Why don't we go ahead and get started? So for those of you I haven't spoken with before, I'm Andrew Marok, and I cover digital media and digital advertising here at Raymond James, and we're thrilled to have with us at our conference this year Vanna Krantz, the CFO of Grindr, so we're going to get into a whole bunch of interesting things on the business, and hopefully we'll educate those who are maybe unfamiliar, but answer some questions for those of you who are, so maybe before we do kind of jump into the specifics, why don't we take the 30,000-foot view, and for those who are unfamiliar, what is the Grindr story today, and where are you fitting in kind of the connections ecosystem?
Oh, thanks for that. And thanks for inviting us again. That was really nice of you. So we are Grindr. We went public in 2022, around just before Christmas. And in the last couple of years, I'd say that we've really established that we are a social networking and connection app for the community. It's been around for 15 years and only went public two years ago. So we're really young on our monetization journey, but actually quite established as being a global gay brotherhood on your phone, essentially digitally. The same thing that you would do in brick and mortar, but actually digitally. And we're in about 190 countries, so we're already global. And we have beautiful global product-market fit with our brand awareness of around 90% domestically and between 60% and above internationally.
A little room to go internationally, but certainly very, very well established in the domestic markets. I'd say that we are not a swiping app, so that's something a little bit different. We are a location-based grid, so you can see the first 100 people for free, and you can chat with them. Chatting is a big, big part of our app, 130 billion chats in a year. People spend around an hour on the app. We have about 14.7 million monthly active users, and they're highly engaged on the app. That, again, is because it's really about social connection. It's about chatting. It's about coming out. It's about being part of the community. We only monetize through hookups, casual hookups, but there's a lot more going on in the app than just that.
Great. And kind of your positioning within the LGBTQ community, your user base, correct me if I'm wrong, skews quite heavily toward gay men specifically. But kind of what are, one, is that intentional? And two, are there other opportunities within the LGBTQ market for you to serve? And I guess who would be potentially competitive in that respect?
So you're absolutely right. We are predominantly gay and bi men, and I think if you look at our leadership team and the makeup of our workforce and how this app began, that is essentially where we play and where we play pretty competitively, I'd say. We're not interested in getting broader at the moment. We continue to be interested in going deeper into this cohort of folks, and in fact, we started doing some user segmentation. We did it in 2024 on really what are the cohorts inside of the gay and bi community. I'm lucky enough to work at a company that has a beautiful sense of humor, so we call them the social skimmers and the rose-colored romantics and these cute names of different cohorts that we are developing, I would say, new value propositions to serve. We don't really think about our competitors so much.
We're the most popular bar in town, and that gives us, I guess, a little bit of an advantage to serve the user's needs in a way that potentially, if you're more nascent in the space, you may not be as successful, so we don't think about them so much. That being said, it doesn't bother us if folks have more than one app on their phone as long as we're first in wallet, and that is really our goal.
Great, and then maybe one more kind of on the high-level section, so the company has changed hands a couple of times, and I think it's safe to say that emphasis on things like monetization and tech was not necessarily always top of mind or as strong as it is now. Can you give us a sense of where you currently stand versus some of maybe either the mass market peers or where you were historically in terms of those variables?
We have been around, like I said, for 15 years. It was actually an app built by the gay people for gay people. And it has an incredible following in the sense of, I think I gave you some stats of the monthly active users, the fact that we're global. And I think that provides us a really nice runway for starting to monetize. As you said, it wasn't the focus in the past. In fact, we have about 15% of our revenue from advertising, which was really the main way of bootstrapping the company. I'd say we're in very early innings. And I think what George has. George is our CEO. He has the foresight to be able to see what's maybe happening with some of the more established longer-term players in the dating space, such as the Match Group and Bumble.
It's very focused on product innovation. With product innovation, that's going to be really the foothold into monetizing further. Because we enjoy a nice free tier right now, I would say that we're not looking to degrade that tremendously because we believe there's still a lot of opportunity from actually providing more value in our tiers. Just to give one second on our tiers, we have the free tier. We have the next tier up, which is called the XTRA tier. The XTRA goes from 100 free profiles to 500 free profiles. Plus, it has no ads. We have Unlimited. Unlimited is our highest tier at $39.99 a month. It goes to unlimited number of profiles. It also has some features like Incognito.
So if you don't want people to see what your face looks like, that's also very popular in some cities. And then I would say it also has Viewed Me, which is also a very, I would say, important add-on or feature, sorry, for our users. So those are our three tiers, free to the most expensive. And we're continuing to build more value propositions for those tiers.
Great. And I definitely want to dig into the product piece in a moment. But before I do, maybe at the top of the revenue algorithm is user growth. So we've seen some pretty consistent top-of-funnel growth now with your MAUs over 14 million, growing in that high single-digit range year over year. How should we think about the scale of that remaining top-of-funnel opportunity? And can MAU growth continue to be a driver for the foreseeable future?
