Grindr Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 6, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Strong quarterly performance and raised guidance: Q2 revenue grew 33% year over year to $138 million, while adjusted EBITDA increased 27% to $58 million, or a 42% margin. Grindr raised its 2026 outlook to approximately $540 million in revenue and $232 million in adjusted EBITDA.
  • Positive Sentiment: AI is improving operating leverage: Management estimates engineering output has increased roughly 2.5 times with a similarly sized team, allowing the company to moderate planned engineering hiring while reinvesting in products such as EDGE and potentially expanding profitability.
  • Positive Sentiment: Product momentum remains strong: Core app revenue rose 30% and advertising revenue increased 44%, supported by conversion, ARPU, retention and programmatic advertising. Management highlighted continued progress in Right Now, a healthier and faster app, Maps, and EDGE, which it views as a major 2027 growth driver.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Second-half growth is expected to moderate: Grindr expects tougher comparisons after strong late-2025 growth and the anniversary of subscription price increases. Advertising is projected to remain in the mid-to-high teens as a share of 2026 revenue but normalize toward roughly 15% in 2027 and beyond.
  • Positive Sentiment: Capital returns and brand initiatives continue: The company executed a $60 million accelerated share repurchase during the quarter, with approximately $300 million remaining under its $900 million authorization. Management also said the Madonna partnership helped demonstrate Grindr’s cultural reach and could provide a compelling case study for attracting direct advertisers, although it involved significant one-time marketing expense.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Grindr Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

Transcript Sections

Skip to Participants
Operator

Good day, everyone. My name is Megan and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the Grindr second quarter 2026 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time and you have joined via the webinar, please use the raise hand icon, which can be found at the bottom of your webinar application. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Tolu Adeofe, head of investor relations.

Tolu Adeofe
Tolu Adeofe
Director of Investor Relations at Grindr

Hello, welcome to the Grindr earnings call for the second quarter 2026. Today's call will be led by Grindr's CEO, George Arison, and CFO, John North. They will make a few brief remarks. Then we'll open it up for questions. Please note, Grindr released its shareholder letter this afternoon. This is available on the SEC's website and Grindr's investor page at investors.grindr.com. Before we begin, I will remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our outlook, future performance, and future prospects. You should not rely on forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today.

Tolu Adeofe
Tolu Adeofe
Director of Investor Relations at Grindr

Some of the risks that could cause our actual results to differ from views expressed in our forward-looking statements have been set forth in our earnings release and our periodic reports filed with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, or any subsequently filed quarterly reports. During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most closely comparable GAAP financial measure, are included in the earnings release we issued today, which has been posted on the investor relations page of Grindr's website and in Grindr's filings with the SEC. With that, I'll turn it over to George.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Thanks, Tolu, hello. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Grindr delivered another outstanding quarter and continued to build on the momentum we have established over the last three years. Our users are responding even better than we expected to the significant product work underway across the app, driving strong organic momentum and exceptional second quarter results.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Today, we are raising our full year guidance to approximately $540 million in revenue and approximately $232 million in adjusted EBITDA. What excites me most is that we are able to invest more aggressively in the future of Grindr than ever before while creating stronger operating leverage. With AI, we are delivering on our product roadmap and expansion efforts with less headcount growth than we expected, particularly in engineering. As always, I encourage you to read our shareholder letter for greater detail. I believe three areas best explain the quarter.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

