Match Group, Inc 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

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 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 substitutes for our GAAP results. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Spencer.

Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us. This was a strong quarter for Match Group and an important one for Tinder. Over the past year, our priority at Tinder has been making the product work better for users. That includes improving our recommendations algorithms, introducing lower-pressure ways to connect, like Double Date and Modes, and upleveling trust and safety. Monthly active users, or MAU, declines have narrowed significantly since we began this work, supported by a better product experience that is improving user outcomes and increasing engagement. Daily active users, or DAU trends, have also improved meaningfully, and we expect them to turn positive year-over-year any day now. This is a huge milestone for us. It will be the first time that Tinder has had positive year-over-year usage in more than three years.

To reach our ultimate goal of returning to MAU growth, we need to drive more reconsideration through product innovation and marketing. That means giving the millions of singles who have used Tinder before, and those who have never tried, more reasons to download the app. Tinder's second-half roadmap is geared to do exactly that. Hinge continues to deliver strong growth with meaningful runway across product innovation, international expansion, and monetization. At E&E, which now stands for Everyone Everywhere, we are sharpening the strategy and applying more of Match Group's shared capabilities. We delivered these improvements while maintaining strong financial performance, with total revenue down just 1% and Adjusted EBITDA growing 14% year-over-year. We have continued to return meaningful capital to shareholders at the same time. Before I joined, Tinder was not shipping features quickly enough to keep pace with evolving user expectations. That has changed. AI has accelerated execution across product development life cycles, enabling us to move faster and execute against an ambitious second-half roadmap designed around how Gen Z wants to connect.

Our internal research shows that nearly half of singles aged 18-29 want to share in-person experiences with people who could become closer connections. Yet, for a generation that grew up online, making that transition into real life can still feel hard. That is why we are doubling down on more social, lower-pressure ways for users to connect in real life. Our Events feature is an important component of that strategy. It gives users a dedicated place inside Tinder to discover local activities, see who else is interested before attending, and continue connecting afterward. We began piloting Events in L.A. in March, and since then, more than 60 events have brought Tinder users together in person.

We see the value of Events extending far beyond those who attend. Bringing more real-world connection into the experience can help shift perception of Tinder and the category more broadly, giving singles a reason to reconsider and try the app. Early signals support that potential. Roughly three in five people who do not use Tinder today say Events would make them more likely to do so, and a similar share say it would make connecting feel easier. Over half also describe the experience as something uniquely Tinder. During the L.A. pilot, 71% of eligible users aged 18-24 engaged with the in-app Events tab, and more than half of users who visited the tab returned the following week. Based on that success, Events is now live in nine additional cities across the U.S. and Europe, with plans to reach 26 cities by the end of September.

Today, we are scaling Events through a low-cost model built primarily around partnerships with leading event providers. Missed Connections brings the in-app and real-world experiences together by surfacing a weekly curated set of profiles in a dedicated tab based on who users crossed paths with in the prior week. It is now testing in Canada and Australia and creating a more serendipitous way to discover someone new while continuing to prioritize user safety and privacy. AI helped this team move from idea to final product in just a few weeks, compressing what would typically be a multi-month development process. We are also expanding how users discover people inside Tinder. In Canada, we are testing a new text-based search feature to help users find people they are interested in more efficiently.

Early adoption is promising, with approximately 10% of exposed users submitting a search and tens of thousands of searches generated in the first few weeks. At the same time, we continue to improve our recommendations algorithms. Earlier this year, updates to our algorithm for straight women drove significant gains in sparks and spark coverage. In mid-July, we rolled out an updated version that is delivering further engagement improvements, and we're now extending these updates to straight men and LGBTQ+ users, where we expect to see similar benefits over time. We are also testing more ambitious changes to our core discovery section and profile quality, including a reimagined user experience with more contextual, individually engaging profile elements and AI-powered profile building. Together, these changes are supported by Tinder's first full rebrand in nearly a decade.

Now live globally, the more modern Tinder identity includes a new logo, color palette, word mark, typography, and visual identity. This gives Tinder a fresh new look, and early results have been positive, with nearly all engagement metrics improving post-rollout. Tinder's richer product roadmap is creating a steady cadence of new marketing moments, giving users more reason to reconsider the app as it evolves. In the U.S., recent Music Mode and Astrology Mode campaigns have helped improve new registrations among women. We have also shifted our strategy more towards lower-funnel channels, which now represent roughly half of our total spend, up from 30% last year, and we believe that shift is helping trends among women. In the second half, we plan to build on that momentum with targeted marketing around Events, Modes, and search.

Employee engagement at Tinder is higher than it's been in years, reinforcing a belief I've held throughout my career. Great people, properly motivated, build great products, and that's exactly what we are seeing at Tinder. In Q2, improvements to the Tinder experience continued to translate into stronger engagement, particularly in key markets and demos, and those trends strengthened further in July. DAU declined 4% year-over-year in Q2, its best result in the past 10 quarters, and a significant improvement from declines of roughly 10% less than a year ago. While global user retention increased 1% year-over-year. In July, DAU improved for the fifth consecutive month to down nearly 2.5% year-over-year. Together, these metrics show that as the experience improves, users are more likely to return, whether the next day to continue a conversation or the next month to make a new connection.

Sparks and spark coverage remain important indicators of whether Tinder is helping users form meaningful connections. In Q2, both metrics were broadly stable versus Q1, globally and among women. Sparks declined 4% year-over-year in Q2, while spark coverage grew 2% year-over-year as we began to comp over product improvements from last year. The stability in Q2 shows the product improvements we've made are having a lasting impact. Following the mid-July rollout of the latest version of Tinder's recommendation algorithms, sparks and spark coverage have moved substantially higher through month-end. We also saw improvement in MAU. MAU declined 7% year-over-year in Q2, one point better than the 8% decline in Q1, with the biggest gains in our most important markets and user demos. Year-over-year MAU trends improved across each of Tinder's top five revenue countries.

In the U.S., its largest market, declines slowed by approximately 2.5 points in Q2 compared to Q1. We saw similar progress among women, where MAU improved across all major geographic regions and age groups, with global MAU among women down 8% year-over-year, three points better than the 11% year-over-year decline in Q1. As MAU improves, we're seeing that directly translate into improved year-over-year direct revenue and payer trends over time. Payer penetration, the percentage of MAU paying for a subscription or à la carte feature, was up year-over-year in Q2, both globally and across Tinder's top five revenue countries in aggregate, and direct revenue per MAU was up 6% year-over-year globally.