Welcome, everyone, and good morning. I'm Tanny Shelburne, Head of Investor Relations at Match Group. It's great to be in New York with you all, and thanks to those tuning in online. Today, you'll have the opportunity to hear from our Senior Executive team as they guide you through Match Group's vision, strategy, and future. We'll kick things off with CEO Bernard Kim, who will share our overarching mission, strategy for our path forward. Next, our CTO, Will Wu, will dive into how innovation, particularly in AI, is embedded across our portfolio of brands to enhance the user experience. Faye Iosotaluno, CEO of Tinder, will then discuss how Tinder is innovating to restore momentum. After a quick break, Justin McLeod, Founder and CEO of Hinge, will highlight the brand's exciting plans for intention daters. Then you'll hear from Hesam Hosseini, CEO of Evergreen & Emerging Brands.
He'll share the benefits of combining the Evergreen & Emerging Brands into E&E. Malgosia Green, CEO of Match Group Asia, will follow with insights into the global expansion opportunities for our Asia brands. Finally, we'll conclude with an overview of our financial framework and long-term plan to drive shareholder value, presented by Gary Swidler, our President and CFO, along with our incoming CFO, Steve Bailey. After another break, we'll end with a Q&A session featuring the entire executive team. For those of you who are here in person, please submit your questions throughout the day using the QR code on your tables. Before we begin, let me walk you through a few disclosures. During this presentation, we may discuss our outlook, future performance, capital allocation plans, and expected product and feature releases.
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 risk and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in the slides and our periodic reports with the SEC. Also today, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in an appendix to the slides and on our IR website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be substitutes for our GAAP results. We've also provided information about key metrics. With that, let's get started.
Hi. When you create the category, when you invent the swipe, the virality will take you really far. Find someone you'd like to la-la-la-la-la on Stir. We challenge you to date differently. So what is your favorite app currently? Tinder. Tinder. Tinder is putting rescue dogs on their app. I got to add this to my Tinder profile. I was like really looking for a way to be able to find people and connect with people outside of like going out to bars or going to parties. That's when the idea came. Enjoy your afterlife.
Match Group believes in the power of meaningful connection around the world. While also adopting and personalizing our approach across geographies. There's something universal about the human experience, and that's hope and desire for connection. I just got home from the first date. I'm actually like crying because it's so emotional when you meet someone who just has the same core values as you. I feel like I've met my person. At my desk, I actually have a stack of wedding invitations, and I always turn to them to really remind myself why we're doing the actual work that we're doing. W hat a humbling and beautiful responsibility, and there's so much more love to create in the world
Hello, everyone. I'm Bernard Kim, and on behalf of our entire team, I want to welcome you to Match Group's first-ever Investor Day. Whether you've been in a relationship with us for a long time or this is our first date, we've built a portfolio of brands that have fundamentally transformed how people connect. From our flagship brands like Tinder and Hinge to exciting innovations on the horizon, today is how we plan to shape the future of dating and how we're creating shared value. Here's what we'll look at today. First, we'll share our perspective on the state of the dating category and the opportunities that we see ahead. Next, we'll talk about why Match Group has been the leader for 30 years and how we're positioning ourselves to extend that leadership well into the future. Then we'll dive into the transformative nature of AI.
We really believe that this will play an unlocking wave of growth for Match Group. We'll also explore why our portfolio approach continues to be a winning strategy and how we'll harness it to unlock product innovation, revenue, and profit growth, and finally, how we expect our business to deliver highly attractive returns for the next few years. With that, let's dive in. Our mission is simple yet profound: to spark meaningful connections for every single person worldwide. Very few companies impact our people's lives and society as deeply and as positively as we do. We have redefined how people meet and connect for the past three decades. In fact, over 50% of online dating relationships in the U.S. started on one of our products. Just think about that. Match Group has changed millions of lives through pioneering technology and a diverse portfolio of brands.
