66. Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $204 million, down 23% year-over-year, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 40%. Excluding the legal settlement charge, adjusted EBITDA would have been $264 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 52%.

Hinge continued its strong momentum in Q3 with direct revenue of $185 million, up 27% year-over-year and up 26% year-over-year FXN. Payers increased 17% year-over-year to 1.9 million and RPP increased 9% to $32.87. Adjusted EBITDA was $63 million, up 22% year-over-year, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 34%.

E&E direct revenue in Q3 was $152 million, down 4% year-over-year and down 5% year-over-year FXN. Payers decreased 13% year-over-year to 2.3 million, while RPP increased 10% year-over-year to $22.22. Adjusted EBITDA was $47 million, up 14% year-over-year, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 30%.

Match Group Asia delivered direct revenue in Q3 of $69 million, down 4% year-over-year on both an as-reported and FXN basis. Excluding the exit of our live streaming businesses, Match Group Asia direct revenue in Q3 was flat year-over-year on both an as-reported and an FXN basis.

Azar direct revenue was flat year-over-year and up 2% year-over-year FXN. Azar direct revenue was negatively impacted by an estimated $3 million after Azar was blocked in Turkey by Turkish regulators in late August. We're pursuing all available legal remedies and working with Turkish regulators to get Azar unblocked. However, it is unclear at this time when that may happen.

Pairs direct revenue was down 1% year-over-year and down 2% year-over-year FXN. Across Match Group Asia, payers increased 6% year-over-year to 1.1 million, while RPP declined 10% year-over-year to $20.73, partially due to the exit of Hakuna mid-last year. Adjusted EBITDA was $15 million, down 14% year-over-year, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 22%.

Looking at costs, including stock-based compensation expense, total expenses were up 1% year-over-year in Q3. Cost of revenue decreased 2% year-over-year and represented 27% of total revenue, down 1 point year-over-year, driven by reduced variable expenses from the shutdown of our live streaming services mid-last year, lower web services costs and lower employee compensation expense from our restructuring efforts.

Selling and marketing costs increased $12 million or 8% year-over-year and represented 19% of total revenue, up 1 point year-over-year, primarily due to increased marketing spend at Tinder, Hinge and Match Group Asia, partially offset by lower employee compensation expense from our restructuring efforts.

General and administrative costs increased 42% year-over-year, up 5 points year-over-year as a percentage of total revenue to 16%, driven primarily by the legal settlement charge, partially offset by lower employee compensation expense from our restructuring efforts.

Product development costs increased 1% year-over-year and were flat year-over-year as a percentage of total revenue at 11%. Depreciation and amortization decreased by $44 million year-over-year to $24 million due to impairments of intangible assets at E&E and Match Group Asia in the prior year quarter and lower internally developed capitalized software costs, primarily at Tinder and Match Group Asia.

Turning to the balance sheet. Our trailing 12-month gross leverage was 3.4x and net leverage was 2.5x at the end of Q3. We ended the quarter with $1.1 billion of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments on hand. In August, we issued $700 million of 6.125% senior notes due 2033. The proceeds from these notes will be used to repay all of the exchangeable senior notes coming due in 2026 on or before maturity and for general corporate purposes. In September, we repurchased $76 million of the 2026 exchangeable senior notes at a discount to par.

Year-to-date through Q3, we delivered operating cash flow of $758 million and free cash flow of $716 million. We repurchased 17.4 million shares at an average price of $32 per share on a trade date basis for a total of $550 million and paid $141 million in dividends, deploying nearly 100% of free cash flow for capital return to shareholders.

In October, we repurchased an additional 3 million shares of our common stock for $100 million on a trade date basis and at an average price of $33 per share. As of October 31, 2025, we reduced diluted shares outstanding by 8% year-over-year. We maintain our commitment to target returning 100% of free cash flow to shareholders through buybacks and the dividend.

Now turning to guidance. We expect Q4 total revenue for Match Group of $865 million to $875 million, up 1% to 2% year-over-year. This range assumes a nearly 2.5 point year-over-year tailwind from FX. FXN, we expect total revenue to be down 1% to 2% year-over-year. We expect Match Group adjusted EBITDA of $350 million to $355 million in Q4, representing a year-over-year increase of 9% and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 41% at the midpoint of the ranges.

Q4 total revenue guidance reflects continued strong performance at Hinge and Tinder performance that is in line with the expectations we had at our last earnings in August, including an expected $14 million negative impact to Tinder direct revenue from user experience testing. It also reflects weaker-than-expected performance at E&E and assumes the continuation of Azar's block in Turkey.

E&E saw weaker trends in Q3, which we are working quickly to address, and we no longer expect Emerging brands' direct revenue growth to offset Evergreen brands' declines in 2025. We expect an estimated $9 million negative impact to Match Group Asia direct revenue from Azar's block in Turkey. We expect indirect revenue to be approximately $15 million in the quarter.

Our Q4 adjusted EBITDA guidance includes $4 million of restructuring-related costs, included in the $25 million of restructuring-related costs announced in May, and an $8 million positive impact from an expected sale of one of our 2 office buildings in L.A. that was not fully utilized.

We are increasing our 2025 full year free cash flow guidance to $1.11 billion to $1.14 billion, which assumes the Candelore settlement will not be paid until Q1 2026. We now expect our 2025 full year tax rate to be in the high-teens.

Now let's open it up to Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan.

Spencer, you mentioned in your prepared remarks that the early investments -- sorry, the early reinvestments are giving you confidence in your strategy. Could you expand a bit on the green shoots you're seeing across the broader company and then also at Tinder specifically?

Yes. Thanks, Cory. Let me start with Tinder and then if we want to expand from there, we will. At Tinder, we now have a clear mission statement, which we understand. So we know why we're building what we're building. We have clear consumer personas, so we know who we're building them for. And now we have a clear metric, 6-way conversations or what we call Sparks so that we know how to measure whether we're driving good user outcomes.

And Sparks, we think, are a good measure of product efficacy. Globally, they're down in the low single-digit range year-over-year, but they're improving and close to flat. And it's actually quite a bit better than now, which has kind of stabilized in the 9%, 10% kind of high single-digit year-over-year range.

Sparks coverage. As I said just a moment ago, Sparks coverage is actually up year-over-year, but it's up the most among U.S. Gen Z. So all this by way of saying the product is working better today to help Sparks something new with someone new than it was a year ago. That's encouraging.

There are a couple of reasons why that the product is having -- has improved efficacy. The first is a lot of our recommendations tests are bearing fruit. So at any point in time, we have dozens, sometimes hundreds of different recommendation algorithms in the market. And we ended up finding one of them, it actually improves women matches by 4% and improves Sparks and improves retention, with no revenue trade-off, which is really uncommon. Usually, when we have recommendation improvements that improve user outcomes, it comes at some revenue hit. And in this case, it did not. So we've rolled this out globally. Our work is not done on [ REX ]. We are always continuing to improve them, but I'm encouraged by where we're headed. The second -- so moving from REX is #1.

Number two, I'll turn to Double Date. So Double Date continues to resonate really well with our target users. As I think I mentioned just a moment ago, adoption for Double Date is up quite a bit. The stat I don't think I shared yet is that about 17% of U.S. users age 18 to 22 now have a Double Date pair. And that's a big deal. If you think about that, think about a Gen Z 18- to 22-year-old American user of Tinder, almost 1 in 5 of them are now using Tinder with a friend to swipe on Pairs of people. So that's changing perception of what Tinder is and how they use it, and that's critical for us to drive reconsideration and ultimately, MAU growth.

