Match Group, Inc.

Welcome to the Match Group Second 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, 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 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 up-leveling 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 DAO, 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 malgrowth, 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. Meanwhile, Hinge continues to deliver strong growth with meaningful runway across product innovation, international expansion, and monetization. and 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, and we've 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. Thank you for watching. Thank you for watching. 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 described the experience as something uniquely Tinder. During the Los Angeles pilot, 71% of eligible users aged 18 to 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 US 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. Thank you for watching. 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 plus 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, wordmark, 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. Dow 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, Dow 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 Mal. Mal 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. Thank you for watching. As Mal improves, we're seeing that directly translate into improved year-over-year direct revenue and payer trends over time. Payer penetration, the percentage of Mal paying for a subscription or a 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 Mal was up 6% year-over-year globally. While we don't expect these metrics to always move in lockstep every quarter, given that we have some user experience tests and monetization initiatives can have short-term impacts to payers or revenue, the longer-term trend is clear and gives us confidence that continued malimprovement should support better payer and revenue results over time. Turning to Hinge. Hinge continues to be the best example in our portfolio of product-led growth at scale. Hinge has strong product market fit with intentioned daters and its designed to be deleted promise is clear. The team is disciplined about building against one objective, helping users get out on great dates. Global MAL grew 13% year-over-year in Q2, driven by strong growth in its expansion markets. In core markets, where Hinge remains a top downloaded app and has achieved a significant scale, MAL remained relatively flat year-over-year, while revenue continued to grow double digits in aggregate. Thank you for watching. Our early results are encouraging, driving a positive lift in overall registrations, and in particular among young women, as well as a measurable impact on brand sentiment. Hinge is still expected to reach a billion in revenue in 2027, and we see three primary drivers of that growth, product innovation, international expansion, and monetization runway. First, product innovation. Hinge continues to improve its core user experience across the dating journey from self-expression and discovery to early engagement on the app to ultimately meeting in person. Friends Take, which officially launched in mid-July, brings the people who know you best into an individual's dating experience. Friends and family can contribute text, voice, video, and photo reflections to a user's profile that help create a richer, more authentic picture of who someone is. The team is improving its recommendation algorithms with a particular focus on the women's experience and testing features like your type lately in select markets, which lets daters describe what they're looking for in their own words from hobbies to personal values. Gen Z daters learn more about what they're looking for as they date. This approach clarifies who a user is drawn to right now and adjusts recommendations for that user. For returning users, pre-filled basics lets people who deleted their accounts pick up where they left off instead of starting from scratch. It is a simple change that reduces friction for intentioned daters to reenter the ecosystem and start having relevant experiences and success more quickly.

AI is also becoming more important to building the hinge experience.

The team is building its first reinforcement learning model to better understand when a user may need help and what kind of help would be most useful, whether it's a nudge, a tip, or other prompt at the right moment. Over time, we see a path for this to become a broader personalization layer across hinge. and finally Signals makes effort and follow through more visible, recognizing and rewarding daters who demonstrate thoughtful participation, which is particularly important for women. The Signals badge also creates a new surface area for value creation, allowing subscribers to filter on only those users with a badge. Signals is driving meaningful outcomes for users including more conversations while incentivizing better behavior like sending likes with comments. Signals also led to a 15% increase in selfie verification for existing users in tests. International Expansion Hinge grew direct revenue 86% year-over-year across its European expansion markets and maintained the No. 1 downloaded position in aggregate across those markets in Q2. Hinge also entered six new European countries during Q2. Thank you for watching. Third, monetization. We see significant runway for future monetization through both further payer penetration and monetization optimizations over time at Hinge. We also plan to begin testing an additional subscription tier in Q3. The goal for Hinge is to create offerings that are new, differentiated and highly relevant to women that are worth paying for. Stepping back, Hinge is already a strong business, but the long-term opportunity remains large. The team is executing, and they are doing it in a way that stays anchored in what makes Hinge distinct, helping intentioned daters get off the app and onto great dates. Turning to E&E, which now stands for Everyone Everywhere. Over the past quarter, we completed a deep review of E&E and have established a clear direction for the portfolio. E&E, which now includes our two Asia-based businesses, Pears and Azar, serves distinct audiences across community, geography, identity, lifestyle, and life stage. With the major platform migrations now complete, the portfolio has a stronger foundation to execute from. Moving forward, E&E has sharper brand-by-brand priorities, with a greater emphasis on user outcomes and ecosystem health. We are making more deliberate investment choices and aligning resources behind the brands and capabilities with the strongest long-term potential. E&E brands are benefiting from shared match group capabilities, including trust and safety, recommendation algorithms, cross-sell, centralized marketing, consumer research, and more. Under this 1MG approach, we are building shared capabilities that can support multiple brands over time. For example, we expect Tinder events to power in-app events on BLK in Q4, with the potential to extend the capability to other E&E brands in ways tailored to their audiences. We are also integrating analytics and performance marketing while increasing collaboration in recommendations and trust and safety. There is still work ahead, but the early progress we see gives us confidence that E&E is moving in the right direction. We look forward to sharing more in the coming quarters. Turning to final thoughts, I'll leave you with this. Our mission is rooted in a simple truth. Humans need humans. At a time when technology often pulls people further into their screens, we are building products that help people form meaningful connections in the real world. Our progress this quarter demonstrates our sustainable growth flywheel is working. Product innovation, increasingly powered by AI and 1MG, is delivering better user outcomes. Those outcomes strengthen engagement, retention, and ecosystem health, which supports audience growth and, over time, stronger financial performance. Our job now is to keep every part of that flywheel turning faster and better convert experiences into sustainable growth. That's how Revitalize becomes Resurgence. With that, I'll turn it over to Steve.