First, AI. Over the last several quarters, we have been terraforming Grindr into an AI-native company, which is changing how we build software. Engineers are increasingly architecting, directing, and reviewing AI synthetics rather than writing code themselves. As a result, our conservative estimate is that engineering output increased approximately 2.5x from July 2025 to April 2026 with roughly the same size team.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Before GenAI, we estimate that producing that much output would have required roughly 200 additional engineers and about $60 million in annual cost. This is also assuming we could have found that quantity of exceptional engineering talent, which has historically been the true limiting factor. With this technological evolution, our exceptional engineers can now focus more of their time on creativity, judgment, and architecture while AI increasingly handles implementation. That is why I call this AI terraforming. It is a bit like creating oxygen on Mars. Second, product.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Many of the product initiatives we have been investing in are beginning to reinforce each other. The free experience continues to improve. AI and better data are making the product more useful. Users are increasingly feeling the benefits of the work we have done over the last several years to simplify and re-architect our code base. We also continue to make strong progress in both Right Now, which remains one of the most important opportunities to strengthen Grindr's core use case, and EDGE, our AI-enabled tier that will be a key driver of our revenue growth in 2027. Third, Madonna. Even a couple of years ago, no one would have expected one of the world's biggest cultural icons to launch a major album through Grindr. Today, that feels natural.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

That incredible moment in Times Square, where an estimated 50,000 people showed up after hearing about Madonna's performance just 30 minutes earlier through Grindr, demonstrated our unique ability to bring together product, culture, commerce, and real-world experiences in a way that no other social connections platform can. We are showing that as the global gayborhood, Grindr can play a much larger role in gay life without moving away from our core.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

In fact, the strength of our core is what gives us the opportunity to do more. Overall, thanks to our team and our users, our business is firing on all cylinders. I continue to believe the opportunity ahead for Grindr is much larger than the market has historically given us credit for. Thank you to our shareholders for your continued support. With that, I will turn it over to John for detailed financial results.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

Thanks, George, and hello, everyone. Second quarter was an outstanding quarter across the board, as George highlighted. Revenue grew 33% year-over-year to $138 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $58 million, representing a margin of 42%. The performance was driven by continued momentum in core app revenue, reflecting strong conversion, ARPU, and user retention, as well as robust ads performance. App-based revenue grew 30% year-over-year to $113 million, supported by solid demand across our XTRA and Unlimited tiers and strong consumables performance. Advertising revenue grew 44% to $25 million, driven by strength in programmatic advertising performance and the continuation of our large year-long direct brand campaign. We continue to expect advertising revenue to run in the mid to high teens as a percent of total revenue for full year 2026.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

This comes even as we are balancing a disciplined approach to third-party ad loads in connection with our priorities around user experience and ecosystem health. As previously discussed, we expect ads in a percentage of total revenue to normalize back near the historical 15% range in 2027 and beyond. Adjusted EBITDA grew 27% year-over-year to $58 million, or a 42% margin.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

This strong result reflects top-line outperformance, combined with the operational leverage unlocked by our AI terraforming efforts. Operating expenses excluding cost of revenue were $71 million, up from $53 million in the second quarter of last year, with a portion of the uptick driven by one-time marketing expenses for our Madonna partnership. Our strong revenue growth more than offset this investment. Turning to share repurchase activity. During the second quarter, we executed another accelerated share purchase for an upfront payment of $60 million.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

As of quarter end, this and certain other repurchase transactions remain in progress, with settlement expected to be completed in the third quarter. We have approximately $300 million remaining under our $900 million share repurchase authorization and will maintain flexibility to buy back shares opportunistically. Given our strong growth through the first half of the year, positive user response to core app improvements and higher than anticipated AI-driven operational leverage, we are raising our full year 2026 outlook today. We now expect full year revenue to be approximately $540 million, up from $535 million, and adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $232 million, up from $227 million.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

In the second half of the year, as we have previously discussed, we expect growth rates will naturally moderate in the third quarter and fourth quarter as we anniversary the global rollout of our subscription pricing changes and lap more difficult comparisons from the second half of 2025. Overall, we are pleased with how the business is performing. The structural leverage we're seeing allows us to reinvest in high ROI growth initiatives like EDGE, while both returning capital to shareholders and expanding our bottom line. We intend to carry this momentum through the rest of the year. With that, operator, please open the call to questions.