Finally, I will just hit on a basket of features at Tinder, which, in the aggregate, help people assess the whole person rather than just quickly assessing the attractiveness of the photo. These are features like contextual likes, which Hinge pioneered, features like putting biographical information on the first photo. And the good news here is those types of features have improved user outcomes like Sparks without impacting revenue. So we were prepared to accept the small revenue hit for these types of features, but many of them actually just improved user outcomes and have not impacted revenue.

Let me sort of pause there. I'm happy to elaborate on the road map and kind of where it's going, but that brings you pretty current with what we've shipped on Tinder over the last couple of months and the early positive results that we're seeing on user outcomes.

And the next question comes from Nathan Feather with Morgan Stanley.

Really encouraging to see the faster product velocity at Tinder. I guess any way to get a sense if that's also accelerating the curve as you think of user outcomes and underlying metrics? And connected to that, as you start prioritizing user outcomes, you mentioned a negative Tinder revenue headwind in 4Q. I guess to what extent should we expect that to continue into next year as you continue to make these product improvements?

Thanks, Nathan. It's probably a little too early for us to know the answer to your question about 2026. What we're in the midst of right now is evaluating all these tests in key markets, including in Australia, where we're kind of throwing the kitchen sink in terms of user outcomes and marketing efficiencies in order to see what it takes to turn around user outcomes and audience in a couple of key markets so that we can decide how we want to run the company in 2026 with respect to profitability.

What we -- what Steve, I think, highlighted in his prepared remarks were a potential $14-ish million impact on Tinder revenue, which is baked into guidance for Q4. This comes from features like different recommendation algorithms that we're testing still to try to improve user outcomes even further, rolling out new Modes.

So of course, today, we have College Mode and Double Date Mode, but there are several more Modes on the way, and those might come at small cost to revenue. Building out open messaging and giving more free user outcomes like letting users see a couple free see who likes you pairs and redesigning certain aspects of Tinder, building out chemistry into the main card stack and rolling that out into more geographies, rolling face checkout across the whole United States by end of year, which I don't think I mentioned that in the prepared remarks, but now we're targeting face check through the whole U.S. by end of year and globally with the possible exception of the EU and the U.K. by spring.

All of this is taking us towards a product event in spring 2026 for the media, for influencers, for investors and hopefully, we'll see many of you there, where we'll show the world what we've been building at Tinder over the last -- I guess, by that point, it will be around 6 months-or-so and also what's coming. And that's a real catalyzing event, which has the Tinder team rallying with urgency around building product as much as products as we can to improve user outcomes by that spring 2026 event.

And the next question comes from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer.

So just maybe follow up a little bit. I mean you did elaborate in the letter that you plan to unlock $40 million of payment savings. Is the idea that like if you do decide to lean in more into these, I guess, kind of cleanup initiatives or however you want to describe them, that $90 million could help potentially offset that revenue headwind next year?

And I guess, like to that point on Project Aurora and like if you did go kind of fully roll this out, like, I guess, should investors assume like how dramatically would you be willing to let like revenue come down to kind of end up with like the right place from a user experience standpoint?

Why don't I take the first part of that question. Here's the way I think about the $90 million. The $90 million gives us clear flexibility, right, and optionality. And as Spencer just said, the $14 million Q4 impact from Tinder user outcome testing is an estimate, right? These are tests. So it's probably premature to speculate on whether we'll need the $90 million to offset the revenue declines or whether there will be revenue declines at all until we see how these tests play out. And so the plan is to continue testing throughout the rest of the quarter, to go through our annual planning process like we always do and then we'll give clear guidance on 2026 in a lot more detail on our investment strategy and the outcome of these tests and all the learnings we've gathered at that time. That's the plan.

And the next question comes from Ben Black with Deutsche Bank.

This is Kunal for Ben. A couple on Hinge. And right from the beginning, Hinge was designed to be deleted or meant to be deleted. Has the engagement profile of the users kind of changed since the beginning? And then you talked about how Hinge is expanding into Mexico and Brazil in the coming months. How does that change the addressable market?

Yes. Thanks, Kunal, good questions. Yes, Hinge is really meant to be the last dating app that you'll ever use and Tinder is meant to be the first dating app that you'll ever use. So that positioning is clear in terms of how we think about marketing the 2 apps and in terms of the product road map and focus of the teams at Hinge and Tinder. That positioning for Hinge hasn't changed since Match Group purchased it. It's been very consistent. And I think that consistency is one of the reasons for Hinge's continued success.

Hinge just launched in Mexico a couple of weeks ago. It's off to a faster start in Mexico than when Hinge launched in Europe several years ago. So that's extremely encouraging. Brazil will launch in the next few weeks. And when you look at Hinge's success in the markets that it's in or even this recent fast start in Mexico, it gives me a lot of optimism that the total addressable market for Hinge is massive, that this customer segmentation or psychographic segmentation between Tinder opening a world of possibilities at the kind of fun spontaneous side of dating and Hinge being for more serious and intentional daters, that duality should be true globally. And I don't -- it's hard for me to imagine there would be a country where there wouldn't be an opportunity for an intentional dating app like Hinge to be a category or a leader in that segment.

As we go through the annual planning process that Steve mentioned over the next couple of weeks, we'll be thinking through which markets to expand Hinge to in 2026. We already have integrated certain areas of our go-to-market such as Asia, where Match Group now provides shared services for all of our brands as we expand to new markets in Asia and that allows us to even more efficiently and effectively and intelligently expand to new markets in a coordinated manner, so that's the type of thing that only our multi-brand scaled portfolio as the category leader can provide and I think should be an even greater tailwind as Hinge launches into new markets in 2026.

The next question comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

I think based on the early learnings in Australia, how do you think about the philosophically going to market with a wider array of offerings and changes to Tinder all at once relative to looking out towards next year and thinking about being more strategic and sort of directed in the way certain enhancements go global, either by country by country or by geo? Just curious how you think about that.

Yes. It's a good question, Eric. The interesting thing about this category, which can easily be forgotten by people that aren't in it day to day, is that the company and the brands build products and then we market them. But ultimately, we're in the service of introducing strangers to strangers. And so the success of the products really rely on the quality and behavior of those in our community.

So one of the reasons that we're doing Project Aurora is to try to not just improve the actual feature set, but increase the marketing, focus on trust and safety there, kind of turn that whole market around with vigor in the aggregate, so -- because the ecosystem hangs together in these products in a way that e-commerce really doesn't have that experience.

So in terms of how we roll this out, these types of changes in 2026, I do want to be clear that we're not standing still. So for example, the REX algorithm that I mentioned that's in Australia, we've also rolled that out in other markets. Face Check, which we've rolled out in Australia, we've also rolled out in a handful of other markets.

So we're certainly not waiting for a clean read from a single market, but it is helpful for us as we decide what the answer is to, I think it was Jason's question, about 2026 and profitability for next year. We will benefit from having greater insight into how the product investments and the marketing hang together to improve the whole ecosystem, and that will help us articulate what the plan is for 2026.

The next question comes from Ygal Arounian with Citi.

Spencer, you mentioned MAU is kind of stabilizing in this down 9%, 10% range. And as we think about the initiatives you're rolling out all the way from kind of the single stuff in certain markets, the whole kitchen sink like you said in Project Aurora, how do you think about the time line for -- you're seeing some of these KPIs and green shoots, like what's the time line to when you think MAUs can start to turn around and start to move in the other direction?

And then on the in-app payment, the upside to the savings that you're seeing now versus what you called out last quarter, can you talk about what's driving that? What you've seen that's driving more savings?