Thanks, Spencer. We're pleased with our Q2 results. Revenue was in line with our expectations and adjusted EBITDA exceeded our expectations. As a reminder, we reorganized the business into three segments, Tinder, Hinge, and E&E, which now includes our Azar and Paris businesses. Historical periods have been recast in the supplemental materials available on our IR website. 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. In Q2, Match Group's total revenue was $853 million, down 1%, down 2% on a foreign exchange neutral basis. FX was $2 million worse than we expected at the time of our last earnings call. Payers declined 6% to $13.3 million, while RPP increased 6% to $21.13. Indirect revenue was $13 million, down 28%, reflecting lower spend from our top advertisers compared to a strong Q2 last year, as well as some reallocation of spend during the World Cup. In Q2, match groups adjusted EBITDA was $331 million, up 14%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 39%. Tindy direct revenue in Q2 was $457 million, down 1% and down 2% FXM. Q2 direct revenue includes an approximately $8 million negative impact from user experience tests and product changes in the quarter. Payers declined 5% to $8.5 million, consistent with our expectations. RPP increased 4% to $17.90. Adjusted EBIT in the quarter was $233 million, down 5%, representing an adjusted EBIT margin of 50%. Payne's direct revenue in Q2 was $204 million, up 22% and up 20% FXM. Payers increased 17% to $2 million, and RPP increased 4% to $33.11. Adjusted EBITDA was $79 million, up 48%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 39%. E&E direct revenue in Q2 was $179 million, down 17% and down 17% FXN. Payers declined 21% to $2.7 million, while RPP increased 4% to $22.24. The revenue impact for Mazars app redesign was approximately $5 million better than we anticipated at the time of our last earnings call. Adjusted EBITDA was $54 million, up 69%, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 30%. Including stock-based compensation expense, total operating expenses in Q2 were down 9%. Cost of revenue decreased 16% and represented 24% of total revenue, down 4 points as a percentage of total revenue, primarily driven by alternative payment savings. Selling and marketing costs increased 10 million, or 7%, up 1 point as a percentage of total revenue to 19%, as a result of increased marketing spend at Tinder and Hinge, partially offset by reduced marketing spend at E&E. General administrative costs decreased 22%, down 3 points as a percentage of total revenue, to 12%, driven by lower headcount-related costs, including SBC, and lower legal expenses. Product development costs were flat year-over-year, and as a percent of total revenue, at 13%. Depreciation and amortization decreased by $5 million to $24 million. Our trailing 12-month gross leverage was 2.7 times and net leverage was 2.2 times at the end of Q2. We ended the quarter with $584 million of cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments on hand and used $424 million of cash to pay off the exchangeable notes that matured in June. Year-to-date through Q2, we generated operating cash flow of $564 million and free cash flow of $527 million. We repurchased 7.3 million shares at an average price of $34 per share for a total of $245 million, paid $91 million in dividends, and deployed $92 million of cash towards net settlement of employee equity awards, equating to 81% of free cash flow. Between July 1st and July 31st, 2026, we repurchased an additional 430,000 shares at an average price of $38 per share, for a total of $16 million. As of July 31st, 2026, we reduced diluted shares outstanding by 5% year-over-year. Our capital allocation strategy remains unchanged, prioritizing investment in the business to drive growth, returning capital to shareholders through buybacks from the dividend and selective M&A. Now for Q3 guidance. We expect Q3 total revenue for match group of $885 million to $895 million, down 2% to 3% year-over-year. This range assumes a one-point headwind from FX. FX neutral, we expect total revenue to be down 1% to 2% year-over-year. Q3 total revenue guidance assumes a $10 million negative impact from Tinder's user experience tests and product changes and a $15 million negative impact from lower Hazard direct revenue as a result of the required app redesign. We expect indirect revenue to be approximately $15 million in the quarter. We expect Match Group adjusted EBITDA of $330 million to $335 million, representing a 10% increase and adjusted EBITDA margin of 37% at the midpoints of the ranges. Moving to full-year 2026 guidance, we expect match group total revenue to be near the midpoint of the guidance range provided in February on an as-reported basis, and at or above the midpoint FXN. We now expect FX to be an approximately half-point tailwind to full-year total revenue, a half-point worse than we expected when we provided our guidance in February. We continue to expect full-year indirect revenue to decline in the mid-teens percent. Thank you for watching. At Tinder, we expect direct revenue to decline in the low single-digit percents, an improvement from our full-year guidance provided in February. We expect Tinder user experience tests and product changes to be a $30 to $40 million negative impact to direct revenue, less than the $60 million impact we included in our initial guidance. At Hinge, we expect direct revenue to be in line with our full-year guidance provided in February. At E&E, our full-year guidance in February, inclusive of ISAR and PEARS, would have been direct revenue declines in the low double digits and adjusted EBITDA margin in the mid to high 20%. We now expect E&E direct revenue to decline in the mid-teens percent, primarily due to the ISAR app redesign, and adjusted EBITDA margin to be in the high 20%. We expect free cash flow to be at the high end of our guidance range provided in February. We expect SBC expense to be $230 million to $240 million for the full year, a $20 million improvement at the midpoint of the range versus our initial guidance, reflecting continued discipline on headcount related costs. With that, let's turn it over to Q&A.