Operator

We will now move to our question and answer session. If you're viewing the webcast, you can submit a question via the Ask a Question tab on the top right-hand side of your screen. If you have joined via the webinar, please use the raise hand icon, which can be found at the bottom of your webinar application. When you are called on, please unmute your line and ask your question. We'll now pause a moment for the queue to assemble. Our first question will come from Nathan Feather with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Nathan Feather
Nathan Feather
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Hey, everyone. Thanks for taking the question and congrats on the strong performance here. A few if I may. First, you talked about broadening Right Now. If you can drill a little bit more into the changes in the product experience you're making there, then help us think through how Right Now adoption and utilization has evolved over the past few years that product's matured.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Hi, Nathan. Good to talk to you. Right Now was the first product that we started working on after the current management team came into place with the idea that people who join Grindr join for many different intentions. Users that wanted a more immediate or soon-to-happen connection that's more casual were feeling like they couldn't have as easy of a time finding other people who wanted that, given that some people didn't want that. Right Now is a way for people to express that need directly and connect with other people who have that interest. We have very good usage on Right Now. We're really happy with how much traction that product has gained over the last year and a half or so. At the same time, we've gotten feedback on things that users want to be different.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

As one example, people say Right Now, even in the name, implies that I need to connect this moment. You're in the Right Now period for an hour also implies that you have to connect this moment. Whereas some people are saying, "Well, I want to be able to connect soon," like it could be tomorrow or the day after, but not in this very moment. We are taking that feedback from users and are going to be making some changes to the product to be responsive to that. I think that's a normal kind of process that you normally go through with a product. You launch one version, you get feedback, and then improve on it, which is how we tend to build products in general.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

I think all these things are going to make the product even better and lead to more people using it. Some of the other things we've done recently is we now allow people to post in Right Now without tying that post directly to their Grindr profile. Because there are people who want to be able to say, "Hey, I am in Right Now mode. I'm willing to engage people in that, but I don't want people to know on my regular profile that I'm in Right Now," which I think was really well received as well. Overall, pretty happy with the product and really happy with the roadmap that we have for what we want to do to make it better.

Nathan Feather
Nathan Feather
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Great. That's helpful. The 2.5x increase in engineering output is really interesting, and I haven't seen too many companies really try to frame the actual uplift they've seen through a lot of this AI tool utilization. I guess, can you help us frame out, one, how you're calculating that and the kind of methodology there, and then two, how should we think about token costs and how you're balancing between open and frontier models to balance that with profitability?

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

We looked at how much was shipped in a period of time when we had our team working on things before we started to really push adoption of AI coding. I don't want to say it was none at all because we did have some AI coding at the time, but very minimal. This is in July of last year. We compared that to how much

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

stuff are we producing as engineers across various metrics in the month of April. When you compare those to things, the numbers actually came out to a 3.5x more, but then we reduced that number to 2.5x because we just thought it was unreasonable to expect things to have changed that much. Just looking at the number of projects that people are working on at the same time now versus the number of projects that people are working on before, you can't really compare them. I think it's reasonable to say that you would be doing more things than you were doing, but what we're now doing is a totally different way of thinking.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

I remember when I took this job, I met with a very prominent CEO, kind of as a mentorship meeting, and I told him, "Hey, these are the things I want to do at Grindr over the next few years. My guess is in three to four years, I'm going to need a team of about 250 to 300 engineers." He's like, "No, you won't, and let me tell you why." Really pushed on the idea that AI coding would take over. He was right and I was right. For all the things that we're doing, he actually would have needed about a 250, 300 person team in the old world. With AI coding, you actually don't anymore. It's a really incredible kind of outcome for us.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

We are of the view that people should use all the tools that are out there and not really worry about the cost of them as long as the ROI that we want to see is there. Ultimately that has to do with management. If you manage the business really tightly, which we do, I don't think there's a risk that people are going to go and waste time and work on things that are not worth it and/or just have agents running in the background for no reason, as has happened in other places.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

We encourage all tools possible. Historically, we've used a lot of Cursor and a lot of Claude code. In the last few weeks, we've actually seen a ton of adoption for Devin, which I think is quite exciting for what it's worth. Most of what we do are from frontier companies.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

We have deployed open source models in our system for other things, but not for coding in an aggressive way yet.

