Well, good morning everyone, and thank you so much for joining us. My name is Nathan Feather, and I am Morgan Stanley's Small and Mid-Cap Analyst here at. I'm excited to be joined this morning by Gary Swidler, Match's CFO, and Faye Iosotaluno, the CEO of Tinder. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us. Great to see you.
Great. So before we begin, a few quick housekeeping items for important disclosures. Please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosures website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. And also please note, Match is Safe Harbor. During this presentation and during the question-and-answer session, 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 periodic reports filed with the SEC. Great. And with those out of the way.
You're going to be a voiceover actor.
Well, why don't we start with you, Faye? First off, congratulations on the new role.
Thank you.
You know, can you walk people who may be unfamiliar through your background?
Sure. Thanks for having me, and thank you for the congratulations. I think there's probably three things that people should know about me. The first is I have been with Match Group for six and a half years. I have worked with and alongside some of our most major popular brands in the portfolio. I joined six and a half years ago to drive strategic new initiatives and then most recently served as Chief Strategy Officer at Match Group before moving over to Tinder. And so with those six and a half years, I think I've developed a very, very deep understanding of this category and have gotten really, really close to users, which has been tremendous in my job now as Tinder's CEO. The second thing I think that's important to note is my career has fully been in the space of consumer technology.
I started my career in media, but even in media, it was really about the transition of media into a digital era. Later in my career, I really focused on how do we unlock the value of social platforms. So for me, consumer tech has always been the core of what I'm interested in and what I do. At the heart of it, I really think it's about understanding consumer needs. I have spoken to or heard from thousands of singles around the world. I know how they use Tinder. I know what works for them. I know where we're failing them. That really helps to inform where we're going to focus our time this year. The last is I think of it as a privilege to be a steward of Tinder as a brand and a product.
You know, I'm leading a team of 615 that are committed to our mission. With this team, we're driving close to $2 billion of revenue with exceptional margins. We've structured the team to be nimble and fast, constantly learning and improving. So me and the executive team that I've been working very closely with for the last 18 months are just so excited to take Tinder into the next chapter of its growth. So that's a little bit about me.
Great. Well, I think it might be helpful to start with the most common question we get across the industry. Do you believe that the market is fully saturated, friendly dating, at least within the U.S.? If not, how do you see the market opportunity and potential growth from here?
Yeah, maybe I'll jump in, and Faye can certainly amplify. I mean, look, I think that to say that the market is saturated is really not accurate. There's lots of singles out there and people generally who want to meet others. You know, there's a huge TAM outside of the U.S., and there's a significant TAM even in the U.S. and other developed markets. So I don't think that that is the right diagnosis of what's going on in the industry. What I do think is right is to say, you know, the current crop of products, Tinder included and other competitors as well, are not satisfying enough people with the user experience today.
We need to focus on improving the user experience to cater better to those demographics who have said, "I have some concerns," or "I have some things that lead me to be unhappy with my experience with some of these apps." That's what Faye's laser focus on doing, is improving the experience at Tinder to do a better job with younger users, to do a better job with female users, and really evolve the app experience to grow the user base effectively.
Yeah, I really agree with Gary there. And I want to also make sure people understand dating is just hard in general. I don't know if you guys can think back to dating. Dating is just hard in general, whether you are dating in real life or whether you are on an app. It's our job to make the experience and make the journey better, fun, efficient for you. And as Gary mentioned, we do believe that user needs are shifting and changing. And that's a keen focus for us, is how do we adapt Tinder as a product to address those needs?
Yeah, I think the only other thing I'd add is, if you just do the thought exercise and say, "Do you think more people are going to use technology to meet people and connect in the next 5, 10, 15 years, or fewer?" It's very hard to think that it's going to be fewer. I don't think anyone really thinks that. So it is our job to provide better products, better technologies, and harness the power of technological evolution to better give people tools where they can meet people and enjoy that experience. We're going to keep pushing on that.