If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question today is from James Heaney with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Great, thank you. Curious what you think is driving Thanks for the question, James. So the big picture on turning around Tinder is three steps. The first is improving the product.

so that our existing users have a better experience. The second is relaunching the brand with a redesign, which we've just done. And the third is to use events and other features to drive new users who either aren't using Tinder or perhaps have never used Tinder. So what we've done so far has really improved the product itself, and that's why DAO is improving so quickly because we're getting a higher level of engagement from our existing users. To try to select what it is that's specifically driving product improvements is difficult because we've done so much. We've done double date, astrology, music mode, events, video speed date. We're about to launch a groups feature. We've improved recommendations. We've got better notifications and SMS messaging. We have face check. We did a rebrand. We now have search. We redesigned chat. We redesigned the likes you tab. We've built new profiles and photo upload. We've basically changed every single thing about the Tinder app in the last 12 months, all to great effect. If I had to choose one, which is difficult, the one I would choose would be recommendation algorithm improvements, where we are showing more people the people that would be good matches for them, and that is driving better user retention. give you some data, some of which I shared in the prepared remarks, some of which is kind of breaking news. I'll give you some info here. So matches are up 14% year over year. And last quarter, matches were up 7% year over year. Unique people with sparks in Q2 were down 4% year over year. In July, they were down only 1% year over year. And today, in August, it's trending better than the July numbers. Spark Coverage was up 2% year-over-year in Q2. In July, it was up 5% year-over-year. And today, in August, it's trending better than the July numbers. And Dow, as you mentioned, was down 4% year-over-year in Q2. In July, it was down 2.5% year-over-year. And today, in August, it's almost positive. So we continue to gain momentum, you know, even day by day. To your question about why is Dow ahead of Mao, that comes to the point around driving reconsideration for people who either aren't Tinder users today or maybe have never been Tinder users. And the big initiative there is events. So we fired the starting gun on events in January. In March, we were in one city. In July, we were in five cities. Today, we're in 10 cities, including in Europe. In September, we'll be in 26 cities. By the end of the year, we'll be in 75 cities. So the product and engineering team and the event operations team are moving very, very quickly, launching event partnerships in new parts of the world and also building products and features to support it, like letting users see many profiles of who will be attending events, letting people message one another after the event. In terms of our optimism for why we think this will drive engagement among new users. Well, our research says that 60% of non-Tinder users say they're more likely to use Tinder because of events. And as I already shared in the prepared remarks, 71% of 18 to 24 year olds engage with the events tab and more than half of those that engage with the events tab come back the following week to engage further with it. So we have a lot of qualitative research and also quantitative research to give us confidence that this will be an A powerful way to drive reconsideration and change perception of Tinder for new users and lapsed users. Next question, please.