Nathan Feather
Nathan Feather
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Okay, great. That's helpful. Then one more for me. Back half has a relatively large implied step down. It's been the case through the year, but just help us think through the puts and takes here. As we head into 2027, can you help us stack rank maybe qualitatively, what are the major drivers of revenue growth that could hopefully lead to an acceleration versus at least back half levels?

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

Thanks for the question, Nathan. Our guidance really, our philosophy certainly hasn't changed, I would say our expectations for the back half of the year are pretty consistent with how we started things all the way back in February. To your point, you communicated it well. We've anticipated the second half of the year is going to see some deceleration, which is really just an artifact of a couple of things.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

One is pricing increases that were put in place on subscriptions at the end of last year, beginning of this year, which is sort of a one-time pickup for the year, but there was not anticipated further increases in pricing in the back half of the year. That was one factor. The other was just anniversarying a pretty strong finish to 2025. In particular, we saw acceleration in revenue growth each quarter last year.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

The comparisons are a little more tricky. That was all what we thought about and our philosophy around guiding to what we had line of sight to with a high degree of confidence hasn't changed. The increase in the guidance we talked about today really is a function of outperformance in the first half of the year, and in particular the second quarter, despite the investment we made in the Madonna event, which was certainly significant, both in terms of just being something we hadn't done before, but also in terms of the quantum of investment and work that went into that event. As an organization, it was a huge undertaking and it did have an impact on our marketing spend.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

Despite all that, we were able to increase guidance primarily because our experience kind of churn and paying user conversion was better than we anticipated with the pricing increases. We run A/B tests on all these things. We have an informed hypothesis of what the response is going to be to pricing changes well before we roll them out more holistically and made those assumptions, and that was underpinning our guidance that we communicated earlier in the year. The results were better than that. People didn't churn as much as we expected. We saw better, I guess, inelasticity to price increases, and so we didn't see the degradation in some of those metrics that we had forecasted, and that led to outperformance, which was the vast majority of what the increase in the revenue EBITDA was this year.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

Effectively just outperformance relative to plan the first half of the year and not a big change in the second half. We think about 2027, I think we're in an exciting spot in that I think George and I still see great opportunity for growth next year. Certainly, and I think you've talked about this, Nathan, in your notes, but EDGE, which is our AI-enabled next tier premium product, is a big part of the 2027 story. We've talked about direct advertising potentially modulating a little bit. We had some very good outcomes this year that we're not underwriting for next year that we've talked about a little bit, and that revenue in the advertising business may trend closer to 15%. That's probably as much sort of qualitative conversation as we can offer on next year at this time.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

Obviously, we'll have better views as we get to November and then certainly into the first part of next year when we introduce guidance more formally. Stay tuned. We get through the year, obviously, we've got better line of sight, and more precision to where things sit, so we should have more to share in November.

Nathan Feather
Nathan Feather
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Awesome. Very helpful. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Your next question will come from Andrew Marok with Raymond James. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Analyst at Raymond James

Hi, thanks for taking the questions. This is Tim on for Andrew.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Hi, Tim.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

Hi, Tim.

Operator

I believe we lost your audio. Are you there, Tim?

Analyst at Raymond James

Hi, can you hear me now?

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Yes, we can hear you now.

Analyst at Raymond James

Can you hear me? Hi, sorry about that. This is Tim on for Andrew. You've talked about how you are moderating third-party ad load to better support the free user ecosystem. I'm curious how you distinguish sustainable ARPU growth from monetization borrowing from future engagement. What are the internal metrics or guardrails that inform how monetization intensity takes a toll on the free experience? What do those metrics tell you in the first half?