Yes, I'll take the first question. So a number of the product initiatives that we've been doing to improve user outcomes actually have the effect of hurting monthly active users. For example, Face Check hurts monthly active users by a little bit, at least initially, a couple of percentage points.

And the recommendation algorithm also can have the effect of hurting male monthly active users. It improves female retention, the female experience, but that can have the effect of pulling female attention away from certain male users and then we sometimes lose their visits. And that's okay.

So the fact that MAU is hanging in there in the high single-digit year-over-year, even while we're improving user outcomes is a good sign, just as the fact that we're able to improve user outcomes at minimal impact to revenue with a couple of the examples I cited, that's also a good sign.

I'll let you talk to the IP.

Yes, I can take the IP, sure. Yes, we've made a lot of progress over the last few months on alternative payments. And you're right, the expected savings in 2026 has gone up quite a bit. So let me just give you a little bit more detail.

Basically, back in August, Hinge had yet to start testing. We said it was going to start testing in September. That happened, and we were sort of extrapolating Tinder and E&E results and seeing about a 30% shift to web payments, of course, in the U.S., and we extrapolated that out to about a 10-point increase in net revenue, which equates to about $65 million in savings in 2026.

Now as of October, actually Tinder, Hinge and most of the E&E apps are now fully rolled out. So we've rolled these apps out faster than we sort of originally planned, which is good and Hinge saw really strong results out the gate better than E&E and Tinder we're seeing. And since August, Tinder has also done a really great job, as has E&E in continuing to optimize.

So now with all -- with most of our apps, including Tinder and Hinge, rolled out 100% in the U.S., fully optimized, we're seeing a 40% to 60% shift to web depending on the app, which translates into a 15-point increase in net revenue and $90 million of savings. So the net of it is strong results at Hinge out the gate and continued optimization at Tinder and E&E has resulted in more of those payments going to web, which is resulting in more savings.

And the other thing I'll just mention, I don't know if you caught this, but Google mid-last week updated it to Play Store policy, allowing for web payments as well in the U.S. without fees similar to the Apple situation, and so we plan to test there, too. That's a smaller opportunity. We have less Android users in the U.S., and we have Apple users and also the fee we pay Google for in-app purchases is more like 18% versus the 27% we pay Apple. So there's less savings to be had from shifting to web. But if you sort of pencil it out, our early estimate is about a $10 million to $15 million additional savings through Google on an annualized basis. So we're excited about that opportunity, too. We'll start testing and confirm those initial estimates.

And the next question comes from John Blackledge with TD Cowen.

It's Logan Whalley on for John. Could you talk about any traction or the traction that you cited from recent marketing efforts? And then kind of maybe how you approach the opportunity with last daters versus those that have never used the app before? And then sticking to marketing on the cost side, maybe how you're thinking about marketing spend and the traditionally more expensive 4Q advertising season?

Yes. So I'll take the very first -- the very last part of that first, which is we do go lighter on advertising in Q4. Our seasonal peak tends to be after Christmas, kind of people make a New Year's resolution about starting to date a new, and we benefit from that and we spend into it. But between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the media market is more expensive and -- because of e-commerce and other consumables, and we tend to pull our marketing spend back.

In terms of overall marketing, we just completed Project Prism, which was Match Group's first ever attempt to put marketing spend on an apples-to-apples basis across all of our brands to create a shared framework to assess the efficacy of marketing spend so that we'll have a point of view now about going into 2026, if we were going to put $5 million or $10 million against brand X, what is the likely number of downloads that it would acquire? What's the user and gender mix? What's the user retention? What's the cost to generate a Spark or contact exchange or other KPIs that we track across our different brands?

So we now have a rubric that puts every -- all our brands on the same footing. This is something that we worked with an outside resource on a marketing, an executive, a person that used to run marketing for me at Zillow Group; and before that, we worked together at Expedia Group. So she has created shared marketing frameworks in several multi-brand Internet companies before. And that project has been really illuminating in order to inform our 2026 decisions.

So if you take all these different things together that we've mentioned, the Tinder user tests, the Tinder testing in Australia, a shared understanding of what marketing efficacy is across all of our brands, the IAP savings that Steve just talked about, and now you have a little window into what the next couple of weeks are going to be for us as we go through business unit by business unit, creating our annual plans for 2026, rolling them up, discussing them with the Board, making final decisions about how we're going to operate the company by the end of the year and then communicating it with all of you in early February at earnings.

But it's great to be going into that process with the work done on Project Prism, so we understand marketing efficacy by brand. And with the work kind of still in flight on the Tinder front in terms of the different testing that we've been doing, but much more well informed than we were even a couple of weeks ago now that we have a lot of these features in flight, and we're starting to see the impact on user outcomes as well as revenue and expenses.

The next question comes from Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research.

Spencer, you mentioned you'll assess next year's growth and investment opportunities as you think about how your product and marketing is trending. I guess my question is, what are -- what will you be looking at? Is it predominantly the inflection in top of the funnel that will give you more confidence in your product road map working and/or marketing initiatives working? And if it is somewhat slower than expected, is it fair to assume you'll reinvest to the degree that it makes sense? How should we think about that as we think of next year?

Yes. I'm solving for or maximizing against what I think will make the stock price higher 3 years from now. And -- so I mean, there are hundreds of puts and takes that go into that from user outcomes to revenue to audience on Tinder market expansion on Hinge. I mean there are so many different variables that impact that. But if there's a single North Star to try to explain how I'm bringing it all together and the way the leadership team is bringing it all together, that's the one.

I think with -- I think the big question marks going into 2026, of course, are going to be what level of profitability do we choose to run Tinder at? I mean to date, Match Group has chosen to run Tinder at a much higher level of profitability than Hinge. And the 2 components of that are how much benefit users get? In other words, if we decide to give more value to users and what type of cost of acquisition we choose to deploy against Tinder? So those are some of the key questions that we'll face going into planning. And now you understand how I'm making the decision is what do I think the stock price will be a couple of years from now.

Of course, the key components of the stock price are -- I mean, you know this better than anyone, stock prices at net present value of stream of future cash flows ultimately divided by the shares outstanding, which, of course, we've -- as Steve mentioned, we bought back 8% of our shares year-over-year, which is pretty extraordinary and is worth highlighting.

And the next question comes from Youssef Squali with Truist.

Spencer, can you please talk about the state of the broader dating market in the U.S., how it's performing, given the macro environment, competitive intensity and any early read or impacts from Facebook Dating? And then Steve, just quickly, what does the Q4 revenue guide imply in terms of payers growth and RPP?

Yes. We've always had competitors. I'm sure we'll always continue to have competitors, whether they be big tech companies or startups. I like our brands. I like the network effects that the brands provide. Our biggest challenge as a company is growing category acceptance. I think there was a prior question, which I only answered partially about bringing new people into the category. There are 250 million people globally that are single and dating in countries that we serve that are not on dating apps, 250 million; and only 30 million of those have used dating apps and they're not currently using data apps. 220 million of them have never been in the category.

So to the extent that Meta and Facebook or any competitor educates people that they can use a dating app, they can use the power of technology to safely meet people and get up off the couch and go out on dates and form human connections that benefits Match Group as the category leader, especially because this is a category with multi-app usage.

So we welcome any and all initiatives, whether they've come from Match Group, such as our Face Check initiative, which we think brings new people into the category as we improve trust and safety in the apps or others such as Meta to raise attention and awareness to the power of technology to drive human connections. That's what we're here for.

Steve, you can do the second one?

Yes. Let me touch on macro first. The way I would describe it is we continue to see the same trend that we've seen. Earlier this year, we've talked about the last couple of calls, where it's some -- a little bit of weakness, not a lot, but a little bit of weakness on ALC amongst younger users on Tinder, that trend hasn't gotten any worse, but it also hasn't gotten any better either. So a little bit more of the same.