The next question is from Shweta Kajuria with Wolf Research. Please go ahead.

Okay. Thank you for taking my question. I have one, a little bit of a follow-up. Payer penetration improved year over year and payer growth is down year over year. So I guess, could you please talk to that gap and how you see that gap narrowing to turn that around into positive growth? And then on DAU turning almost positive, how are you thinking about the lag between DAU to MAU to payer? Anything on that in terms of timing of that, that'd be great. Thank you.

Thanks for the question. Let me take the pair penetration one. Yeah, look, there's a couple of things we said. One, pair penetration was up year over year in Q2 globally. That's true. And also direct revenue per MAU, which takes into consideration pair penetration and RPP was up 6% year over year in Q2 at Tinder as well. You know, yes, pairs are still down, but they're declining at less than the rate of MAU. That's why pair penetration is up. and that's a trend we've seen for some time now. Those two metrics tend to follow together, which is great. You know, the payers declines are less than MAU. It's been that way for quite some time now. They won't move in lockstep every quarter. I don't think we should expect that. And really why that is, is because we're doing, we've talked a lot about user experience tests and product initiatives that can have impact to payers and also sometimes monetization initiatives can have impact to payers but are clearly the right thing to do for long-term revenue. So there can be some disconnect in any particular quarter, but the long-term trend is very consistent. As MEU improves, payers have improved the trend. And in fact, for the last couple of years, payer declines have been less than MEU declines. And that points to the fact that payer penetration is up. So that's how I think about it. In terms of the expectation going forward, I do expect payer declines to lessen a little bit in the back half of the year in Q3 and Q4 from where they are today at minus 5%. So that's what we're counting on. That's what's included in the guidance.

Thanks, Steve.

The next question is from Benjamin Black with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you for taking my questions, Spencer. I thank you. You spoke about testing a reimagined user experience with more contextual and individually engaging profile elements. Could you dig into that a little bit more and touch more broadly? How do you think about the Tinder user experience evolving over the next 12 to 18 months? And then, Steve, I guess for you, You lowered expectations for the give back for the year. Could you just talk about the genesis of that decision and how should we think about the reallocation of those savings potentially? Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for the question. It was a bit of a mouthful the way I described changes to the user experiences because we're testing so many different things. So I'll describe it this way. The Tinder historical We've been Slowly changing that product orientation to present more of the whole self into the evaluation of whether there's compatibility. Why? Because we think that's where consumer tastes are. We think that consumers want to assess the overall person's compatibility, including the way they answer prompts with prose. They want to consider things other than just the appearance of the photo. But to make that change requires a lot of complexity. You have to, first of all, change the profile creation so that people are encouraged to enter qualitative information and answer questions with text. You have to help them with photo selection so that it's easier for them to add more photos so the profiles are more complete. You have to test the different displays of the profiles and make sure that you're balancing user improvements with monetization. This is work in progress. We've made a lot of progress already, but we're continuing to experiment with different ways to give people a better sense of potential compatibility that slow things down and are more attuned to changing consumer taste. But we have to balance that with monetization at the same time. Steve, the second.