We've revolutionized dating on a global scale, and that means the opportunity ahead means we're just getting started. We know the online dating landscape and user needs are rapidly evolving. Today, you'll see how we're innovating and leveraging AI to drive better user experiences across our company. By doing so, we expect not only to fuel growth within our brands, but also unlock even greater opportunities across the category. Now, four key strengths underpin this strategy. First, we have a proven track record of disruption and innovation, constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the dating industry. Second, our portfolio of brands caters to a diverse and global audience and positions us to capture even more users across the world. Third, while we serve a large global user base today, we see an enormous opportunity to attract new users.
Finally, there's our incredible management team, who I'll get to introduce in just a few minutes. Our four businesses position us as the global leader in online dating, serving roughly 82 million monthly active users, driving both high durable revenue and great profitability. Now, if our user base were a country, it'd be the 20th largest country in the world and probably the most fun country. Our monthly active users also include some duplication because of multi-app usage, which I'll get to in a minute. Tinder's unmatched global scale makes it the go-to dating app for 18-year-olds just entering the category. Next is Hinge, which is redefining intentional dating and driving both exponential growth in both users and revenue. Its success spans both core English-speaking markets in Western Europe, as well as room for further expansion.
Evergreen and Emerging, or E&E, is home to some of our longest-standing brands, including Match and OkCupid, as well as a number of demographically focused apps, which are becoming key drivers for its growth. And MG Asia caters to serious daters in Japan with Pairs, as well as Gen Z audiences globally through video chat app Azar. Across these brands, we share expertise in product development, monetization strategies, trust and safety, and marketing, allowing us to operate smarter, more efficiently, and successfully as a portfolio. Before we dive into the details, let's take a quick step back and look and see how this category has evolved to where it is today.
The search for true romance can begin just about anywhere, but these days, many of those seeking soulmates are turning to the internet. We met on match.com. It's been a really interesting evolution for the online dating space. Dating products have changed dramatically in the last several decades. One thing that is going to continue to get better is our understanding of what compatibility looks like. Only 10 years ago, Tinder was a new brand that I had never heard of. It changed the game, the entire landscape of connection and dating and relationships. When we tell people we met on Tinder, the majority of the responses are like, "Wow. I'm joined by Justin McLeod, the founder and CEO of the popular dating app Hinge, to discuss how he transformed the company from a $1 million revenue business to one that's projected to rake in a whopping $400 million
The thing that excites me the most about the future of dating is that there's no one-size-fits-all approach. We have to look at how the world is evolving. People do want different things, and different generations want to do things differently. When I think ahead, we're going to see a shift in what type of connections are forming on the apps and the tools that we're giving them. There's so much potential for where the brand is going to go and for where connection is going to go.
That was just a snapshot into our incredible history. In the late 1990s, Match pioneered online dating, overcoming stigma, creating a profitable business. We expanded globally with acquisitions. In 2012, we revolutionized the category with the introduction of Tinder. We then built an incredible business at Tinder with subscription tiers like Tinder Gold. In 2018, we welcomed Hinge into the Match family. It's been an incredible success story, living up to its promise to be the app that's designed to be deleted. Then Azar followed in 2021, giving us a new way to appeal to Gen Z. These are just a few examples of how innovation and expansion have consistently fueled step function growth for Match Group. Now, as we look into the future, we see an even bigger opportunity ahead. With the power of AI, we're on the next transformational leap for our company's evolution.
Part of that future is in this vast, untapped global market for dating apps. The notion that the online dating category is saturated is simply not true. Excluding China, there are 220 million people globally who are actively dating but have never tried dating apps. There are also 30 million people that have tried dating apps, but for whatever reason, aren't using them today. We believe that this unserved 250 million people globally represents a significant growth opportunity for us. With product-led innovation supplemented by targeted marketing, we believe we can attract a meaningful portion of these daters. We estimate that the online dating penetration is just 12% of daters globally, 30% in developed markets, and only 7% in developing markets. But how do we unlock this huge market opportunity? It starts with solving the real challenges that people face today using dating apps.
