Match Group, Inc. (MTCH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

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.