We're not seeing it on any other part of the Tender business. We're not seeing it on the subscription revenue and we're also not seeing it across any of our other brands or at Hinge. So we'll keep looking at it closely, but that's what we're seeing today.

And then on payers and RPP, we don't typically guide to payers and RPP. Specifically, we're focused on revenue and user growth. But those metrics have been -- the trend of those metrics has been relatively stable, just like MAU trends have been relatively stable and I expect something similar in Q4.

The next question comes from Chris Kuntarich with UBS.

Maybe just one on Face Check. You mentioned it being fully rolled out in the U.S. by the end of the year. I just want to clarify, does that include existing users? And if it doesn't, could you just give us a bit of an update on your thinking about rolling out to that cohort of users for Tinder? And then maybe just one follow-up. Any early read on the level of inefficient marketing spend that you've been able to identify with Project Prism?

Yes. Face Check only applies to newly created accounts because that's the vector that bad actors use to attack us. So spam accounts from bad actors create brand-new accounts, and therefore, if we can stop those with Face check and that's exactly what's happening. So as I've mentioned, 60% reduction in interactions with spam accounts.

And I don't remember if I mentioned -- I think I mentioned it vaguely, but to give a little more detail on the perceived improvement in trust and safety from Face Check, we survey users and we say, do you believe the profiles that you see on Tinder are real? And in Face Check markets, 5% to 10% more folks are saying, yes, they believe that the profiles they see on Tinder are real. So it's not just improving safety and authenticity, it's actually improving perceived authenticity, which is so critical to driving category reconsideration.

Marketing. Yes, I guess what I would say there is, unsurprisingly, Hinge's marketing drives new registrants, new downloads or Sparks at a lower cost per than Tinder's does and that makes sense for a couple of reasons. First of all, Hinge is a newer brand. Hinge's product is better at taking users and kind of moving it down the funnel in that way. And more of Tinder spend is focused on brand marketing than direct response user acquisition.

The reason for that is Tinder is trying to drive reconsideration and change user perception, whereas Hinge has a pristine user perception. And so therefore, most of their spend can be focused on user acquisition. And user acquisition spend is always going to be more effective on paper than brand spend will be. So that's not surprising.

And as we go into 2026, and we think about the marketing levels that we want to run the company at and the allocations between the brands, we'll have to weigh that, of course. But boy, it feels good to be going to that decision actually having some levers to look at. And previously, we were kind of flying this plane without an altimeter and now we actually can see some metrics across different brands and start making informed decisions based on that.

And the last question comes from Robert Coolbrith with Evercore ISI.

This is Georgia on for Rob. Thanks for the color on Sparks and MAUs. I guess, last quarter, you noted some encouraging movement at the top of the funnel. Can you provide an update on that so far?

Yes, we're -- thanks for the question, Georgia. We -- our Tinder monthly active users at the top of the funnel is basically down high single digits, similar to where it's been for the last couple of months. It moves around a little bit based on different tests that we're running, as I already mentioned, initiatives like Face Check and recommendations can improve user outcomes, but can and sometimes do hurt mostly active users. But it basically stabilized kind of in that range.

And it's worth noting Tinder revenue is down 3% year-over-year this quarter and last quarter, it was down 4%. So revenue also has stabilized. Obviously, we don't want it to stabilize down year-over-year, but it's nice to see that we're starting to see some stabilization for some of those metrics. And of course, as I think I said last call, the first way to -- the first thing you have to do if you're trying to turn around the line that's slipping down is you've got to get that line to flat. So it's nice to see some of those lines starting to flatten.

Thank you very much, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Okay. I think in the interest of time, we're going to start with our next fireside chat. I'm just going to check on the clock down here. There we go. Okay. Well, first of all, it's my pleasure to have the team from Match here for the conference again this year joined by Spencer Rascoff, CEO. Spencer, thanks so much for being part of the conference.

Thank you. I'm going to start with the safe harbor. So stick with me. During this presentation and during the question-and-answer session, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements. These statements are subject to risk a everyone. [indiscernible] Let me start at the beginning of that sense. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from our views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in our periodic reports filed with the SEC.

Spencer, for those who are a little less familiar with the story and your background, can you start by maybe talking about how you came to be involved in Match and now you're the CEO of Match.

Absolutely. Well, I'm a Goldman Sachs alum. So my first job was Goldman Sachs Investment Banking as an M&A banker. Then my first -- my next job was Hotwire. So I started Hotwire here a couple of blocks away in 1999. The reason I mentioned that was we sold Hotwire to Expedia in 2003, and Expedia created Expedia Group, which, of course, became Expedia, Hotwire, Hotels.com, Travelocity, Orbitz, Vrbo, Trivago, et cetera. I then left Expedia Group to start Zillow, which through 17 acquisitions will become Zillow Group. And Zillow Group is Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy, Hotpads, realestate.com and other brands. That will become relevant in just a moment.

I left Zillow after about 15 or 16 years, super proud of what we helped build at Zillow. But in 2020, I wanted to take a break. I started my family office. I started incubating start-ups. I started, I believe, 8 companies, 6 of them were with teams formerly at Zillow, so former people on my teams. And I was on a couple of boards during those periods. I was on the Board of TripAdvisor. I was on the Board of Palantir, and I was on the Board of Match Group.

I loved the mission of Match Group. I think we're doing incredibly important work. The only thing more important than helping people find a house is helping people find a spouse. And about 6 months -- 6 or 8 months ago, the Board came to me and asked if I would consider being CEO, and I jumped at the opportunity. So I've been in the CEO seat for 7-ish months, and we've gotten a lot done in a short period of time, but we still have plenty of more work to do.

Yes. And I would say that comes through on the earnings call that you are running with intensity right now at Match. I think you very much shared that message on the public earnings calls. Let's take a step back first and talk about the market opportunity. I think one of the biggest debates I have with investors always comes back to what's the market opportunity for dating. In a post-COVID world, there's always a lot of are people still going to find each other online, which age demographics, where does the opportunity set sit? What's your world view? And how do you bring that back to the strategy at Match?

This was one of the things that drew me to the company. It's still relatively early in the category, even though we are the category leader, the clear category leader, I think, around 10x the size of the nearest pure-play competitor. There are still 250 million single daters in the world that are not on any dating apps. And those are just in countries that we actually -- that are within our serviceable addressable market.

Only around 7% of singles who are daters in developing countries are on apps, only around 30% in developed countries. So it's still relatively early. And yet these -- the product works, around half of all relationships in the U.S. started online. A new relationship starts on Tinder every 3 seconds. So these are products that have a high degree of efficacy, but they're still relatively new.

And if you look at other categories like home shopping, where it's almost entirely online or transportation or travel booking. I mean those are much more highly penetrated categories than the one of online dating. And I guess the last thing I'd say is there is a loneliness epidemic globally. People are more lonely than ever before. And so Match Group is one of the only companies that can put a dent in that at global scale and help people live a less lonely life, which is the goal that we aspire to as a company.

Yes. Let's focus on that because I think one of the subsets of this debate among investors is sort of the Gen Z user base. And there's a lot been written about the loneliness dynamic in that user base and where they sit socially coming out of what happened over the COVID period a number of years ago. What sort of opportunity and challenge does that generation present to online dating companies?