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Broadly speaking, Grindr is testing all the time. We run a lot of experiments across the board on many things, what free users are doing and what they're experiencing, and product improvements with them, what paid users are doing, what leads people from being a free user to being a paid user, and what impact one might have from a given conversion mechanism you might put in place, both in the short term and long term. Obviously ads factor into that as well. What are the places where you might want to have an ad, and might not? We had put in certain ad triggers in the past and got feedback on some of them from users, which led us to change some of those triggers, earlier this year. Not universally everywhere, but in many locations around the U.S.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

We track what impact that has on revenue and what impact it has on the user experience, from what we hear from users, surveys that we do with them, and their engagement. Overall, our objective is to maintain an extremely robust free offering, and we have done that over the last four years. We've added a lot to the offering by introducing a lot of new features like Right Now that are available to everybody. I would expect that we would continue to add more features to the free offering while aiming to maintain as robust of an offering as possible, because free users are the lifeblood of Grindr, and unlike other products in a similar category, we don't aspire to a world where as many people as possible are paying.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

We want some portion of our users obviously to be payers, and then we want to be able to offer a set of our users even more premium offerings that we believe they are looking for. We expect most of our users to not be payers and to be having as good of an experience as possible in that free cohort.

Analyst at Raymond James

A second, if I may. The guide now implies 43% margin for the year in a year that was a deliberate investment year. Is the 39% to 42% margin band being re-underwritten because of the lower user churn, or is their investment sort of sliding into 2027? Thank you.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

I think longer term, that 39% to 42% guidepost is the right one to keep in your models. We certainly could improve operating and EBITDA margin significantly if that were the primary objective. We've talked a lot about specifically investing in very early-stage or no-revenue businesses today and incurring cost in both product development and SG&A, R&D work, et cetera, that are effectively setting the stage for 2027, 2028, and beyond. We've talked also about this year being an intentional year for investment, where we were consciously making the decision to underwrite certain things that don't have associated large revenue contribution, in order to position us for the future. None of that's changed. I think what is specific to this guidance was an outperformance in the second quarter, which gave us better operating leverage for the full year.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

As George talked about, we did see a fairly significant improvement in productivity, particularly in our engineering discipline within the organization. That's allowing us to probably temper our headcount additions more than we had anticipated in the first part of this year. We're still hiring. We're still going to grow. We're not looking to cut headcount. We're just excited about the ability to produce more shippable code and better product given the capacity unlock of greater productivity with the team we have in place, and that's going to continue.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Yeah, the only thing I'll add to that on the team is that we, historically speaking, and I've been building software now for about 20 years. In a software company, engineering was always the primary driver of why you couldn't get everything you wanted done. Like the constraint on the business was how many engineers did you have? Most of the time, not because you couldn't afford engineers, but because you couldn't hire the engineers that you wanted. What we've seen at Grindr, and I know some of the other most up in the forefront of adoption of AI coding companies are seeing, is that engineering as a constraint is, if not going away, significantly decreasing. Other constraints are now coming into play, such as product management.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

We actually today at Grindr don't have enough product managers to do all the projects that we want to do at the speed that we want to be doing them. The constraints have shifted. With that, where you're going to get headcount is going to shift as well. The kinds of product managers you need on a go-forward basis will not necessarily be the same kinds of product managers you needed in the past because they're going to be doing a lot more of coding-like work as well. The roles between engineer and designer and product manager are over time going to collapse. We will continue to hire, but we're being quite thoughtful in how we are hiring and how quickly we want to grow our team, given the fact that we're in this massive time period of transition.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Whereas we might have planned on hiring 10 or 20 more engineers than we will end the year with, we just found that was not going to be necessary, and we could direct those resources to other things and/or push that into more profitability.

Analyst at Raymond James

Thanks so much.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Thanks, Tim.

Operator

Your next question will come from Andrew Marok with Raymond James. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Andrew Marok
Andrew Marok
Analyst at Raymond James

Hi. Sorry about that. I was unmuted on the last question as well. You said in your shareholder letter that packaging and marketing a premium experience like EDGE is a new muscle for Grindr. What are some of the key learnings that you made along the way so far, and what are some of the key markers that you feel you're yet to have addressed?