During the pandemic, we saw a surge of users coming to our apps to combat the isolation. However, as life returned back to normal, we've seen a decline in active daters, with many focusing on themselves, their well-being, and their friendships, and unfortunately, less on dating. We believe these trends will return to more normal patterns over time. At the same time, some pain points have become more pronounced. This includes things like it takes too much work, or people don't show their true selves, or even I can't find compatible matches. We are well aware of these challenges and are committed to tackling them head-on, creating better experiences that resonate with more of today's daters. We know we can make this work because the desire to meet someone remains incredibly strong. Nearly 80% of Gen Z tells us they're looking for some form of connection.
Today, our brand leaders will share plans to address these issues, returning us to user growth and enhancing our revenue growth. Another reason for our confidence is that dating apps are still by far the primary source for finding first dates today, far surpassing social media, friends, and bars. In fact, dating apps in the U.S. have been steadily increasing their lead in the share of first dates over other sources for quite a while now. So while meet-cutes are great for the movies and run clubs are great for exercise, dating apps are by far the most effective way for people to make connections. Many daters use multiple apps, averaging about four at a time. Gen Z and millennials, not surprisingly, are some of our heaviest users. These multi-app users tend to be more active and more engaged, making them our most valuable customers.
Our data shows that many customers use both Tinder and Hinge, and those who do are not only our most engaged users, but also our best payers. Part of what makes this engagement possible and sets us apart is the incredible scale and liquidity of our platform. In dating apps, user liquidity is critical, meaning there must be a significant number of people who are on the apps who are available to match and chat with, and because our communities are so large and diverse, we're able to provide more and better matches than you can find elsewhere. Our apps facilitate nearly 500 million matches every month, and users send more than 100 million messages every single day. This unparalleled scale is a major competitive advantage for us. Replicating the scale of our apps is very hard to do, and scale is critical to effectiveness.
But scale alone isn't enough. Creating meaningful connections means more than just bringing people together. It requires ensuring that everyone feels safe and supported while using our platforms. That's why we've made it our mission to lead the industry fostering an environment based on safety, authenticity, and trust. Our approach is grounded in four guiding principles: safety by design, user control, authenticity and trust, and inclusivity. We focus on embedding safety at every phase of our product lifecycle. We empower users to tailor their experience, offering tools like Photo Verification to ensure profiles are real. Our innovative features like Are You Sure? detects potentially inappropriate messages, have dramatically improved user behaviors. And our proactive moderation tools are incredibly effective, removing 90% of spam accounts before users even have to report them.
We strive to create an environment where everyone feels welcome, no matter who they are or what they're looking for. A big part of my confidence in the future comes from the incredible team that I get to work with every day. They bring a combined 40 years- plus of experience leading, innovating, and scaling dating businesses. Faye, who is Tinder's CEO, has been with Match Group for seven years. She has a deep understanding of the modern dating landscape. Since becoming Tinder's CEO at the start of this year, she has galvanized the team, solidified the strategy, and is now working on creating momentum. Already, her leadership has been instrumental in building a stronger foundation to drive Tinder forward. Justin is Hinge's Founder and CEO. He brings an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for creating meaningful connections.
Since launching Hinge in 2012 and joining Match Group in 2018, his hands-on leadership and product innovation have driven Hinge's success, facilitating millions of dates globally. Hesam is the head of E&E. He's been with Match Group for 16 years and has broad institutional knowledge. His long-standing experience in brand transformation, app incubation, and acquisitions make him a versatile leader. Hesam's ability to adapt across different roles guiding emerging brands positions E&E as a vital component of our future growth. Malgosia leads MG Asia. Based in Singapore, her expertise managing cross-cultural teams and go-to-market strategies in various markets has been essential to the improved momentum of brands like Pairs and Azar. Will joined us last year from Snap and leads our innovation efforts as CTO. Will has a passion for connecting people by leveraging the latest technologies.
It's been inspiring to see him work across the portfolio, digging in and helping create a culture of innovation, particularly focused on unlocking new opportunities with AI. And later today, you'll hear from Gary, our President and CFO, who's played a pivotal role in building Match Group since its IPO. And you'll meet Steve, who will step into the CFO role in early 2025. With over a decade on the finance team, Steve has been instrumental in shaping our financial strategies, which we believe will lead to a seamless transition as he takes on this new leadership role. Before I wrap up, I want to go through what I hope you will all take away from today. First, there remains a massive market opportunity globally for us. We firmly believe that people are going to rely on technology to spark the most meaningful connections in their lives.