Yes. I think there's a common misconception that Gen Z doesn't use dating apps. they do. All you have to do is look at -- sorry, at Hinge's growth. And Hinge is growing audience by 20% year-over-year, growing revenue by 25% year-over-year. In many countries, Hinge is growing audience by 60%. So Hinge is doing incredibly well in the intentioned dating category, even with Gen Z. So Hinge's tagline is the app that's designed to be deleted. It's meant to be your last dating app. Tinder is meant to be your first dating app.

And so Gen Z is the loneliest generation, and they're the most digitally connected generation. They just -- Tinder wasn't innovating enough to continue to grow audience in that demo. Hinge was in serving a different customer segment. So one of my first and most important orders of business, which I'm sure we'll get to is rebooting innovation at Tinder in order to reestablish product market fit with young users. But it's not true, just to close on this point, it is not true at all to say, oh, Gen Z doesn't date or Gen Z doesn't use dating apps. The data just doesn't support that at all.

Understood. So let's come back to Tinder there. You've obviously laid out a plan to put the division in where you wanted to be 6, 12, 18 months from now. There's been some early signs of success that popped up on the last earnings call, but you also struck a very interesting dynamic of like it's still very, very early days, and we haven't even implemented a lot of what we're going to implement. So where are we on repositioning Tinder the way you envision it and the team envisions it being repositioned?

So I have a leadership philosophy that I've had my whole career dating back to Zillow or even Hotwire, which is great people, properly organized and motivated, build great products. Those products attract audience, which generate revenue, profit and shareholder value. So where are we on Tinder? We now have great people. We've changed a lot of the people in the leadership roles at Tinder, including me. So I'm now CEO of Tinder and also CEO of Match Group. That's something that I did at Zillow also. I was the CEO of Zillow Group, but I was also the CEO of Zillow. We have a new Head of Product. We have a new Head of Engineering. We have a new Head of Design.

We have 4 of our 5 product team leads are new. So the leadership team at Tinder is quite new. Importantly, most of them are not new to Match Group. Most of them were in kind of a separate innovation function, and I brought them over into Tinder. So they understood the category, they understood the company, but they weren't given the keys to the car, and now I've given them the keys to the car. And I'm -- I guess, let's see where am I? I guess I'm the pit boss. I don't know. I'm the team manager.

But anyway, I'm helping them succeed on the racetrack. So great people, properly organized. After I started putting the right people in place, I completely changed the org structure and org design at Tinder. And this is a bit of a kind of, I don't know, HRE, not very Wall Streety riff to talk about, but org design is super important, especially at a product-driven organization. And the prior org design at Tinder, the one that I inherited was very different. It was one with a couple of hundred software engineers, a couple of dozen program managers, a couple of dozen designers, a couple -- like a couple -- 20 or 30 people in business intelligence. It's not the way a modern product and engineering-led organization should be structured. It's not the way Zillow was structured. It's not the way Hinge is structured. So we did a total reorg at Tinder, one aspect of which was to reduce the number of managers, and we reduced about 1/4 of all managers to make the team smaller and give people more agency.

But the more important change was to create small pods. And again, this is the way Zillow is structured. So the way Tinder is structured now is there's a 2 pizza team. This is the Amazon terminology, meaning they can be fed with 2 pizzas. So it's around 10 people. There's a 2 pizza team just on profiles or just on the recommendation algorithm or just on push notifications. So a different surface area of the app or just on college, so just building features specific to college. And that 2 pizza team feels like a little startup. They have their own release cycle, their own prioritization queue, their own objectives and key results. The product team lead there feels like the CEO of that little startup, and they have real agency and a sense of ownership and urgency around that small area of surface area of the particular app. So great people properly organized, build great products, and that's where we're starting to -- we're just getting to.

So Double Date is a good example of this. When I started in February, we were testing a double date feature on Tinder in just 1 or 2 countries. Based on good results and a sense of urgency, we rolled that out globally by -- I think it was July instead of by the end of the year. Double Date has great resonance with Gen Z because that's how young people want to interact. They don't want the high stakes, high-pressure environment where they get paired with one person and now they're in a chat, and they have to figure out what to say and how to act and how to be clever even though they missed their high school prom because of COVID or even though they may not be comfortable with small talk. So you and I are paired up now, and we're swiping through pairs of people.

And now we pair up with another set of people, and now we're in a 4-way chat and then we meet in person. So Double Date is a much more lightweight way to connect. It's not as scary or intimidating. There's a whole other remaining product road map on Tinder that some of which I can get into and most of which I can't, which is about these lighter weight ways to connect, which is what will resonate with Gen Z. And that's kind of where we're at right now. So it's not quite the first inning of this product-led turnaround, but it's probably the second inning, maybe the beginning of the third, probably closer to the second inning.

If you were someone in the audience here, what would you be looking for from the outside in for proof points that all of this from an implementation strategy and an output or a yield strategy would sort of work?

Yes. So I mean the KPIs that we look at, the metrics that I look at every single day, start with top of funnel in terms of audience. So it's registrations and reactivations and retention. That gets you to monthly active users. And then where I really focus my attention is in the user outcome part of the funnel. And the 2 keys or outcomes that I look at are 4-way chat. So that's once I get paired with somebody or once a double date gets paired with 2 other people. What percent of the time or how many total people are engaged in a conversation back and forth, which lasts at least 4 back and forth.

Obviously, we want to last a lot longer than that, but that's kind of a leading indicator. So we call that 4-way chat. And then at the bottom of our funnel, kind of the closest thing to like a purchase behavior, if you will, is contact exchange. So that's when people are chatting and then eventually after the 10th or 20th or 30th back and forth, somebody says, "Hey, let me give you my Instagram handle or let me give you my WhatsApp handle or let me give you my cell phone number so that we can text or direct message so we can organize a date. We call that contact exchange. So those are the 2 KPIs that I look at, 4-way chat and contact exchange.

We haven't made those SEC type publicly available KPIs that we disclose every quarter. We're considering trying to find ways to give investors more visibility into some of these metrics. It's hard. A lot of these metrics have noise and have problems and challenges and privacy issues and issues in certain countries. And so we make inferences about certain metrics. So it's difficult for us to make those like SEC-able metrics, but we're trying to find ways to give investors more visibility. What I did last quarter was we started to give kind of ranges of some of these metrics and some color so that at least we're trying to be as transparent as possible on how these metrics start to unfold.

Okay. Understood. You referenced earlier Hinge, obviously, seeing good growth, executing in a nice way and also now increasingly expanding internationally. How should investors think about the core market opportunity for Hinge as much as the international opportunity?

Yes. I mean Hinge is probably the most underappreciated and at least focused on success story in consumer tech. If it were a stand-alone company, I think it would get more visibility. That's -- we're not considering that, don't worry. But I mean, I'm trying to give Hinge more visibility to the investor community because I think it's an important story that needs to be told.

So Hinge is on a path to $1 billion of revenue in 2027. It's in the $700 million to $750 million revenue range. And it just hit a milestone of 15 million monthly active users. It's already the #1 dating app in a couple of countries. It's the #2 dating app in many countries. And yet it's still only in, gosh, I don't know, 10 to 20 countries, somewhere in that range. And so what we've said to investors is we're going to launch in Brazil and Mexico this year.

That's -- I'm excited for that, and we're looking at other country launches next year. The reason Hinge has been so successful is because it has a very refined and kind of crystallized understanding of the problem that it's solving. And as I said, it's the app that's designed to be deleted. It's meant to be your last dating app. And they build for that. The feature set is all about that. The product marketing is all about that. It's just -- it's like a -- it's a very tight positioning.

And my goal is for Tinder to be -- have equally a tight positioning and product road map in a different space, frankly, a space with a bigger TAM, which is the first dating app that you ever use. And so if we can make Tinder as kind of crystal clear on what it's going after as Hinge, then I think Match Group will be even more successful.