Yep. So we really think of two drivers for our growth, MAU, like you've spoken about. And we see a couple of reasons why we are quite bullish on that continuing to grow. First off, from a very macro level, more and more countries are becoming more and more open. And that is allowing users to also feel more and more, let's call it, open to use the app. And we're seeing a higher percentage of people identifying as fluid as opposed to not fluid than we've ever seen, particularly in the younger cohorts. And those continue to be entering into our app. So that's sort of like the macro side. On the what we can control side a little bit more, we are focused on providing a user experience that's more pleasing to them. And so we brought our chat infrastructure in-house.
It used to be on the phone, and people would lose all their chats. It was sort of a source of frustration. Now it's sitting on the cloud. We have this lovely feature called Albums where you can share albums. And we've got just an incredible number of albums shared. So those kinds of features continue to offer folks, I would say, reasons to continue to being in the app. And then lastly, I think these other value propositions with respect to, let's call it travel, like where you want to travel or being a little bit more focused to the rose-colored romantics who might be more interested in a longer-term relationship, having features for that or intentions or filters for that, I think also allows our users to be more engaged and increase that monthly active users. So three real levers that we're pulling for that.
Great. And we've heard about the great debate of the evolving tastes in the mass market dating apps, maybe from the millennials to Gen Z, and how product-market fit is maybe not aligned so much anymore. But it doesn't seem to be the case among Grindr or the gay community. Do you think there's a reason maybe why the tastes are a bit more consistent generationally?
Generationally. So, I think for us, we're really fortunate that when you turn 18, you can be part of our app. You can't be part of our app below 18. And as you turn 18, I think it's like the time horizon of when folks are identifying their sexuality and if they're fluid and the whole coming out process. And that is a process that there's a lot of love and sharing between the community. So for us, it's actually quite a big driver of the youngest cohorts coming into the app. And then because the app is really based on social networking and messaging and connecting, I would say that that continues to be another driver for that. We are monetizing right now, as I said, only through hookups.
But there's a lot more on the roadmap, which I'm sure we're going to get into and which George has been talking about.
Right now, as a matter of fact, so you did outline a pretty extensive product roadmap at your investor day earlier this year up to, I think it was 2027, medium term in general. Can you talk about maybe some of the unmet needs that you're looking to serve for your users and where we stand kind of in terms of what's made it to market or testing phases so far?
Sure. So we put out eight new products or features, and I think those are really based on what I would say we're seeing users chatting about anonymously inside of the app. So we know that folks talk about health and wellness. We know they talk about travel. We know they talk about areas to be safe in. And so one of the products that we're putting out and have put out, just rolled out, was Roam. And so Roam is where you can put your profile into another city that you're going to in advance of going to the city and learning more about it and potentially helping it choose what areas you're going to spend your time in, where your hotels are, the rest of it. So that has been something that we developed, that we put out.
The other thing that we've talked about a lot is Right Now, and so Right Now goes to the intention feature of. I think when people are in the app, George would suggest that they have multiple intentions or they're not really sure of their intention, or if they are sure of their intention, it would be more efficient and effective for them to actually present it on the app, so those are two things that we've started to put out. We've talked a lot about AI Wingman. That's been in, I think, lots of publications. George is super excited about AI, is really, I would say, very forward on AI. We've been testing it for a while. It's in a very tiny group of users right now so that we can see if our AI Wingman is helpful and how it can be even more helpful to the users.
And then finally, the dating tier. The dating tier is something that I think is very near and dear to many people at the company and also to the community because the community, as it's evolving and growing and sort of maturing, is maturing into wanting a long-term relationship, not just hooking up. And in fact, I think George was sharing the stat the other day that the average age of gay men getting married has actually come down from, I think, first digit four to a first digit three. And heterosexuals actually get married with a first digit of a two still. So there is like a migration of more and more folks wanting to get married as it's been opening up. So that would be the third thing that we're working on, which is the dating tier.
I think specifically with the dating tier, George is a product person at heart and thinks about how product innovation could be very helpful in, I would say, the effectiveness of that product proposition in terms of finding the right match quicker.
So one of the things I think is really interesting kind of about the product philosophy overall at Grindr is there's a lot on the table, right? You just walk through a few products in quite different spaces. And then we heard about an interest tab on the Q3 call that was not even on the product roadmap. So I guess given all of these things that you can work on, how do you think about prioritization and your ability to be nimble to respond to some of these signals that you're getting from users?