Our focus is on innovating and evolving our apps to better serve existing users and bring on those who have not yet tried online dating. Second, we believe that AI is going to transform the dating experience. It's going to make us and enable us to make all aspects of the online dating journey better, from onboarding and filling out your profile to the recommendations that we make to how people manage their matches. With the resources and insightful data, no one is better positioned to unlock AI's potential in dating than Match Group. Third, our diverse portfolio of brands allows us to meet a wide range of needs and can take advantage of every new unlock. We're launching an exciting new initiative called Power of the Portfolio+, or PoP+, which I believe will help us unlock the full potential of having all our brands under one roof.
This initiative is designed to drive meaningful margin and revenue growth by leveraging the unique strengths of our portfolio. Gary is going to share more on PoP+ later. And finally, we are well positioned to drive shareholder value. In 2025, as we innovate our products, we can generate significant cash flow and return capital to shareholders to provide attractive total returns. Looking ahead to 2026 and 2027, we expect to deliver even higher free cash flow as we improve revenue trends and harness efficiencies to drive even more value for our shareholders. Gary and Steve will walk through our financial metrics and our shareholder return algorithm in more detail later today. I am truly excited about our team, our portfolio of brands, our relentless focus on innovation, and the vast opportunities that lie ahead.
With that, I'll hand it over to Will, who will share how we see innovation transforming not just our business, but the entire category.
Hi, everyone. I'm Will, the CTO at Match Group. I joined about a year and a half ago with one clear focus: to foster deeper innovation across our portfolio to help reignite growth in this dynamic category. Before I dive in, I'd like to share a bit about my journey and what inspired me to join this incredible company. I've always been fascinated by how technology can bring people together. I grew up when the internet was just starting to reshape how we connect. This sparked a deep passion about how digital products could go beyond the screen to impact real human relationships.
This passion ultimately led me to Snap as one of the founding product designers, where I led the creation of core parts of the Snapchat app. I'm incredibly proud to have played a role in building products that have redefined communication for a generation, but as rewarding as that journey was, there was always a part of the online connection space I hadn't yet explored, something deeply personal to me, and I'm sure many of you: dating and love. As a former user of Tinder and Hinge myself, I've experienced their incredible capacity to connect people, and I remember telling myself that one day I'd love to work on these types of products, and here I am. When I joined Match Group, I was struck by the capabilities of the people and their expertise in the dating space.
But I also saw an incredible opportunity to elevate our culture of innovation even further. As BK mentioned, there is so much more we can do to address the evolving needs of our users, solve real pain points, and ultimately drive growth for many years to come. Today, I'll walk you through how we're working to harness AI to transform our portfolio and the category and unlock the future of dating. I've spent the past year and a half building a team of some of the most phenomenal product innovators I've encountered in consumer tech. They are incredible product designers, artists, engineers, and most importantly, dreamers. Together, we are bringing our vision to life, challenging how the company approaches design, product, technology, and what's possible. We've also integrated the Hyperconnect AI team, some of the brightest AI minds in the world, into my organization.
They are the central Match Group AI team. We've created an AI organization that follows a hub-and-spoke model, which empowers localized teams at each business unit to deliver tailored, impactful solutions while leveraging centralized AI resources to scale ideas, deduplicate efforts, and accelerate breakthroughs. This approach allows my team to partner with AI teams at all of our business units to create new groundbreaking experiences, some of which we'll preview later. We believe that true AI-led product innovation happens when creativity and technical excellence work together. That's why all of these teams are partnering to drive AI-led innovation. We are embracing the principle of innovating once and deploying across our portfolio to unlock our transformative potential. This is a critical muscle that we're building that will drive profound benefits for many years to come. Our AI journey isn't just about internal innovation. Strategic partnerships also play a vital role.