Yeah. Let me just give one example. I was at a university in Los Angeles a few weeks ago and talking to students and asking them, "Would you go to a bar and go up and talk to the girl at the bar?" And the answers you get are, "No." That seems really aggressive. And I have no idea if that person actually wants to be approached. So when you think about online dating as a pool of people who are actually looking for something and are self-identifying as that, there's real value there. So I think as a category, it is actually delivering. And now we need to make sure the products within it continue to satisfy more specific needs.
Well, I think that's really helpful. And a lot I want to unpack there. But let's start a little bit more near-term and dig into some of the top-of-the-funnel trends. And so from our vantage point, 2023 was a pretty interesting year because you had some strong momentum building up into the summer, but then a little bit of a falloff in the fall and the winter. I guess, would you agree with that characterization? And then if so, what do you think drove both the mid-year strength but also back-half weakness?
Yeah, look, I think that as we've talked about publicly, Tinder really hadn't marketed in a global, cohesive way in a long time. And Faye and the team organized a new campaign, a global campaign, and rolled that out in February of last year. And what we saw, when you haven't marketed for a while and you start marketing, people are reminded about Tinder and the benefits of Tinder. And we saw some really nice user growth improvement from, let's call it, February of last year until about June of last year. So we saw an initial surge. But what we also saw is it didn't sustain because the product hadn't evolved sufficiently to better meet the needs of the people who were trying it again.
We started to see a falloff in the user growth back to kind of mid-single-digit declines from July of last year, which have basically been pretty stable in and around that level from then all the way through the beginning of this year. That's where the product evolution really needs to come in. The marketing can help. It can get people to take another look. It can certainly help drive a little bit of user growth. But it's not going to do the heavy lifting. The heavy lifting really needs to come from product evolution and product improvement, which is why Faye is so focused on making sure that that's what happens.
I mean, I do think that the marketing investment has been key, though. When we look at our brand consideration metrics now versus a year ago, those numbers are 20% higher for women 18 to 24. When we look at social positive sentiment, those now outweigh negative mentions. So social sentiment is actually incredibly important. You can go online and find a plethora of complaints of people not liking things. To actually go online and talk positively about a brand or an experience is actually terrific. There's a high bar for that. So when we see those numbers trend in the right way, it's a great indication for us of that growing brand affinity that we think becomes a leading indicator for things to come.
Now, Faye, I want to focus a few questions specifically on Tinder. So I guess first, coming into the seat as the new CEO here, I'd be interested to hear what you think Tinder does particularly well that's driving that social sentiment. And then conversely, what are the biggest areas where you really need to improve on the product side?
Yeah. You know, when Tinder came onto the scene, it really revolutionized the category of online dating. The things that made it so special was that it took advantage of the user needs and trends that were happening at that time, right? The advent of mobile devices and being able to take amazing photos and put that in your pocket. So suddenly, Tinder, a mobile-first experience, brings those photos to the forefront, makes it incredibly approachable to actually create a profile and get in versus experiences before that took much longer. It was like a significant affair to get into online dating. What we introduced was the ability to be able to welcome users in in a faster, approachable, and delightful way, surprising at times. Those are still core to the differentiators at Tinder.
I think as we look at things moving forward, we need to keep those intact. But at the same time, when you think about user trends and you think about the technology that's available today, like AI, we need to be able to incorporate that into the experience in service of better outcomes for people, in service of helping that user journey now that has evolved over the last 10, 11 years as we've existed out there.
Yeah. Thinking about 2024, on the back of that negative top-of-funnel growth through 2023, how do you flip that positive both next year but also sustainably?
Yeah, look, you know, I think it goes back to the product. I think we need to meet people where they are, how they want to date, how they want to meet people, make the experience fun, and not feel like a lot of work. And that's what's happened, as Faye described. When it first burst onto the scene, Tinder was fun, easy, quick, and those were all viewed as positives. Over the course of the last 10 years, those things have somewhat morphed into negatives, right? There's too much bad behavior. You know, it's too easy for people to just throw in a picture and start swiping away. It's not substantive enough. I don't really know who these people are. I don't want to meet them because I don't know who they are.
