Yahoo Finance Tinder is on pace to double its revenue this year
Match Group, which went public in 2015, owns more than a dozen online dating brands, including Match.com, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, and Hinge. But the crown jewel of Match Group is Tinder — and on Match Group’s Q2 2018 earnings call on Wednesday, the company shared numbers that make that abundantly clear.
“Tinder is on pace to exceed $800 million in revenue in 2018, a phenomenal achievement,” Match Group CFO Gary Swidler said. Match Group has not normally broken out Tinder’s revenue in the past.
That number would be double Tinder’s revenue in 2017. While Match Group (MTCH) did not specifically share Tinder’s revenue last year, the company said in Q4 2017 that Tinder comprised 30% of overall Match Group revenue for the year — that would come to about $400 million. Match stock was up more than 13% in morning trading.
Tinder now has small ads, but says the ads comprise only 5% of its revenue. Meanwhile, 95% of Tinder revenue comes from subscribers who pay for either Tinder Premium or Tinder Gold.
Tinder now has 3.8 million paying subscribers, and it added 300,000 in the quarter, a growth rate of 81%.
Most importantly, the company says it is seeing “very healthy adoption rates” of Gold, its pricier pay product. Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg said that 50% of the people paying for Tinder are now Gold users.
Match Group also raised its 2018 overall forecast to $1.72 billion in revenue. In other words, Tinder alone now amounts to nearly half of of Match Group’s revenue. The first half of 2018 has been, Ginsberg touted, “the best first-half performance in our history.”
Ginsberg also declared that, “Prior to Tinder, people in their late teens and 20s simply didn’t use dating products.”
It is a claim that some older online dating sites like eHarmony or OkCupid might dispute, but it’s hard to argue with Tinder’s eye-popping growth numbers.
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Daniel Roberts is a senior writer at Yahoo Finance and closely covers the online dating business. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.
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