Given our leadership in online dating and our AI expertise, we're an attractive platform for other tech pioneers. One of the most exciting examples is our collaboration with OpenAI, where our engineers and theirs work hand- in- hand, bringing new ideas to life and testing the limits of their latest AI advancements that can be applied to the dating category. Examples like these keep us on the cutting edge of AI development, ensuring we have access to the latest and greatest foundational AI models and ultimately stay ahead of the curve. But beyond a world-class team and exciting AI partnerships, I want to acknowledge a key asset that firmly positions Match Group at the forefront of AI-driven innovation in our category: our data.
Andrew Ng, an AI pioneer, once said, "AI is akin to building a rocket ship. You need a huge engine and a lot of fuel. The rocket engine is the learning algorithms, but the fuel is the huge amounts of data we can feed to these algorithms." He then said, "No one can replicate your data. It is the defensible barrier." This is precisely where Match Group's advantage lies. We don't just have the engine. We have an unparalleled supply of the fuel needed to power it.
With 82 million monthly active users generating over 5 billion new data points daily, ranging from profile likes to matches and preferences, we possess an unmatched scale of proprietary data to drive our AI strategy. It's not just the scale of our data. Our data is also unmatched in diversity and depth. For example, profile data like photos and bios helps us capture users' personalities and interests. Behavioral data such as likes, notes, and boosts reveals implicit preferences and patterns of intent.
Preference data, including age ranges, dating goals, and values, is explicitly shared by users to refine their matches. And that's just the beginning. What's truly powerful is how these different data types come together to highlight the unique characteristics of each brand's audience. For example, Match brand's older demographic generates structured data focused on long-term compatibility and values, while Hinge's iconic prompts offer insights into personality and communication styles among millennials and Gen Z. Meanwhile, Tinder's billions of daily interactions give us a real-time pulse on cultural trends and user behavior worldwide. This incredible diversity spanning generations, dating intents, and global regions gives us an unparalleled breadth and depth in our brand's data. We expect it to power AI models that are deeply personalized while also inclusive, adaptive, and reflective of a wide variety of dating experiences. And it doesn't stop there.
Since AI thrives on data, our network effects should create a flywheel where better AI leads to better products, attracting more users, which subsequently generates even more data. It's a powerful cycle where our advantage compounds with every new user who joins our apps. Our brands are at various stages of deploying AI to benefit from this unique data advantage. Some, like Tinder, have been utilizing AI for safety and recommendations for years and are now doubling down to provide deeper personalization and introduce customer-facing features that improve the user experience. Others, like Hinge, have only recently gotten started in their AI journey, but are moving very quickly. At Match Group, we're in the early stages of a multi-year AI transformation where we will harness our data to drive greater value to our users.
We're moving forward rapidly to create a future where we expect meaningful connections to be made faster, safer, and with greater personalization than ever before. To illustrate, I want to share a quick example which shows how we've already come together to solve real problems and deliver tangible value to our users. When I joined Match Group, I knew firsthand how difficult it can be to choose the right profile photos for dating apps. Whether it's overthinking which photo best represents you or not knowing what will resonate with others, it's a common challenge. In a sea of profiles, presenting yourself authentically and effectively can feel overwhelming. To tackle this, we shook things up.
For the first time ever, we brought together top AI talent from different pockets of the company to create a new AI solution that could help users rapidly select the best profile photos from their camera rolls, turning what's typically an overwhelming challenge into a quick, simple task. Leveraging our vast dataset spanning hundreds of millions of Tinder profile photos and billions of user interactions, we trained a proprietary new AI model to sift through your camera roll in seconds to identify the photos most likely to succeed on the app. Importantly, we designed this AI to run entirely on your device, so no images leave your phone unless you choose. This allows us to uphold the highest standards of privacy and transparency. As a result, we've created a smarter, more intuitive experience to solve a real user problem. And the early data shows that it's already making an impact.
Since launching in late July, over a million users have uploaded more than 3 million photos using our new tool. And while it takes a Tinder user 2.6 minutes on average to select their profile photos, our new AI surfaces these photos in seconds. As we began testing the AI Photo Finder internally, it quickly became clear we had created something special. The potential extended far beyond Tinder, and soon the Hinge team began to integrate the same technology. Intentionally, we had built the AI Photo Finder as a flexible, reusable module, meaning we can easily scale the innovation across multiple brands. While the initial prototype development with Tinder took on the order of six months, Hinge was able to create their initial prototype in a matter of days. What's more, the Hinge team didn't just adopt the technology. They evolved it.
