Match Group, Inc Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026
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I think in the interest of time, we are going to get going. It is my pleasure to have Match Group back at the conference this year. Spencer Rascoff, CEO. I am going to dust off my law degree and read the 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 the company's IR website.
These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for the company's GAAP results. Okay, so you have been in the CEO role over the last couple of years since coming back into that role inside the company from your involvement with the company before being in an operating role. Before we take a step forward, let us take a step back and just reflect a little bit on all the things that have been put in place and the journey you have been on over the last two years, or just under two years.
Yeah. I was on the board for about a year before I became CEO 18 months ago. Being on the board is helpful. It gave me a running start and let me have some relationships formed, but you never really know until you get into the company and you roll up your sleeves and I quickly learned a lot. I am very proud of what we have accomplished in the first 18 months. I feel like we have changed the company culture pretty significantly. We have built a much more of a consumer-oriented culture where people really focus on user efficacy and the quality of the user experience.
We have personas built out for every one of our apps now. You will hear employees talking about Jasmine, the joyful butterfly, and Abby, the anxious romantic, and all these different personas across our different brands and thinking through what they need from the product. So that probably sounds like a small thing, but it is a big thing in terms of shifting the way employees think and what they prioritize. Then we created a much greater culture of innovation and of improving the quality of the products, starting with just using our products more. There are a couple oddities about our category that make online dating quite different from other companies that you might be here to listen to. But one of them is that it can be difficult for employees to use the product.
Imagine if you are an employee at Instagram and you do not use the product, or you are an employee at Snapchat, you do not use the product, or at Zillow, you do not use the product. Here, a lot of our employees, including me, are married, and a lot of us do not use the product day to day unless you really force yourself to. If we make it a job requirement, which we have, and you make it front and center to get employees actually utilizing our own apps, then it unleashes all sorts of observations that people now have about how we can improve the products. If you are not using them, then that does not come through. We accomplished a lot in a short period of time. I am happy to go into different detail in different areas, but it has been a busy 18 months.
Okay. Maybe starting big picture first. We continue to get a lot of questions from investors on where the dating opportunity online still sits today. Obviously, we went through a COVID period, we went through a post-COVID period. I think investors still try to question what the market opportunity is here.
Yeah. Has there been an evolution in your view of the market opportunity, or has it been relatively stable, but there has been dynamics of volatility around it?
Well, there are about 250 million people worldwide who are single and dating and do not use dating apps. There are a lot of potential people out there that could use dating apps, but several of our apps, notably Tinder, the number one dating app in 166 countries and our number one app, had really lost product market fit. Which is a funny thing to say because it is still the number one app. It is a little bit weird to say that it lost product market fit. But it had not innovated in about 10 years and users changed and user expectations changed. To answer your question, the size of the prize has always been massive. I feel more confident than before that we can go after it because of the way we have changed the product to regain product market fit. I will give you a couple quick examples.
If you talk to Gen Z, 18 to 28-year-olds, they will tell you that dating is stressful. Dating feels like a job interview. A one-on-one date feels very stressful. They are not ready for it. They do not want it. Part of it is because of COVID, because they lost a couple years of social and emotional development. Part of it is because of the Me Too movement, which changed the way men and women relate to each other, and some men are afraid to ask women out or to come off as potentially aggressive inadvertently. There are a lot of societal reasons for it. Nonetheless, where we are is that it can be stressful to engage in online dating.
What we have done with Tinder is we have created social features, starting with Double Date, extending to group dates, which we are testing right now, and events, which we have rolled out to 25 cities on its way to more than 75 cities, all of which lower the pressure.
Yeah. They take us a little bit away from dating and kind of dating adjacent into the meet new people safely for fun category.
If you can be in that space, which is a little less stressful, then we think you can earn your way back into product market fit and go after a lot of that TAM.
Okay. Talk to us a little bit about the journey that Tinder has been on, because the KPIs for Tinder have now shown market improvement over the more recent periods, and you have been on quite a recovery turnaround journey with respect to Tinder. What have been the signals you have picked up on that have started to build in momentum, and how are you thinking about investing behind those signals for that transformation?
We are a much more consumer-oriented company, as I mentioned. One of the biggest consumer innovations that we have brought to Tinder is improving our recommendation algorithm. If you think of a dating app, the beating heart of a dating app is the recs algo. Figuring out whom to show to whom, that is kind of the whole thing, right? That is ultimately what we do, is we show people to one another. The recs algo that powers that is critically important. Just as TikTok's recs algo is critically important, Instagram's recs algo, YouTube's recs algo, Spotify's recs algo, even Zillow's recs algo. That is really, really important to any of these services, but most important in dating apps. We have significantly improved our recommendation algorithm. I have talked a little bit about this.
Last week, we did an investor event called the CEO Connection, which is on our IR website, where my CTO and my chief product officer and I discussed in detail the improvements that we made to recommendations. I will not go through them all right here, but suffice it to say, we have significantly improved recommendations. The other significant set of improvements have been these social features, like Double Date and Events, all of which have improved what we call sparks and spark coverage. A spark is a conversation that goes back and forth 6 or more times, and I am just pulling out some of my data so I get all of my metrics right. Our daily active users, for example, which is a metric that we look at, it is the measure of how many people are coming to the app at any given day.
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