We need to correct for some of those things, evolve the experience more to the way people are thinking about it today as opposed to 10 years ago, and satisfy people. And then I think the users will naturally come back to the business. It's a globally recognized brand. Everyone knows what it does. It still has massive user liquidity in all of these markets. There's huge advantages that Tinder has as a brand has. It's an iconic dating app that everybody knows about. And so those are all really big positives. But evolving the experience to better cater to what people are looking for today is critical to do. And I think that's what Faye and the team have been working on now for more than 18 months.
Yeah, we're very focused in this area. I know we would all love to just flip a switch, whether it's a marketing switch or whether it's a feature switch, and suddenly change the industry again. This is hard work. It's hard work that any group focused on building consumer products do, right? It's diving in, really unpacking the problems, creating new features, understanding what works, pulling out the things that don't, and evolving that over time. That's what we're focused on every single day.
All right. Well, let's dig a little bit deeper on some of those specific products. So thinking about the Tinder roadmap you outlined in the last earnings letter, what are the one or two things that you're particularly excited about for this year and then the one or two that might be more impactful over the medium term?
Yeah. You know, we really don't think about it as one or two things. I think we really think about it as this sustained investment over the course of the year with lots of elements on this roadmap, all the way from trust and safety features down to monetization features. I do think that the two core areas for us and our focus is around Gen Z. We've talked a little bit about that and the changing needs, and it's around women. For Gen Z, what's clear to me is that younger users don't love this one linear path of online dating. If you come into any of the apps today, you set up a profile, you start discovering, you match, and then you chat, and then hopefully you end up on a date. Pretty linear.
But younger people today, the way they make connections, the way they're meeting, it's actually much more fluid. And they want lower pressure. There's something about online dating that says, if you don't have X outcome, you have failed at this experience. And that's something that we don't believe is true because relationships and connections show up in a lot of different ways. So really focused on that as well. And ultimately, also, authenticity is at the core. You know, when you think about young users who are questioning what they're seeing online, whether that's on social platforms or in other spaces, we want online dating. We want Tinder to be a place where people can show up and bring their authentic selves. And that helps you connect. That helps you trust who you're seeing on the platform. So we're doing a lot of work on that space.
From the women's experience perspective, my goal is to make sure if you're a woman and you show up, you see somebody you want to match with every time you're in the app. And we think there's two core areas for that this year. One is reinforcing realness. This is a real person with real interests that I can actually go out with if I match and chat with this person. And the other one is relevance. How do we take all the people on the platform and actually show women and ultimately all users the most relevant people to them, learning what it is that they want, learning what they want to actually maximize for, and then deliver that in order to drive results? So not one or two things, but lots of things within those themes that we anticipate to launch throughout the year.
I think we think of it as very iterative, and it will build on top of each other. Then as Gary mentioned, as you have that, it becomes a platform for us to then amplify with marketing, right? Really kind of evolve that experience and then amplify. This work is really critical to me. I have 2 young daughters who will be dating in 5-6 years. I want Tinder to be a place that they go to because they know they can be their authentic selves. They know it's a safe place for them. They will feel included and belonging. They will meet people that they want to actually spend time with. That's our goal every day as we work together.
Well, that's really helpful overview, I think, of a lot of the products. And underlying that is some of the tech layer and particularly some of the advancements in Gen AI we've seen. And so Faye, what are the key friction points in the online dating process that you think you can really help alleviate with the new technology? And then is it possible we could start to see real impact from some of those features this year?
Yeah. I think there's tremendous opportunity with AI throughout the user experience, from onboarding, profile creation, to matching and recommendations, all the way down to post-match, what we call as chat and conversation. Even though Tinder is easy to get onto and approachable, making a profile is very hard. We were just talking about that earlier, right before this, right? What pictures do you put up? How do you actually present yourself? And this is where we think of AI as an enabler, not a substitute for how somebody shows up in the experience. And so we see AI enabling in that journey of onboarding. How do we bring your best self into the forefront? We see it helping with matching and recommendations.
How do we make sure people understand why you're seeing this person to begin with and be smart about it based on all the data that we have? All the way down to communicating. How do we help you have that conversation, again, not as a substitute for you, but really to bring out the best in a conversation, which we also know is very challenging to do? So I am really excited about kind of where AI can show up. We are deep in prototyping a lot of different experiences, but we're also being very thoughtful and responsible. I think the design of how AI will show up in these experiences and there's a lot of buzz about this, but truly, I think it does have a chance to really revolutionize how users are engaging. We want to be super thoughtful about that.