Absolutely a great question. I mean, I think there is so much going on at the company. It's even hard for me to keep track of. So I would say that our ability to stay nimble, that's actually not so difficult for some reason. And I would say for some reason being that there really is one main product at the moment. And although the technical architecture we're working to evolve it and for it to get even better, I think these propositions inside of the app are something that folks are really passionate about and can build. So in relatively small tiger teams, the Viewed Me, I think, is of interest and seemed like a natural, I would say, evolution. We're also not unfortunate in that we've seen some of the products that have done well with Bumble and with Tinder.
And so knowing having that information doesn't hurt in terms of thinking about the product roadmap. One thing that we do know is that because the folks have been on our app for so long, it's like 15 years, that we really need to be patient with the entire monetization of the app, which is why our two foundational products, XTRA and Unlimited, are so important. And putting some of these value propositions into it, I think, is a very elegant and clean strategy that George has come up with. And I would imagine that we could have another tier, subscription tier of dating, but some of these other things that we're talking about, like Viewed Me, Incognito, or interests, went into one of our subscription tiers.
You bring up a great point there, which is you do have a pretty sizable contingent of long-tenured users who are habituated to maybe not paying for Grindr. It's a free app. That's where I go to have my connections, and I don't pay for it. So I guess how do you and maybe that's manifested by your payer conversion is a little bit lower than some of the mass market peers. So I guess how do you ease that process along and maybe habituate them to saying, you know, this is a product that I can find value in enough to pay for?
Great question. I think what you could see is that we actually factually have been pretty successful at that because our conversion rates have steadily gone up in the two years that we've been here. And so to me, that means that there is a willingness for folks to pay with products that they find value in. And some of it has been what I would call relatively basic in the sense of we never merchandised that you could move to the extra tier and get rid of ads. We never put any product marketing into the products that you knew that. So to me, these things are like what you said. They're habitually have gone into the product, maybe complained about advertising, and maybe didn't even know that they could actually just pay the weekly $12.99 and get rid of advertising.
And so that has been also working well for us. We put in what we call a tab Boost button so that you could actually see Boost more easily when you go into the tab because I don't know, it's just like me when I go into the apps that I go into all the time. I kind of have a rhythm of how I do it. And that's why we find that when you put the notification up, that they become more educated in it. So I think you're right. We will probably always have a nice significant size tier of free folks because that's important to us. We find that there's value. It keeps the grid fresh for paying users.
But I think we're going to have no trouble convincing, as we've already demonstrated, that there's more folks that are willing to move to paid when the value is there.
Great. And then maybe lastly on the product front, one of the initiatives maybe that was included in the Investor Day was this global Gayborhood concept where you can, because you have the awareness and the affinity from the gay community, that gives you license to maybe branch out into things beyond relationships and serving as an information hub or maybe even a commerce hub. I guess how should we be thinking about the opportunities that are there for Grindr and maybe the, I don't want to say the timing because it's kind of a longer-term initiative, but just how we can think about that scaling into the product over time?
So I think that someone told me when I first joined that this app has the capability of being an organizing principle. And I have to be honest, I didn't understand what they meant. And I didn't really even, I just wasn't thinking in that regard. But after sitting here for two years and seeing how much this app is part of the DNA of the community, I now understand what they meant, which is there is this desire for the community to say, well, we're different and we are a community and this is what is of interest to us, even in fashion, even in health and wellness, even in travel. And so I think we do have the license to branch out into some of these areas, but it's very new territory.
And so it will definitely take, I think, you know, a couple of iterations for us to get right. I would be, I mean, we could get lucky and it might work immediately. But I think things in life, you know, even in our what I would call core model, we've iterated a little bit. And so my sense is that because the app is used mostly for community messaging and connection, it does give us a little bit more artistic license to go further. And we're going to test that out soon.
Great. Very much looking forward to it. So given the combination of all that we've discussed over the span of the product section here, what effect should some of these have on variables like payer conversion or ARPU? Because I know that not all are necessarily monetization focused. Some are more focused on either user acquisition or engagement.
Yep. So I would say that right at this moment, Right Now is all about engagement. So we're testing out this intention of Right Now. And the thought on how it's going to be monetized is open. We're flexible. We have the benefit of, we have the luxury, actually, I would say, of taking our time to get it right and testing through it because the foundational products are performing so well for now. And so as we think through Right Now, that will be determined, I would say, on how we monetize. And then so going back to your original question of payer penetration or paying users and ARPU, our number one goal is increasing the number of paying users. That's our number one goal. ARPU is an output, not an input.
In fact, when we put out the XTRA weekly at $12.99, that was a lower price point than our monthly of $19.99. And in fact, ARPU went up in 2023. And in 2024, we put out Unlimited weekly, which I was pleasantly surprised at the uptake, the low cannibalization. And again, our ARPU went up. So when I was expecting ARPU to go down in 2023, it actually went up. In 2024, I think we've been very lucky and very fortunate that our use case of immediacy is actually proven through the Unlimited weekly. So what I'd say is, I said we don't really know how we want to monetize Right Now or Roam. It's been, you know, we're testing it out. Whether that means if it becomes an add-on, it could take ARPU down.