Yeah, let me let me take the user feedback. Let me just start at the beginning so we're all on the same page. We originally said $60 million for the full year and user experience tests. That's a negative impact of full year revenue. That's what we sort of included in our guide. Then last quarter we said we'd expected $45 million in the second half of the year. and now we're saying that's only going to be 30 to 40 million for the full year. So the 60 million for the full year has come down to 30 to 40 million for the full year. The way that breaks out, you guys can do this math, but let me just help you. It was $5 million in Q1 of user experience-related revenue declines. Q2 was $8 million. Q3 we're guiding to $10 million. which means Q4 will come in, we think, we expect between seven and 17 million. That's how it breaks out by quarter. Why is it less than what we originally expected? As you know, we were coming in less than expected for the first couple quarters of the year, so that's part of it, but we had kept that 45 million in the second half when we talked three months ago. The biggest reason for that was we were a little bit unsure of how the rebrand in particular would play out and what impact that might have on revenue and engagement metrics. Often rebrands can have revenue impacts just because you're changing so much about the UI and sometimes UX. That thankfully did not happen. We saw no revenue impacts. We saw positive, largely positive impacts to user engagement. So that's what's given us the confidence to take down the full year expectation at this point. Why we have a range of possible outcomes for Q4 between 7 and 17, that's obviously related to the testing we're planning to do between now and the end of the year. I think the biggest swing factor there is what Spencer just talked about. It's the reimagined profile and browse experience. We want to give the teams room to test and be creative and really think about different ways to improve the product. So I think that coupled with obviously with some continued RECS testing, Those are the things that will, depending on how they roll out or tested and what impact they might have, that will determine where we come in at for Q4. So hopefully that brings some clarity to user experience test budget.

Thank you very much. Next question.

The next question is from Nathan Feather with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for the question. First on the events feature, really interesting addition. Given the local nature there, how do you scale that up so you can reach a meaningful portion of the base? And just any way to frame of those 75 cities you're entering, what portion of your user base in those cities or in those metro areas? And then also, sorry if I missed in the letter, but what was the July malgrowth? Thank you.

Okay, yeah, so thanks, Nathan. On events. Most of the events are coming into the platform through partnerships, some with national, some with regional partners, some with local partners. So we have an event sourcing team that's building out those partnerships that allows us to scalably expand to many cities. What we've seen so far in the first couple cities is that even more important than the number of the people, the number of people that actually attend the events or the percent of our DAO or MAL in a given city that attend the events is the amplification of these events on social media. That's actually what gives people the kind of permission in their own minds to start changing brand perception about Tinder. They see people using the Tinder app or talking about Tinder on social and attending an event and say to themselves, wow, I didn't know that Tinder had events. This is a new way to meet people fun and safely with friends. It changes perception even if they're not actually attending the event themselves. So we feel like this can start to bend the curve on perception and reconsideration, even if it only touches a relatively small percentage of total users in a given city.

Yeah, we did not give a July MAU stat. We talked about DAU. One of the reasons we do that is just because we have to go through a defrauding process, and it's really not the best idea to give MAU just a couple days. outside of a month. So, that's one of the reasons we didn't give it, but we did give DAU, so hopefully that, and some of the other engagement metrics, so hopefully that helps give a sense of how we're, you know, how Q3 is off to a good start.

Great. Thank you. The next question is from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Thanks. So, Spencer, really appreciate the detailed Tinder metrics, clearly showing you improved the product. Any comments about pricing? Do you need to reevaluate how you price the service? Anything you can share? And then to the extent you scale events, you know, in a big way, how do you think about that impacting margins, Steve, over time?

Thanks. Yeah, let me take the event cost first. So, Jason, there are really three components to execute on this events initiative. The first is the cost associated with the product and engineering team, which is a couple of pods that are building the feature set for events. That is not an incremental cost because those are products and engineering folks that would otherwise be working on other initiatives, whether it's music mode, astrology mode, face check, all the other work that we do day to day. So that's not incremental. The second cost is the marketing and advertising associated with telling the world that we have events. That also is not incremental because if we weren't promoting Tinder events, we would be promoting astrology or music or face check or some other initiative. And then there's number three is the event sourcing team, which is still quite small, fewer than 10 people and scaled. This team is also very AI native across both marketing, product engineering, and also event sourcing. So we're doing it extremely efficiently. So we don't see this as materially changing the profitability profile of Tinder. In addition, we're building all of this in a multi-tenant way, meaning Tinder events is going to power initially BLK and then over time other match group apps. With different events, of course, but the event sourcing team will globally source events overall at the match group level and then our different apps will select the events that are appropriate for their audiences. So the cost of the product engineering and the cost of the event sourcing team are amortized across multiple match group apps.

Just a broader question around Tinder pricing.