We want to make great decisions for our users.
All right. Well, I think a lot of what you talked about there is taking that product and then amplifying it with marketing. We're about a year into the "It Starts With A Swipe" campaign. I think retrospectively, how are you thinking about that campaign's performance? Then thinking about marketing cadence through the year, how are you expecting that to grow, especially timing along big product launches and innovation within the product?
Yeah. I think one of the learnings we had this year was that the market's competitive. We have landed on something really productive with our "It Starts With A Swipe" campaign. I mentioned some of the stats earlier around brand consideration. Our top-performing asset from the campaign shows a 7% lift in brand consideration. If you ask a brand marketer or tell them about that lift, they will tell you how meaningful that is in the context of an established brand. So these things are elements that bode well for us and tell us that the platform we created last year and continue to build upon is the right thing. We need to keep at it, keep that message out there, and then build and amplify with product, with other moments.
Marketing won't be the answer to everything, which is why we spend a lot of time talking about product too. But marketing is something we continue to focus and invest in. People who know me will tell you that I am maniacal about looking at data. I want to look at data constantly to understand, are we being efficient? What's working? What's not? We tweak week to week, month to month. I actually think that is why, even though our spend is up relative to the market as a % of revenue, our spend is quite low. I think it is that maniacal focus on making sure that we are spending efficiently and tuning our strategy every chance we get.
The only other thing I'd add is the spend is primarily brand spend. It's not direct response spend. Brand spend takes time to build. We made some good progress last year, as Faye talked about, improving brand consideration, getting the message out there. We need to keep spending to build that and ultimately improve the perception. Because as I said before, Tinder doesn't have an awareness problem. It's not trying to build awareness. It's trying to improve perception, improve consideration. There's evidence that that has begun to happen. We need to keep pushing in that regard. But we also need to be responsible, with my CFO hat on, for a second. We're nimble on marketing spend. We're very analytical, as Faye said. We'll continue to analyze it. If we think it's working and doing what it needs to do, we'll keep spending it.
If we don't, we can pull back and adjust. We can do that on a weekly or monthly basis pretty effectively.
All right. Well, rolling all of that together into, I think, the key KPI here, at least for a lot of investors, which is Tinder payers, can you break down the path and timeline to return positive sequential Tinder net adds? And then how much of that do you anticipate will be driven by some of the new user growth that you're hoping to find versus product enhancements versus kind of being bundled in between?
Yeah. I mean, look, just to jump in on a couple of things. I mean, one, I understand the focus on payers exists. I continue to believe that ultimately revenue and profitability is our most important North Star set of metrics. And we need to stay focused on that. Just driving payers for the sake of driving payers is not something I want to do. And we certainly have no intentions of doing things like reducing prices, which would increase payers but reduce revenue. In fact, we've done the opposite. We've been able to increase prices, which has been revenue-enhancing, even though it's been payer destructive. So I think the focus on payers is overblown, but we understand it.
We are positioned by the third quarter of this year, given all the optimizations and monetization things we're planning to do in the first half of the year, to drive sequential payer growth at Tinder in the third quarter of the year. We're positioned to do that. That's not our main focus. Our main focus is on driving revenue and profitability. Now, I think Faye would tell you that we have a relatively small team at Tinder focused on these revenue optimizations and monetization efforts. They are solely focused on that and are going to continue to be focused on that.
But the bulk of the team, the rest of the team, which is obviously much larger, are focused on really solving the true thing that needs to be solved at Tinder, which is enhancing the experience, doing a better job with women and younger users, and ultimately driving sustained user growth. Sustained user growth can lead to sustained revenue growth over time. That is really the critical thing that needs to happen at Tinder. That is, for us, the thing that we're trying to accomplish with all of the product improvements is to build a business that is seeing user growth and the kind of user growth we want to see: people that are additive to the ecosystem, that are engaged, that are sending messages, that are meeting people, and that are good users of the product.
Once we can do that, I think that the rest of the problems essentially will take care of themselves. The other KPIs will be met in a way that's satisfactory because user growth is happening.