Okay. Understood. You also have a number of community-specific apps in sort of your emerging category. Talk a little bit about the role of applications like that against your world view of where dating is going longer term.

Yes. I mean this -- again, this is another undertold story of Match Group. We've incubated brands now in our affinity segment in the last 5 years have gone from 0 revenue to about $150 million of revenue across these different, what we call affinity apps or community apps. So these are apps like BLK that serve black users, UZU that serves Asian users, Archer, which serves gay users, HER, which serves queer women; Chispa, which serves the Hispanic community. So this is a family of apps, most of which have a shared back end, which allow us to build one set of features and then it gets deployed across all of those consumer front end simultaneously.

We think in a category like dating, it's very important to be multi-brand because consumers want to fish in multiple ponds. And our data shows that it's not cannibalistic -- doesn't cannibalize revenue, for example, for someone to use Hinge and Chispa or Tinder and BLK that it's additive because they want to be looking in a couple of different places for whatever personal relationship solution they're looking for.

This also has been a good canvas for us to [indiscernible] from an M&A standpoint. So we bought Salams, which is a Muslim app, and we bought HER, which, as I mentioned, is a queer female app. And the recipe that we follow for these acquisitions is, first, we give them our knowledge, kind of give them our playbook from 25 years of understanding monetization and consumer insights in the category.

Most of the time, these are tiny start-ups, 5, 10, 15 employees, and they greatly benefit from Match Group's long history of category leadership, just knowledge sharing. Typically, then we start integrating the back end. So we put them on our E&E platform, our Evergreen and Emerging platform. And once they get on the E&E platform, they get all of the monetization hooks that we've built over decades. These are things like weekly subscriptions or billing reminders or upsells -- paywall upsells inside the app, things that we've gotten very, very good at from having done this for so long and that most of these start-ups don't have the benefit from.

We also then get cost savings because typically, the product and engineering team that built that start-up isn't part of that next chapter because it's on a shared code base with the E&E platform. And then finally, we cross-sell audience from app to app. So a plenty of fish user might very well get sort of a pop up in the app that would say, hey, do you want to also use Archer or do you want to also use HER; do you want to also use OurTime, et cetera, based on their particular demographics.

And cross-selling audience from one app to the other with one tap where you automatically create your profile in this second app with just one tap, that generates a lot of audience for these acquired apps as well. So we followed this road map with Salams very successfully. We're now following with HER. We look for other bolt-on acquisitions that expand our TAM and are accretive through the recipe that I just laid out.

Maybe just one follow-up there because having covered Expedia and other groups with multiple brands over my career. When do you get to a point where you've got enough brands that you think you have the market covered and some of the incrementalism might be lost? How do you think about the capital allocation decision versus managing all the brands and thinking about the market opportunity?

Yes. Well, this is why I mentioned my history at Expedia Group of having created Hotwire and then my history creating Zillow Group. I've run now 2 of these multi-brand consumer marketplaces in 2 different categories. This is a much better category for multi-brand than travel. there's no real reason why Travelocity should exist and Orbit should -- the brand positioning between those 2 is really minimal at this point, whereas in the dating category these brands exist because you're fishing in different ponds.

You might use a OurTime because you're a 60-year-old dater and OurTime is focused on that demo or you might use Archer because you're a gay male and Archer is focused on that demo. It's very different than Expedia Group, for example, where those brands don't really have clear differentiation. So, in terms of when might we be done, we still have some gaps in our portfolio, important affinity groups that we don't discretely serve. We of course, serve them in our genpop apps like Hinge or Tinder, but we don't discretely serve the Jewish demographics, for example, we don't have a dedicated Jewish apps, just as an example.

So I think there's still opportunities for us to either incubate or acquire certain other affinity apps. And there's also more work to be done on driving synergy across these different brands. When I got here 6 months ago or 7 months ago, for example, Tinder and Hinge, the Tinder and Hinge teams didn't really collaborate or communicate very much at all with one another.

Now, there are certain aspects that we've integrated like certain aspects of trust and safety and a lot of areas where we're at least collaborating. And so having more of a match group philosophy has been an important change that I brought to the company.

I know it slightly predates your time as CEO, but you were on the Board, the investor event that was held at the end of last year talked a lot about AI and how AI might change the dating landscape. With that as a jumping off point, how has your own view emerged over the last 6, 7 months 1about how to deploy AI from a consumer-facing standpoint and how it might effectively change the end market?

It has huge -- I mean, I wouldn't even say potential because potential makes it sound in the far in the distant future. AI already is infused to most of our products -- into most of our products. So we look at it like with most things as a funnel. So for example, the matching algorithm that chooses whom to show to whom. Hinge has a brand-new AI-driven matching algorithm, which is driving 15% better results as measured by match rates and 4-way conversations and contact exchange.

So at that part of the funnel, AI is having a huge impact. Towards the bottom of the funnel -- actually, sorry, let's start at the top of the funnel, your profile creation. So both Tinder and Hinge, actually, all of our apps have different AI features in profile creation. For example, Hinge has prompt feedback. So when you're filling out your profile on Hinge, it will say, you got a question like what's your favorite meal of the day.

If you write Brunch, the AI will say, well, that's great, Spencer, but tell a funny story about -- what was the interesting bunch that you had. And then you right, the waiter spilled food on me at the meal. And then the AI will say, that sounds great. How did you react? And anyway, it teases out from you more interesting content. And the end result is a much more clever, interesting charismatic profile, not written for you by AI, but teased out of you by AI.

And the result is when people are perusing the profiles, it's just much more engaging content. So top of funnel profile creation, kind of mid-funnel matching algorithm, bottom of funnel chat. One of the criticisms of dating apps, and this is a real criticism is that chats are where matches go to die that you'll get matched with somebody and then you'll be in the chat and you'll say, hey, hey, what's up, what's up and then nobody knows what to say to each other.

And this is a real problem that we all face, but we face in the real world when we're trying to flirt or get to know people, but it's particularly acute in dating apps. AI is a very good solution to that. And again, we're not writing prompts. We're not writing content for people, but we are using AI to say, "Hey, Spencer, you wrote in your profile that you like hikes. She wrote in her profile that she likes long walks. Why don't you ask her what -- why don't you tell her what the last hike that you went on was?

And so it's basically kind of suggesting in my ear like a trusted friend what I might want to communicate. Again, not writing for you, we don't want AI talking to AI, but trying to help me put forward a version of myself that might connect with that person. So those are some examples of ways that we bring AI into the product. Internally, we're using AI all the ways that you'd expect a modern tech company to use it.

Every one of our 1,000 software engineers has multiple AI copilots. I'll give you a quick example from the other day. We were having a conversation around whether we should expand our double date feature to triples so that now 3 roommates or 3 friends can join and meet 2 or 3 other people. That's something that in a past life would have taken, I don't know, 6 weeks of user research and prototyping and building wire frames.

In this case, by the end of the day, within a couple of hours through different AI prototyping tools, I could have in my hand an example -- like a working prototype of Tinder with triples because of AI prototyping tools that wouldn't have been possible just even a couple of months ago. So these are just examples of how AI is bringing incredible productivity into the company as well.

Okay. Understood. You had a reorganization at Match earlier this year. Could you talk a little bit about the balance of finding ways to drive operational efficiencies internally. Obviously, this builds on your last answer with respect to AI and redeploying some of that capital back into the business, striking the right balance because obviously, a roomful of investors always cares about margin as an output as well.

