Match Group, Inc.

Welcome to the Match Group first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tani 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 Raskoff and CFO Stephen 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. Mattrip entered 2026 with tangible progress on the three-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 1MD 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 three 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 MAL, 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, Sparks and Spark coverage, continue to improve. In March, Sparks, the number of users engaging in six-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 experience 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 Mao over time. We're now starting to see that play out. Mao 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. US 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 ground 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. By 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 astrology 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-astro 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 for. And finally, trust and safety. We continue to scale FaceCheck into more regions, including the recent launch in the UK and Singapore. FaceCheck is improving authenticity and user trust with particularly strong trends in the US, 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 roadmap, 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 FaceCheck, which is now fully rolled out in the US, UK, 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 Hinge 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, Hinge is reducing friction in getting to great dates with date ideas, a feature formerly known as direct-to-date, which allows users to propose a date idea and time up front to clarify intent and move matches to real-life meetings faster. Early feedback has been encouraging, with nearly 9% adoption in testing, one 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 date ideas like dinner, drinks, and walks, while custom date ideas skew toward light, conversational activities like bowling, arcades, museums, and mini-golf. Second, Hinge is expanding the role friends play on daters' profiles with Friends Take, which addresses two 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 and off Hinge to contribute short reflections to their profiles, adding credibility and helping users get to know one another 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, similar 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 its lead to strong financial results. We're excited to see the impact of Hinge's product roadmap on the business this year as it continues on its path to be a billion-dollar business by 2027. Now turning to our 1MG approach in action. We're continuing the work that we began last year to simplify the organization and operate more effectively as one match group. As part of this effort, we folded our MG Asia business unit into our E&E business unit. This brings our two Asia-based businesses, Azar and Pairs, closer to the rest of the company, removes a 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, Apple temporarily removed 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 MAU are beginning to recover, but the new app experience is monetizing at lower levels than the previous version. We're testing changes to the product to improve monetization, but expect continued pressure on Azara direct revenue over the balance of the year. With the consolidation of MG Asia into E&E, we've transitioned our sole-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 1MG technologies, including AI-driven photo uploading and AI-enabled recommendation algorithms, but will now operate with closer alignment to our largest business unit. In addition, we're shifting nearly 30 product engineering and analytics employees from Azure to Tinder in Seoul. These moves concentrate resources into Tinder at a critical moment, supported by excellent executive leadership, an accelerating product roadmap, 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 1MG 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 ramps. We're also bringing certain areas of E&E closer 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've 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 headcount 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 1MG 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 Sniffies, 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. Sniffies reinforces our commitment with non-heterosexual men, 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 gay male 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.