Yeah. I think Gary raises a great point here. I've gotten closer to Tinder over the last 18 months. My appreciation for this monetization muscle that Tinder has and ultimately, I think, from Match Group is incredible. There's a team that's focused on that day in, day out. I think what hasn't happened over the last few years is that same level of focus and really driving product momentum at the core. That is what's going to unlock user growth. That's where we're really focused now as we move forward into 2024.
And just to be clear, I mean, we're trying to do it in a way which generates a reasonable level of revenue growth. We've said that 6%-8%, high single digits, whatever you want to call it. And we're trying to do that. We're trying to be responsible with margins, investing some more into marketing, some more into product innovation, AI, et cetera, doing that in a way that's responsible to ultimately get to our goal that is the key North Star, which is to drive user growth. And so we're trying to balance all three of those. It is not an easy task that we've got Faye doing to try to balance all three of margin, revenue, and user growth. But we believe that with the right conversations, let's say, we can get there. And Faye and I have those conversations twice a day at this point.
Well, I think that's a really great place to leave Tinder for now. Let's switch over to Hinge. You're about 18 months into the expansion into non-English speaking territories. What have been your major early learnings from those first 18 months? And then given how recently and quickly that ramp has happened, how should we think about what inning Hinge is in in terms of international, both expansion and monetization?
Yeah. Look, I think Hinge is in the very early innings of its expansion generally. It's very early in monetization. It's not nearly as sophisticated in terms of monetization as Tinder is. And it benefits from having a bigger, older sister, I guess, and knowing what some of the roadmap is and being able to roll those plays out over time. So we have a pretty good sense of what needs to get done at Hinge. I think the very encouraging thing is how well that product has resonated across all the markets it's gone into, where you look at kind of where it stands download-wise with leading positions in a significant number of English-speaking markets and climbing the download charts in a significant number of European markets. The resonance that the product has had is extremely encouraging. The user growth has been very strong.
And like I said, in the case of Tinder, user growth has led to monetization growth. And there's a lot more opportunity there. So we're very early. There's also a big world out there. We've only expanded into English-speaking markets and European markets. There's the rest of the world to go after. So the Hinge team is focused on making all those things happen over time. And it's not a 2024 thing, but over time, expanding into additional geographies outside of the core English-speaking markets and Europe, continuing to advance along the monetization journey, and continuing to innovate on the product because the issues that Tinder is grappling with are things that Hinge needs to grapple with sooner. How does it respond to the opportunities presented by AI? How does it stay relevant and current?
Hinge is very focused on making the right investments to build out its AI capabilities, to continue to evolve the product, and really satisfy as many users globally as it can. I think it's focused on the right thing and the right things. The financial trajectory for Hinge looks very, very bright.
All right. Well, you touched on something there I want to dig a little bit more into, which is Hinge's monetization and paid feature set. Now, relative to Tinder and some of the other brands in the portfolio, it's still a relatively small paid feature set. How much white space do you see there for expanding those features? And then where does expanding monetization fit within the near-term Hinge priority list, given a lot of the user traction they're seeing and also some of the tech advancements in AI?
Yeah. I mean, the focus for Hinge, the primary focus, remains on user growth, both in the core markets and in Europe. And in fact, I think the opportunity we've seen in Europe has been greater than we initially thought it might be. And so we're continuing to kind of double down in those markets and really push on user growth in Europe. And like I said, that's going very well. So that is the first focus. I would say there's a modest focus on monetization. We rolled out the two tiers. Hinge has some à la carte features. So it's early in rolling out those monetization initiatives. It will continue to be, I think, on a relatively slow burn compared to user growth until we get a little bit further along. But it will continue to come as well.
All right. Great. Well, one initiative that I think has gone a little bit under the radar has been the shift to a single platform for the emerging and evergreen segment. I guess can you give some background on what exactly is happening there and the potential cost savings you could achieve once that's fully rolled out?