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Historically, the way Grindr has pitched its paid tiers is people being able to see more users in the app wherever they were located. We limit how many people you can see to a free user to a certain number, and then for an XTRA user, they see more, and then a Grindr Unlimited user sees an unlimited number of people.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

There are some other things that people get, for example, Explore, et cetera, but the primary kind of offering has been more people. You really didn't have to pitch that in a very advanced way. It's pretty obvious what does XTRA give you, what does Grindr Unlimited give you. With EDGE, the offering is more complicated to explain. There's a lot of extra stuff that is being offered to you that is very helpful if you are a Grindr user for managing the product and navigating through the product.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Frankly, if you are an EDGE user, like I've been for many quarters now, it's very hard to imagine going to a product without that because it's so awesome.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

People need to be able to understand what they're getting into before they are in it to be able to convert at that price. A lot of the work that we're doing is around how do we tell the story to them well in order to get them to buy. I don't think there's any key learning to that. There's just a lot of testing of language and packaging and presentation, aesthetics around it. What kind of photography do we use that will result in people going to a product and saying, "Yes, I want to buy that." That is not something that historically we've had to do. It's a totally new thing.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

It's at a very different price point than anything we've offered before. I don't expect that learning process to ever be done. We will obviously go live with a set of things that we have perfected over the last few months going into the fall. We'll continue to iterate and become better at that. It is something that we've not done before, and we need to learn how to do it. The product itself is tested really, really well. User engagement with the features in the product is extremely high. Retention for people who sign up for EDGE is higher than we would have expected, frankly. I've said this elsewhere, but we are getting people converting to EDGE who are not payers at all.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Our initial expectation had been that only Unlimited users would convert to EDGE, but actually a portion of people who had never been payers at all are converting, which I think is interesting as well. Overall, we're really happy with it. We will continue to perfect how we package and how do we present the story behind the product to the user so that they have a desire to go into it. While we are on EDGE, I'll just add one other thing, which is there is this information out there in the ether that we tested a $500 price point for it. We actually haven't. We tested a CAD 500 for it, which is not the same. We never tested a $500 price in the U.S.

Andrew Marok
Andrew Marok
Analyst at Raymond James

Got it. Thank you and thanks for the clarification. Maybe one more on the platform health initiatives that you spoke to in the shareholder letter. I think we've heard similar moves from other players in the industry, and they've maybe been a bit more lingering than they'd hoped. How are you approaching the issue, and what are your expectations for ongoing efforts to address new forms of bad actors?

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

I don't think anyone should assume that management of the ecosystem is something you can do once and then it changes all the time. It is something that continuously has to happen. I certainly know that at Grindr, for the entire period that this company has not been owned by the Chinese, so basically since 2020, managing the ecosystem has been an important factor. The way we think about it is illegal activity should not take place in the app. If we find illegal activity, then we're going to remove those accounts and remove those devices and prohibit those devices from being able to create Grindr accounts ever in the future. If you go back to, say, 2020, 2021, 2022, maybe probably through 2024 or early 2025, most of the management of the ecosystem was done manually.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Meaning we had a team of people who were navigating this process, reviewing flags that had been put in place by our users of accounts and/or reviewing accounts that were being reported, or identifying accounts themselves. There was some technology, but it was fairly basic. Over the last few years with GenAI, we've been able to build far more powerful technology to identify bad actors proactively and get them removed, both in-house technology and third-party technology that we deploy. Obviously, as modeling improves, meaning as foundational modeling improves, then you can create even better technology. It's going to be a constant effort to try to be as good as you possibly can be in removing bad actors.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

There is some level of impact on MAU from that because bad actors will appear in your MAU one month, then you remove them, and they don't appear in your MAU next month. I think that's very much a cost worth paying for having a better and a cleaner ecosystem in a product. Lastly, while the technology capabilities to do better in fighting bad actors is improving and we're utilizing it, that same technology can also be used by bad actors to create accounts in your app. That's true for all social networks. I'm not just talking about Grindr. You're constantly having to become better at that, and you're kind of playing whack-a-mole with them. I don't expect this to go away at any point.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

We're just lucky that with modern technology, meaning like last three, four years, you're able to do this a lot better than you ever were before.