Yes. So I mean I'm trying to lead a product-led turnaround at Tinder while also making sure that enough resources are available for Hinge to continue to grow and also manage the E&E business to return some of them to growth. So it's kind of a complicated balance between those 3 different goals. And what I did back in May was we cut in order to save about $100 million of annualized expenses. And again, to be clear, it's good that we're saving the $100 million, but that actually wasn't the primary motivation of those -- the reorg.

The primary motivation was to make sure that we had smaller teams, put people closer to the work, give more agency and accountability to people. But the $100 million of savings was also nice. What we did with that was we've basically given half of that, so $50 million back into the product. Approximately 1/3 of that went towards Tinder user givebacks. So basically improving the value of the Tinder product to Tinder users. I'll come back to that in a second, what I mean by that.

About 1/3 of it went to increased marketing expense across our different brands, which is important at a time, especially when competitors are pulling back, we think it's time to lean in. And about 1/3 of it went to geographic expansion. These are things like Pairs, our Japan app expanding to Korea or Azar, our video chat app expanding to the U.S. or Hinge expanding to Mexico or Brazil. So 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 of the $50 million between those 3 key goals.

The Tinder user givebacks, as an example, we're making changes to make the app even safer like in some countries and states now we're requiring selfie verification. We call it face check. This is something that radically improves the trust and safety of the app because it reduces by about an order of magnitude, the number of spam or bot or fake accounts, but it can cost a little bit of lost revenue. We think that's a trade-off worth making.

But we're paying for that with some of the 1/3 of the $50 million that we've allocated towards when I say Tinder user givebacks. That kind of makes you current. That sort of brings you to today. So where do we go from here with respect to margin? We received a great gift from the [indiscernible] of the ability to let our users choose how they want to pay for our services, either in the app or bouncing out to a mobile web experience. If the user buys through a mobile web experience, of course, we don't pay the App Store fee for the transaction being completed in the App Store.

We've given some estimates of around $65 million of annual cost savings available to us from that. It's changing every day. Hinge just launched a week ago. Hinge was the last of our brands to launch mobile web payments. Hinge didn't have a website because it was always -- it was built in the in-app era, whereas Tinder and OkCupid and Plenty of Fish, they all had web experiences. So our other -- our older brands were faster to build a mobile web experience with click-out payments. Hinge had to build it from scratch. So Hinge just launched.

We're now assessing in service of this product-led turnaround, what type of margin do we want to run the business at? What do we want to do with the savings from the reduced in-app payments? And what do we want to do with the other additional savings from the employee changes back in May. What I've been saying to investors is that the commitments that we made around free cash flow per share and revenue and adjusted EBITDA back in Investor Day in December, even though those weren't my numbers that I put out, I've said that our goal is to continue to maintain those, and we don't have anything to announce in that regard. That's the plan.

Got it. Maybe I'll try to squeeze in a quick one on marketing. I think there's still a debate in the industry, the dating industry about good marketing, bad marketing, chasing growth for the sake of chasing growth. What have been some of your key learnings about how to effectively deploy marketing dollars against the dating.

My key learning is that the way we were doing it before was not optimal. The way we were doing it before was each brand would essentially be given a margin target, an adjusted EBITDA margin target from central. And let's say you're a brand X and you were at a 26% margin last year, you'd be told, well, next year, you need to be at a 29% margin. And they would know what their headcount costs were and their other costs and then the output of that would be a marketing expense at the brand level. That is not how Expedia Group or Zillow Group marketing is allocated, and that is now going into 2026. That's no longer how Match Group brand spend will be allocated.

In other words, there was never before a point of view about if we have one extra dollar of marketing, should we spend it on Hinge or on Tinder or on Archer or on BLK. And if on this brand, should we spend it in this country or that country, it was always done at the brand level as kind of an output of a margin target, which is not, in my view, the right way to do it.

So -- as part of this Spencer creating a one match group philosophy, we've created a single way of measuring marketing efficacy across all brands and all geographies. We brought in a former Zillow and Expedia marketing executive based on the woman that used to run Zillow and Expedia Group marketing to come in on a consulting basis and help create that framework for us. And that's informing the 2026 marketing decisions, which I'm sure I'll talk more about in future earnings calls.

Sure. Understood. I'll squeeze one more in before maybe wrapping us up. Capital allocation, you've talked about it a couple of different ways as the conversations progress. But just put a sort of framework around your priorities. If you think about growth investments, managing a balance sheet, returning capital, M&A, what are your top priorities? What are the nice to haves? What are the must-haves?

We said at Investor Day or not we, I guess, prior management said, but I've maintained that we're going to return 100% of free cash flow to our shareholders in the form of buybacks or dividends. And we're tracking towards that, and we intend to hit that stated goal. We are also in this transitional period from value to growth. So I was -- the Board knew what they were getting when they selected me. I'm a growth CEO. I know how to cut costs, but that's not what gets me up in the morning.

What gets me up in the morning is being a product innovator, building cool stuff that drives user outcomes that grows audience, that grows revenue, I'm a growth CEO. And so my goal very much is to return us to growth and also to build or maybe rebuild our shareholder base with growth-oriented investors like we had at Zillow. And that's what we're doing.

So in terms of capital allocation, -- we're highly profitable, and that's great. We have a lot of margin and profit to give back to shareholders through buyback and dividends, which we are, but we're also becoming a growth company strategically and hopefully, financially as well and also from a shareholder base.

Okay. So we only have about a minute or 2 left. Let's put this all together, growth company, repositioning, Tinder, top strategic priorities. What are the biggest focus areas for you? How does it inform where you think the company is going in the years ahead?

Biggest focus areas are one Match Group, so driving synergies across -- it's not always the cost-saving synergies. It's collaboration or a shared marketing framework or knowledge sharing or audience sharing between the apps. So one Match Group is #1 priority. Number 2 priority is Tinder product-led turnaround, which drives MAU and then revenue growth.

Number 3 is let Hinge continue to be Hinge and give them all the resources available for Hinge to be wildly successful. Those are -- I mean, I could go on. I've got many other priorities, but those are by far the 3 most important.

Okay. Why don't we leave it there. Spencer, thanks so much for being part of the conference. Please join me in thanking Match Group for being part of the conference. Thank you.

Good conference. All right. It looks like we're live. All right. People still rolling in. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Ygal Arounian from the Citi and Internet team. Pleased to have Match Group CFO, Steven Bailey. Thanks so much for being here with us today. We'll take some Q&A towards the end. Mics will go around if anyone has any questions. Just quickly before we start, I'm going to read Match's safe harbor disclosures.

During this presentation, during the Q&A session, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in our periodic reports filed with the SEC.

All right, Steve. You've been CFO for almost a year. There's been a lot of changes at Match, including Spencer coming in as CEO and also leading Tinder. Just would love to hear kind of at the highest level how the culture has changed with Spencer on board, how the company might be operating differently and what that means for Match?

Yes. I've been CFO for almost a year now, like you said, but I've been with the company for 13 years, so a long time. And I have to say, and I've been through a handful of CEOs, and I will say that this is the biggest culture shift that I've seen under Spencer and all my time at Match Group. So it's very exciting. I think he brings a lot of experience more than anything. I think that's what's unique. He's been a public company CEO before with Zillow Group. He's sort of been there, done that. He comes in with a set of principles. He can make decisions very fast and rapid just based on his experience, and he's done a great job shifting the culture.

So it's really just some of the things we've done in short order as we did the reduction in force of about 13% of the company, which was not easy to do, but I think effective. We cut out a lot of the management layer, which you hear a lot of companies talking about right now, which just leads to more autonomy but also accountability. And I think it's allowed us to move faster. So we cut about 20% of managers at Tinder, for example, and that's freed up the company to go a lot faster, which is great to see.