So if you look at the company as a whole, there's Tinder and Hinge, which we look at as scaled global businesses that operate fully their own product, their own tech, their own marketing across the functions. And we believe that's appropriate for those businesses to really kind of operate as if they were standalone businesses, sharing information and knowledge and capabilities with their brother or sister. So I think that that makes sense for those businesses. We have some businesses in Asia, which are a little bit of a different story, which I'll leave to the side for a second. And then we have this set of evergreen and emerging brands, some of which are having trouble growing in the current environment. And that's been true for a while.
In those businesses where it's been more challenging to grow, the evergreen brands Match, Meetic, which is basically Match in Europe, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, it doesn't make sense to have multiple teams that do the same thing in each of those businesses: customer care, other operations, marketing, et cetera. It also doesn't make sense to have separate platforms, separate technology platforms in each of those businesses. It's too expensive. It's inefficient. It's duplicative. So we're combining all of that together. We're in the midst of doing that. What that enables us to do is, instead of having four teams, we can have one. Instead of having four tech platforms, we can have one.
We're combining all that together to generate efficiencies, which I estimate could be as much as 10 points of margin in that evergreen and emerging bucket, which is, call it, about $60 million or so once we fully achieve the benefits of those synergies. There are some benefits of reducing duplication among the teams. We're already achieving that. Then we're putting the tech platforms together where we'll achieve more synergies because not only do you get the benefits of putting the tech platforms together and having less tech costs, but you also need fewer teams to manage all of those tech platforms so you can reduce people in those areas.
And also, you can roll things out faster because instead of doing it once for Match and once for OkCupid and once for Plenty of Fish, you can roll it out once, and it appears on all the apps simultaneously. And so that's a big advantage. Now, these tech consolidations, as you've probably seen for other companies, are complicated and not without their risks. You have to do them carefully, deliberately, thoughtfully because otherwise, and we've seen this with one of our competitor dating apps too, you can have real user negative reaction and have real issues and concerns. We've done this a few times on smaller platforms. We've done it and learned. And now we're doing it on some of these bigger platforms. So we're going to do two of them this year. We're going to do two of them next year.
We'll start to get the benefits of those consolidations. The benefits will be fully phased in in 2026. It's a slow, deliberate thing. We're doing it, we think, as fast as we can in a prudent way.
All right. Well, looking at the portfolio of brands you own today, do you see a lot of opportunities for expansion? And then building on that last point, does the unified platform for evergreen and emerging help you launch or acquire brands a little bit faster?
Yeah. So evergreen actually has a second piece, which are the emerging brands. And what we're doing there is, using the same tech platform for efficiency, we're rolling out targeted demographic brands. And so those brands—Chispa, which is focused on the Hispanic community, BLK, which is focused on the Black community, and there's others, one on the Asian American community—those are never going to be general usage, global-scaled apps like Tinder or Hinge. There's only so many Hispanic people in the country. There's only so many Black people in the country. But we can target effectively those demographics with an app that caters to them by leveraging a common infrastructure. And so that's what we're doing. And I think that's proving to be a very effective strategy. It's also a more efficient strategy.
It's a quicker strategy because we can roughly duplicate what we're doing and make some tailoring and adjustments and get those apps out there. It is a play for efficiency. The strategy is to have evergreen and emerging benefit from this combined shared tech platform where we can also get efficiencies on safety and trust applications and everything else, and then have Hinge and Tinder be their own standalone platforms, sharing some things here and there, but by and large, being standalone.
All right. Well, thinking about a theme we've talked about a lot, which is balancing investment and margin, you got into a 2024 EBITDA margin of 36%. How do you think about balancing investing in some of the core platforms: Tinder, Hinge, et cetera, but also making sure you're delivering an effective margin and cash flow profile?
I mean, look, we think about it every minute, pretty much. It's a constant obsession inside the company. And I think it's a very important one because we want to be as responsible as we can with shareholder dollars. But making those trade-offs of margin for 2024 versus user growth at Tinder, doing the right things with AI, those have benefits in 2025, 2026, 2027, which are hard to get your arms around today, especially when you don't really know exactly where things are going with AI or other innovation. And we're also trying to build new apps and try new things and expand our TAM and cater to new populations. So there's innovation going on in the portfolio.