Andrew Marok
Andrew Marok
Analyst at Raymond James

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Logan Whalley with TD Cowen. Please unmute and ask your question.

Logan Whalley
Logan Whalley
Analyst at TD Cowen

Hey, guys. Thank you for the question. You called out that the core free experience on the app continues to get better. Could you talk about just changes you're making to the core app and whether you're seeing positive impacts to engagement or app opens, thanks to any updates? Kind of as part of that, I'm curious as to whether the Madonna campaign acted as a like a top-of-funnel demand driver, drove new users to the platform at all. I just have one follow-up question as well.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

From the free experience perspective first, we certainly have done a lot to make the free experience a lot better. I think the thing that's most kind of easy to talk about but is not as obvious because it's not a feature, is the fact that the product is just so much healthier now. The code base of the product is so much healthier.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

As a result, we don't have as many crashes. We don't have as many bugs in the app. Grindr's bugginess was like a meme in gay social discussions all the time, and also in in-person discussions because the app was very buggy. You can't say that about Grindr anymore. We've done incredible amount of work to make the app not be buggy, to not crash, and for users to have a better experience when they're in it.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

It's also a lot faster now than it used to be, which I think makes a really big difference. That has been a massive investment of effort, time, and I'm super grateful to engineers for the work that they did on that because we had to basically rewrite almost the entirety of the Grindr code base. We're not done with that yet. There's probably three-quarters done and one-quarter more of work to do. That process has been really incredible. Which, by the way, made it even more possible for us to then deploy AI coding, because before we had done that work, if you deployed AI coding, the agents actually created buggy code. We needed to kind of avoid that from happening. Right Now was obviously another really big addition to the free experience, that we are constantly improving.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

In Maps is another big area that we have started to invest in. Which is going to be a totally new surface area for people to use, which I think will make a pretty significant difference. Grindr's overall engagement metrics are so good that it's kind of hard to say, "Hey, XYZ move made the engagement metrics better." I think we're perfectly happy with just ensuring that our engagement metrics stay as strong as they are. This app continues to be a place that people, when they turn 18, if they're either they know they're gay or they're trying to figure out are they gay or not, they come to Grindr and use it as a place to build a community, build relationships, and make it be the core kind of segment of their gay life.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

That's kind of our goal, and continuing to make the free experience be as good as possible in that regard is really important. On the Madonna partnership, it was a really incredible thing, quite honestly, to have 50,000 people turn up in Times Square on 30-minute notice because we were not allowed to tell anybody that this was happening until 30 minutes before.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Actually, we were living in fear that this would leak and the event would be canceled because New York City has such strict rules about managing traffic and the risk of this kind of coming out. It was awesome. I think it was a really fantastic demonstration of what the global gayborhood means, in practice, that the fact that Grindr as an app can do that and can drive engagement in that way. We really weren't thinking about it as a kind of top-of-funnel driver.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

That was not the goal. The goal was to own this big cultural moment, to continue to build really positive associations with our brand. Grindr is a very known brand, but we're not yet a loved brand. A lot of what we're doing in marketing is to go from being known to being loved. That's going to be obviously a multi-year effort that'll take a long time to achieve. We believe that we can get there eventually. Through that, we can make the app be more valuable to people because if they love something, they're even more likely to use it than just, "Hey, I need it." Madonna was obviously the biggest one we've ever done, but we've done activations like this in the past with artists, with festivals.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

People know about the Grindr bus, which whenever it goes ends up being a big deal, as it was in Cannes, in the month of June. I think we'll continue doing things like that in the future as well, again, with the goal of building love for the brand. Lastly, we still face significant challenges in getting advertisers to work directly with Grindr versus third-party ads to advertise in the product. There's a lot of reasons for that, some of which are not the most encouraging things, that I deal with on a daily basis in terms of why somebody might not want to work with us as an advertiser.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

I think having this case study of Madonna launching her album on the app, us being a massive driver of the album sales in the beginning, is going to be a really powerful case study for advertisers to come and do things with us as well to help their brands, not from just musical perspective, but from actual commercial brands.