But if it doesn't and it goes into a tier, chances are ARPU would stay relatively flat-ish. We have talked a little bit about our Platinum or VIP or more expensive tier. That, of course, would be higher ARPU. And we are imagining that dating would be a more expensive proposition because I think we're going to put a lot of product innovation into it. And we are very optimistic and hopeful that the effectiveness of the dating product would be valuable to our users such that they'd want to pay more. So think about it as meeting users' needs and providing them value at a fair price that should increase paying users, higher paid penetration. At $7.7, we're much below our peers, as you noticed, so there's room to go. But the ARPU will be an output.
At the moment, probably I would imagine it'll be a little bumpy, but I don't see it going down meaningfully, that's for sure.
Great. Wanted to open up if anybody in the audience had a question. Otherwise, I can keep going. Go ahead.
I appreciate what you said about getting the free tier to upgrade. Can you just tell us about your strategy to monetize through advertising the free tier a little bit and where you guys are at, where you're moving forward? You probably have, if not the best one of the best demographics anywhere, right?
For the benefit of the webcast, the question was about monetizing the free tier through advertising and the audience characteristics that you have.
I am so glad you asked that question because I forgot about talking about it, and the truth is we love the advertising business line. It has done phenomenally this year, phenomenally. We brought in a leader from Google, and I would say that in the same way as I've described the subscription tier as being early in its monetization journey, you could take that and probably multiply it by two on the advertising side, and the reason I say that is because we are just putting in place new ad formats, so native ads and rewarded video that are way higher CPM than the current ad base of what I would call banner ads and basic MRECs. So we see not only real room for CPM to go up, but also domestically versus internationally, there is a very big difference in our ad loads.
The reason that's the case is because the third-party advertiser, we probably hadn't been as open on using as many that were global. Now we've added more partners. We expect to take up the ad loads internationally. We expect the CPMs to also go up through the native ads and rewarded video that I spoke about. Going back to your earlier point, which is this is a wonderful demographic that people want to reach. If we're not the best place to reach it, we've got to be in the top few. We have been seeing some continued interest with men's health areas. We plan on trying to broaden that out. However, we view that as sort of a step two because we're taking hold of our brand narrative.
And we are evolving our brand to be just a little still very racy and fun, but also just allowing places for, let's call it more traditional advertisers, places on the app that would be more amenable to them. And so that's taking, that is a little bit of work, and we're going to do it. So yeah, we see real growth there.
Go ahead.
Then maybe I'll follow on that. Are there any opportunities in M&A in either travel, wellness, fashion to either one-off products or smaller companies?
Yeah, for the webcast, the question was about M&A opportunities in adjacencies outside of relationships.
So right now, we've been pretty clear that we have a very high bar for M&A because our EBITDA margins are so high and very enjoyed by us and I think our investors. So we're not looking to degrade that. And we've also been clear that in our Gayborhood initiatives, that really should be done through partnerships. I don't want to speak for forever because that's so long, but certainly it's not on our roadmap to think about any kind of M&A for anything Gayborhood initiatives oriented.
Maybe the last question I have as we're running up on time here. On that margin point, you have outperformed what investors view as your peer set, and it's been a nice stable margin. So I guess how should we be thinking about the trajectory of that going forward given the product mix? And you're at 43% margins, give or take right now. Is it unfair to suggest there could be some leverage in there?
So let's just start by why we have this structural advantage. So we have a structural advantage in our margins mostly because we don't use any performance marketing. And we do use some brand marketing. We've gone up to about 2%, I believe, of our revenue. And that's really about taking hold of our brand narrative and taking charge of it and also through social media and social influencers that can really, I would say, exemplify and put our brand through a loudspeaker per se. So we have spent a few dollars on marketing, but nothing like anybody in the space does because we fill it through word of mouth and through the MAU growth that we talked about. In terms of margins, I mean, 43% is not shabby. So we're pretty happy. We're pretty happy with it. We do have global product market fit.
However, I don't want to pretend that we know for sure that the international markets that are growing right now wouldn't take a little bit more investment to really have the same level of dedication as the domestic markets. You do know that we do have about 55% of our paying users are international. Sorry, yeah, of our paying users are international. But we can imagine that growing and we can imagine the domestic growing. So I would say that we're lucky that we can fund our growth ideas and what we need to make the app work for everyone globally with our free cash flow. And we're pretty happy at 43. Could there be leverage in the model? Not tomorrow, but there certainly could be over time.
In fact, that's what you've seen this year as we've let the revenue, not let, but the revenue drops down to the bottom line when things outperform.
Great. Well, I think that's all we have time for this morning, but I did want to say thank you again to Vanna for taking the time to speak with us.