Oh, right. Yeah, on Tinder pricing. So we have some new surface areas, Jason, that we can potentially consider monetizing now, including events, including search and some other new areas that our product innovation have brought us towards. We haven't yet. We're just starting to have those conversations. We haven't yet developed a point of view on how we should be thinking about monetization with some of these new surface areas. Hinge building a new pricing tier in late 2026 at a lower price point is going to give us a lot of insight, which we'll learn from as we decide how best to approach monetization for Tinder in 2027. Next question, please.

The next question is from Robert Coolbreath with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you very much. Steven, just wanted to ask on the mobile direct billing opportunity. I know there were some changes there a few weeks back with respect to Google Play, both on policy and pricing. I guess there's a sense out there there may be a platform-level fee to pay to Apple as well. So just wanted to maybe provide any update on how you're thinking about those cost savings. And then second, Spencer, wanted to ask about the issue of reconsideration. Maybe a couple questions related to that. have you continued to monitor contact exchange in markets where you have access to that data to make sure that sparks sort of properly correlate to contact exchange, people going out on dates. I was wondering if that's continuing to trend in the right direction if you're monitoring it. And then secondarily, related to reconsideration or consideration, what do you think is potentially the biggest lever you can pull or You know, we could see think pieces out there, you know, from, you know, at the Atlantic. I think there was one this week about, you know, people's hesitance to get out there and date. Just wondering about, you know, what you think you can do to drive reconsideration of the category and Tinder in particular. Thank you.

Yeah, let me take the IAPPs and give you an update on everything going on there. So let me start with Apple. Apple, there's not any real new news to update you on, but it's still moving through the courts. The Epic versus Apple case, of course, it's both in the district court and the Supreme Court now. We expect to know more later this year, early next year on those cases. And until then, still 0% commissions on alternative payments. We still continue to optimize and do a really good job there. We now think it will contribute about $130 million of savings to 2026. That's about $20 million better than we expected at the beginning of the year. So that's been a big win for us. And then on Google, you're right. There is a little bit of new news there. They had put out a new global fee structure back in March, but it was blocked by the courts from going into effect in the US. That's no longer the case. They're going to move forward with that fee structure and it will go into effect. It's already in effect in certain parts of Europe. It will go into effect in the US on March 1st, and then it goes into effect across other geographies in the world, sort of through the rest of 2026 and into 2027. That fee structure does reduce commission rates a little bit on in-app purchases for ALC type purchases, but only for new installs. It reduces the fees from like 30 to 25% there. that helps us a little bit, but not a lot. The bigger consideration is there's really no economic benefit in this fee structure for alternative payments. Once you consider the payment processing fees, you have to pay the credit card companies. It really doesn't make a lot of sense to do it. And so unfortunately, the net of all this is a very small benefit to us in 27. We estimated to be maybe $5 million. It's a disappointing outcome, to be honest, for us and I think many other developers. It could change from other legal or regulatory reasons, but for now, that's where things stand and what we're planning against. I hope that provides some clarity.

On the question of reconsideration and category headwinds and Gen Z adoption, I'd say the following. The product roadmap that we've been following at Tinder and at Hinge is all about regaining and improving product market fit with young users. So for example, double date on Tinder, users under the age of 30 are 70% more likely to use double date than users over the age of 30. So that just speaks to the level of interest in social features. and bringing your friends into dating. That user insight exists at the match group level, and then Tinder has acted on it by building Double Date, and Hinge has acted on it by building Friends Take, which is very consistent with the different brand positioning of these two apps, but they're both taking this consumer insight that young daters want to bring their friends into dating and make it a more social experience. Events also speaks to the increase in cost and stress and safety concerns around dating, which is one of the things that holds the category back. So if you go on a one-on-one date, it's $20 to $100 to spend one or two or three hours to assess compatibility with one person. Events on Tinder, however, are a much more scaled way of to have fun with your friends, meet a larger group of new people to assess potential compatibility, have a fun night out. And 30% of our events on Tinder are free. Of the paid events, our average cost is $30. And even that is kind of overstated because many of our events have Tinder benefits for Tinder attendees. So it's a much better value as a way to meet new people and also just have a good time, very consistent with how Gen Z approaches Thank you for taking the questions. Maybe a couple.

So can you guys talk about Hinge's organic growth on a like-for-like basis? I know that you've expanded them into a bunch of markets.

There are more markets coming. Are there any other material markets or regions where you'd like to still take it and extend that growth? And I have a quick follow-up after that.