Logan Whalley
Logan Whalley
Analyst at TD Cowen

Thanks. That's good to hear. Just one question on the cost lines. Obviously, you called out that the marketing expense, the SG&A expense, stepped up in Q2 along with the Madonna campaign. Looking at SG&A and product development expense that stepped up as a percentage of revenue, should we expect those cost lines to step down in Q3 and Q4 at levels kind of in line with Q1, or what is the best way to think about costs there? Thank you.

John North
John North
CFO at Grindr

I think in general, our operating margins stayed pretty consistent in the quarter, despite revenue growing significantly year-over-year, which is in line with our stated longer-term objective of 39% to 42%. We've also given you EBITDA approximation relative to revenue. I don't think there's enough nuance there to tease out anything more specific than we should be relatively similar in terms of trajectory. We held operating margin consistent year-to-year despite a big increase in revenue, and we did see some elevated costs in the marketing line associated with the Madonna event in the second quarter. Little moderate a bit, but I don't think it's going to make a material difference to your forecast going forward. If you need more help, we can pick this up offline. Thanks for the question.

Logan Whalley
Logan Whalley
Analyst at TD Cowen

Okay, great. Thanks, John.

Operator

Our final question comes from the WallStreetBets community. How are you engaging with Gen Z, given the perception that they are less interested in traditional dating and may prefer to avoid getting entangled in relationships? Are you seeing increasing interest and engagement from this age group, and how does that compare with millennials, Gen X, and other cohorts? Looking further ahead, how do you plan to attract the generation after Gen Z, which may be even less interested in interacting with people in traditional ways?

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

It's a great question, thank you. I know that I'm going to be doing something with WallStreetBets later this quarter, so excited about that. We released data in November of last year in our shareholder letter that looked at Grindr demographics in the various different cohorts. If you look at that, it told you that 46% of Grindr users in the U.S. are ages 18 and 30, and that number is actually over 50% on a global basis. Grindr is the central place where gay Gen Z people come and connect.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

There's kind of no other way to square that. Those numbers way over index versus that cohort's share of the population. If anything, where we probably have more opportunity is getting older gay men to stay in the app, when they're, say, in their 50s and 60s versus any concerns with Gen Z.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

I think they're very engaged and that's obviously awesome. My general sense about the dating apps and Gen Z is that Gen Z doesn't want to use apps that are stale and that haven't innovated, and that are so heavily monetized that you can't use them if you're not paying. If apps respond to what you need and if they're usable as a free user, the people are very inclined to use them. Look at TikTok and Gen Z, no one can say that they're not online all the time. I think in that sense, maintaining a really robust free experience is really important and obviously we'll continue to do that.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

With regard to what might happen in the future, I think hard to predict, obviously, but our goal always is to ensure that as people become 18, whether it's at 18 or at 22 when they finish college or soon thereafter. Whether if they're out before they are 18 and at 18, they can come to us because Grindr is an 18-plus-only product, or are going through a coming-out process later. They think of Grindr as a place where they need to come to and kind of use it as a way to understand what it means to be gay and build a community. If we do that for them on a continuous basis, we'll be in a really strong place with future generations. Again, as an 18-plus product only.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

The last thing I'll say on our cohorts is that we are able to maintain such a robust free product because as people mature and reach older ages, get to 30 and then to 35, their inclination to become payers increases significantly. We have a very robust free users when they are 18 to 30, maybe a little bit to 30 to 35, and then they're much more likely to become payers, which works very well in the business. They kind of complement each other, and I think that's another big distinction between us and other products like us.

Operator

This completes the allotted time for question. I will now turn the call back over to George Arison for any closing remarks.

George Arison
George Arison
CEO and Chairman of the Board at Grindr

Well, thank you everybody for being here and we will speak to you.

Executives
    • Tolu Adeofe
      Tolu Adeofe
      Director of Investor Relations
    • George Arison
      George Arison
      CEO and Chairman of the Board
    • John North
      John North
      CFO
Analysts
Powered by Quartr