And he's also done a couple of other things that I think were smart, which has really focused the company on outcomes as our sort of guiding principle and a little bit away from short-term monetization, which we've always been so good at, but maybe a little bit to a fault. So he's pointed the company in the right direction. And then we've taken pretty decisive action on the cost-cutting side, which is free to stop to reinvest in some of these growth initiatives we think are important drivers of future success. So I've been very impressed so far. We've taken real -- he's taken decisive action, and I really think we're moving in the right direction.

Okay. Great. Yes, I think it's notable in some of the way, the speed of change you're seeing and some of the aspects, and we'll dig into that a little bit more. But maybe just to start at the macro level on the dating app ecosystem because that still continues to get a lot of attention from investors. And what -- how saturated the market is or what the opportunity is from here. One of the things that we're seeing in the space and with Tinder also is just around trust and safety, some kind of like shrinking to get bigger and navigating the overall user ecosystem. What's your view on where the dating app ecosystem is today and the role that Match can play to get -- to kind of get it back into a healthier place? And do you think we need to expand beyond dating? Is it AI that kind of moves the needle? Just kind of like state of the union on that, and then we'll dig into Match a little bit more.

I'm a numbers guy. So when I think about the opportunity, I just -- I look at the TAM numbers. And the opportunity is pretty clear. Basically, what it says is that category adoption is around 30% in developed countries. So that means 30% of singles are using a dating app, not just a Match Group app but any dating app. It's still pretty low. And in developing countries, regions like Asia, for example, it's even lower, it's 7%. And so that shows you that there's real opportunity there. And then if you peel back the onion even further and you look at active daters because, of course, some singles aren't actively dating. That's a harder group to go after. But if you look at those actively dating right now, there's about 250 million of them across the globe that aren't using dating apps to help. And so that's pretty big relative to our MAU. I think the last time we gave a number was 82 million. And that's -- a lot of that, there's duplication there, right, because we've got users using multiple apps. So if you look at it from a unique perspective, it's lower than 82 million. And so the 250 million is a big opportunity.

And so what we're really focused on is how can we capture that group. And I think it really comes down to product innovation. Maybe we rested on our laurels a bit with Tinder. It really hasn't changed all that much in the last decade. Consumer wants and taste and needs have, particularly with Gen Z. And so it's up to us to get the Tinder product back on track. And I think we've started to do that with features like Double Date, and we've got a great product road map laid out for the rest of the year to help address Gen Z user pain points in particular.

And the last thing I'll say, which gives me a lot of confidence is AI as a tool, right? And if you look back over the history of our industry, we've been here before. We've seen plateauing of the category. I mean that was the case in the 2010, 2011, 2012, and then we had a new technology called the smartphone, and that Tinder took advantage of. They came up with a totally new rethought product experience. You would have not imagined even 5 years earlier when you had the Match.coms of the world on a desktop computer, right? This is a new form factor, a new technology. Tinder came in, took advantage of it, totally rethought the product experience and it blew the category open, I mean particularly with young people.

I think we've kind of been waiting for what's the next technology breakthrough that allows us to rethink how our products work. AI is clearly that for not only us, but a lot of industries. And I think it's given products -- the product teams the tool they need to really rethink how these products work. So I think AI, the cultural reset we talked about under Spencer, the sense of urgency and the fact that we're the biggest player in the space with the resources needed to make these investments puts us in a good position for success.

Okay. We'll come back to AI, but I like that comparison to mobile and how mobile changed the dating ecosystem.

Arguably, AI could be a lot bigger than the smartphone.

Yes. So that's an interesting point. We'll come back to AI. Just one quick follow-up on the Gen Z point, just to dig in a little bit deeper. So it does -- it sounds like that, the kind of not keeping pace with the evolving changes within the younger audiences was part of the challenge that the space has seen and that -- but that's also the opportunity right now. Is that a fair way to think about it?

Yes, I think that's right. Like the thing you have to understand is that we know what the problems are, right? We've got tens of millions of users that we can survey, that we can ask what's working, what's not. We do -- we spend a lot of money and we have a lot of resources around real deep product research. And we survey the single population quarterly and understand trends and sentiment. And so we know what they want. They want -- they're worried about authenticity. We hear about dating app fatigue. We hear about outcomes. We want these products to work better. And so it's on us to build the product that they're looking for.

Okay. Great. So let's start talking about the product, and we'll start with Tinder, obviously. So the turnaround is still in earlier days. You've kind of accelerated the product velocity there, but we're still rolling out some of those things and so it's still early. Maybe just talk about the product and the drivers and your expectations to get Tinder back to a better spot. Like what are the things that get you there? And to be frank, I guess, we've been through this maybe a few times with Tinder over the past few years on this path to get into a healthier spot. What's different this time about the approach?

Yes. I would say, look, this is a product-led turnaround, right? And what you need to find success in a product-led turnaround in my mind is a few things. One, you need a great team. So you can't do it without super really strong product talent. I think we now have that at Tinder. We've brought in great talent that were part of the ASL Group, which was a central group within the organization. We now embedded them directly in Tinder. They are the best product people we have. I feel really good about that.

You also need to have a product and engineering organization that fully enables the product talent to go execute with autonomy and speed. And we've reorganized the Tinder product and engineering org into autonomous pods. That was part of the changes we've recently made. So I think we've got the org structure needed, too. So that's one, it's the team and the org structure.

Two is ideation, like good ideas, right? And so what I've seen is the way good ideas come about are really strong product, the team, combined with that deep research that we have. So research insights combined with product talent leads to great ideas. And we're seeing that, I think, with product features like Double Date and Interactive Matching. So the ideas are there. There's no lack of ideas.

And then third is velocity because you've got to go fast, right? Because not all these features are going to work. Some are going to work, some are not going to work. Even if the research is saying one thing, it may not resonate when you roll it out. So you got to go fast. You got to iterate. You got to be quick. You got to fail fast if it's not working, get rid of it, move on. And so velocity becomes an important part of the recipe. And I think we've really seen an increase in velocity lately. We've gone from releasing every 2 weeks at Tinder to releasing every 1 week. Things like that help increase the probability of success in a product-led turnaround.

So those, I think, are the -- is the recipe for success. I know we've been at this for a while. It's taking longer than I would like to. So why is it different now? I think the main reason why it's different now is the management team, I think. It's a new management team, particularly under Spencer, which we talked a little bit about, and this focus on -- he shifted the focus from monetization to outcomes. And that's -- it's a bold shift to make. And also what we've done, so it's management and strategy. And the strategy component is freeing up the product teams to iterate, giving them the breathing room to maybe take a little bit of a short-term monetization hit for long-term user growth or revenue gain. And that's what we've done, I think, in a smart way by taking this $50 million of savings and plowing it back in the business. And I thought 1/3 of that is going towards this Tinder product innovation, just giving the product team some more room to really iterate on concepts that I think will work over the long term.

Okay. So I just want to tie that together just to be clear. So on the accelerating velocity on the product side, Double Date, Interactive Matching. And maybe we can dig into the product a little bit more. But does that mean that in the near term, those products aren't being monetized directly, they're meant to drive MAUs and top of funnel and then think about monetization? Is that the right way to think about it?

I think that's exactly the right way to think about it. The focus is on driving user growth. Really, the focus is on driving outcomes right now. That will then lead to user growth and that will then lead to revenue. I will say that I do think AI in itself will lead to monetization opportunities down the road, but it's definitely a second step, just by introducing new form factors. If Interactive Matching really works, gets you in matches, gets you on dates faster and easier and better, there will be ways to monetize it, but it's not a focus today.