I now recall the prior questioner asked about contact exchange, and I just want to cover off on that. The answer is yes, we are still monitoring contact exchange in addition to SPARCs and SPARC coverage. We just think that SPARCs and SPARC coverage are a better metric for a variety of reasons that Notably, it's difficult to know whether contacts have been exchanged, and there are certain geographies where we can't infer that because of different privacy issues. So we prefer looking at Sparks, but yes, we are also tracking contact exchange, and it continues to correlate. Steve, question on Hinge?

Yeah, I can talk a little bit about Hinge growth. So feel free to jump in, Spencer, if you want. But globally, MAU growth has been great, up 13% in Q2. Revenue growth continues to be very strong, 22% in Q2. The European expansion markets are driving a lot of that. Revenue grew there by 86%. We entered six new countries in Europe and four in LATAM. This is what you're speaking to. Core market growth has remained relatively flat, which we also discussed in the pair of remarks. But revenue growth there continues to be very strong. So that's the way I would think about it is relatively flat user growth in core markets, but still double-digit revenue, and then still very strong growth in the international expansion markets. And look, what Hinge has been able to prove is that every market it enters, it's resonating with singles. And so there's lots of parts of the world we haven't entered. Asia would be the next big one from a TAM perspective. moving into India where they've had really strong organic growth. They're going to put some marketing spend behind that now. And then there's other parts of Asia that would be a natural next step. But that's how I think about user and revenue growth across the various geographies.

Thanks, Steve. That's helpful. And lastly, how do you guys see the trend for payers decline in E&E? I know it's a catch-all, but as we look at the second half of the year, I'm Maybe you can just highlight areas or brands that you believe are ultimately going to maybe outperform relative to some of the ones that are underperforming.

Yeah. Let me just start with, obviously, we just resegmented the company. So now E&E, so we're clear, also includes Azar and Pears. And one of the biggest Areas of pressure we're facing with E&E is as are. If you recall, we got removed from the App Store back in late March, had to redesign the whole app. The team did a fantastic job there. We're now back in the App Store, but at a much lower revenue base. So we've called out that that's about a $15 million negative impact to match group revenue each quarter, and that we expect again in Q3. So that's also affecting pairs as well. Spencer, do you want to talk about some of the brands within E&E? or anything to add?

Yeah, absolutely. So we've just done a kind of brand review. You probably saw we shut down Archer when we made the investment in Sniffies. We're focused now on a smaller number of brands within E&E, and we're surging our product and engineering resources on a couple of those brands, including Match and R-Time and BLK and Upward are just a couple of the examples of the brands that we're particularly focused on. Some of those expand us to new TAM like R-Time and Upward and BLK. Some of them are very large like Match or also Pears and Azar are in that focused brand category. So we're redoing the product roadmaps. We're reorienting our marketing spend across those brands that we think are really important. We're bringing a 1MG mindset to it where we're now through the through the replatforming, so new initiatives like a new profile experience or a new photo upload or modernizing recommendations. These are all things that now we're building once and deploying everywhere across all of our E&E brands. At the same time, soon we'll be deploying FaceCheck, which will improve trust and safety across all of E&E. We've integrated performance marketing, or I guess we're in the midst of integrating performance marketing across all the E&E brands. We're about to rebuild our CRM notifications and email across all of the E&E brands. So it's very early in the E&E-focused turnaround. We're following the Tinder playbook, but we're just getting started. And I'll update you all more in the coming quarters.

Thanks. That's helpful. Thank you both.

Thank you. I think that's the last question. So I'll just wrap up. I'd say we feel great about how 2026 is shaping up. Tinder is ahead of expectations. Hinge is tracking in line, and E&E has had wins from Azar, but as we just said, we're battling through those. We're also confident in Tinder's path through the end of next year, and we expect Mao to be flat by the end of Q4 of next year. So I guess I would conclude by just saying, I guess also on Tinder, that payers should return to growth by Q4 of next year, and full year revenue of 2027 for Tinder should be up over 2026. We're doing all of this, this product-led turnaround, while also delivering profitability and capital returns. Just EBITDA is going to be at or above the high end of guidance, and we're going to continue returning 100% of free cash flow to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. That results in attractive free cash flow per share because of the share count reduction and the free cash flow growth. And we're doing all this while turning around a couple of really important products around the world. Thanks, everyone, for your interest this quarter. I look forward to talking to you all soon. Bye-bye.

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