By its nature, our portfolio is going to have some more scaled, more mature brands that are growing less, some a little bit less mature that are growing faster, and some new ideas and things that we're trying. We have to manage the portfolio in that way because we've done a good job nurturing brands like Hinge and getting them from $1 million of revenue to $400 million of revenue. And so we need to have that new idea and try that new thing. And it's always challenging to come up with something that actually does take hold. So we want to invest in new ideas. We need to invest in Tinder to get it back to growth, make it more cutting edge, invest in AI. The same is true at Hinge. We're expanding Hinge internationally. We need to invest in those markets as well.
So there's a lot to balance. And we think that delivering 36% plus margins, which in kind of the category that we operate in are still very attractive margins, enables us to make the investments we want to make in Tinder and Hinge marketing, in global expansion, in AI, in new apps, and still generate really attractive profitability levels. We don't have a lot of CapEx, so it flows pretty much to cash flow. And we think the company generates really attractive levels of cash flow as well. And so that's our strategy. And we have these trade-offs. How do we balance user growth and innovation, revenue growth, and the margin profile of the company? And we're constantly debating that and trying to be as responsible as we can, and both long-term and properly short-term focus where we need to be.
All right. Great. So 36% plus today. The company had spoken a while back to getting long-term margins of 40% plus. Do you think that's still achievable, at least putting aside some of the app fee changes for a different discussion?
Yeah. I mean, look, I think the App Store fees are a real thing that could really drive the margins much higher. In fact, this is an important week with the Digital Markets Act going into effect. You start to see some of the things happen in Europe with a big fine levied against Apple on the music streaming side for not complying. The regulators there actually can't really take action until the Digital Markets Act goes into effect on March 7th. So this is a week we've been waiting for. It's going to be interesting to see how these next few months play out between the regulators in Europe and the App Stores. But I think the regulators have been pretty clear that they mean business.
So that's really significant upside to us and to consumers that I think shouldn't be overly discounted just because we've been waiting a long time for it, and it's been hard to quantify. I mean, that's a real kind of upside for our company and enables us to invest in innovation. Instead of paying almost 30% to Apple, we can use some of that and invest in innovation. That's a really powerful lever that we have. I'm encouraged that we're finally getting close to that March 7th implementation date. I think the goal of the company is to continue to invest profitably, as I said, shorter and longer-term focus, improve margins gradually. That's what we're going to continue to try to do and really do that constant balancing act.
Not setting a specific target on it one way or the other, but gradual improvement in margins is certainly something that we're mindful that shareholders would like to see, and we'd like to deliver.
All right. Well, one more in the minutes that we have before we end. Let's touch on capital allocation. So you got into about $1.1 billion of free cash flow this year. That's on top of the $860 million or so of cash you have on the balance sheet, especially given how the stock's traded. How are you thinking about capital allocation over the year? And then interested to hear if you have any updated thoughts on the dividend as well.
Hey, look, I think we've been pretty clear, I think, in our shareholder letters on our plans around capital allocation, which is we're fairly internally focused at the moment. We have operational things we want to achieve. So don't see us going outside for M&A in the near horizon. And we don't have a lot of capital expenditures or other things we're trying to do that way. And so as a result of that, we're generating a lot of cash, very high conversion level of EBITDA to cash flow. And we don't want to just build cash for cash's sake. That's never been our strategy. We do think our stock is an attractive opportunity now. And we continue to put our money into our own company. And we think that makes sense to do. And so we're going to continue to invest in ourselves.
We've said we're going to invest at least 50% of our free cash flow in returning capital shareholders this year. That is a floor. It could be higher. And we're going to keep buying back stock with all that in mind. A dividend is just another way of returning capital. If that tool makes sense, we're not afraid to deploy that as well. Other companies have started to use dividends even though they're growing companies. And so we think that's an interesting model. We're going to look at all of these tools. And we want to return capital to shareholders in the most efficient and effective ways possible.
Great. Well, Gary, Faye, thank you so much, both, for being here.
Thank you.
Thanks, Nathan. We're happy to participate in your debut in the first chair. Congratulations to you on getting the seat. We're very happy for you as well.
I appreciate it.
All the best in the new role. Thank you all for joining us.
Thank you.