Instead of selecting only headshots, the latest AI model now picks a collection of photos that offers a multifaceted representation of who you are. Hinge's creative enhancements push the AI even further, and those advancements can seamlessly flow back to Tinder. This is how we create a portfolio-wide innovation flywheel where each brand's success strengthens the others, driving even more value to our users. And while the AI Photo Finder is one exciting piece of our AI puzzle, it's just a tiny star within the expansive universe of Match Group's innovation potential. As you'll see throughout the presentations today, we are just getting started in reimagining the online dating experience and removing barriers for our users to find connections. This is a great example of our scale and benefits. We can share successful new AI products to tens of millions of users across our portfolio rapidly.
The power of our portfolio model, combined with the benefits of our scale, enables us to deliver AI solutions across our brands to better serve our users. Innovation with scale and speed. Of course, as we push boundaries with AI to enhance the dating experience, we do so with a deep commitment to ethics and trust. We've published clear AI principles that guide how we develop and deploy AI responsibly, helping to ensure that trust remains a cornerstone of our platforms. In online dating, trust is everything. And our commitment to ethical AI practices helps reinforce the safety and transparency our users expect. To pull it all together, Match Group is driving innovation to shape the future of online dating. We firmly believe that AI is poised to transform nearly every facet of life in the years ahead.
That's why we've embarked on an ambitious AI-led chapter of innovation, ensuring we harness this technology to spark more meaningful connections across the globe. We have an unrivaled proprietary dataset built from the hundreds of millions of real connections we've supported around the world. This uniquely positions us to train AI models that not only reflect but also serve the needs of a truly diverse global population, all while staying true to our commitment to ethical AI principles. Our broad portfolio of brands allows us to innovate at scale, building once, deploying everywhere, and sharing learnings across the company to accelerate our collective progress. Our centralized product and AI teams are working hand- in- hand with our brands, combining cutting-edge expertise with our data to create impactful, personalized experiences that resonate deeply with users worldwide. This strategy is already bearing fruit.
By the end of 2025, we expect Tinder and Hinge to launch groundbreaking new features born from this vision, and we're looking beyond, exploring transformative ways to leverage AI to create entirely new experiences, opening the door to a broader untapped audience. With that, I'll turn it over to Faye, who has been a fantastic partner in spearheading innovation over the past year.
I knew that this was different right from the start. It was just a really good connection. I met my wife on Tinder almost 10 years ago. I find it's a great way, especially when you arrive in a new city to meet new people. It's so crazy just to meet someone else who loves the same things as I do. It's positive. I make connections with people I normally wouldn't have connected with in real life.
There is a lot more people that's thrown my way, at least it seems, on Tinder. What I learned by being on Tinder was who I am, what was important to me. I match with my current fiancé. I wasn't really looking to date or especially marry this person. When I saw her profile, it rang true to me that she was someone like me. I've used Tinder ever since I came to college. I met my best friend, Control. I was in the middle of German class, and then I got a notification on my phone that I got a Tinder match. And he was like, "Hey, how are you?" It was very fun. It was really great for the self-esteem. A lot of my friends I have met through going on like one day. We did match on Tinder.
We met at a party, but then we saw each other and we were like, "I know you," and Matt's like, "I know you too." It's almost like an invitation to be like, "Hey, like, you know, you're giving me the chance to get to know you. How about, you know, you kind of dive into that a little bit more?" It gives you the opportunity to interact with people you wouldn't stereotypically meet.
I realized that the things that I was looking for in a person, I could find those key attributes based on what they put on a profile. Their vibe, you know, more than even like attraction on Tinder, so Tinder felt more of like, "Hey, I just want to meet somebody and see how it goes." She definitely passed the test, became a rum lover, even showed me how to run a business. That's why Tinder's perfect. Tinder. Tinder. Tinder. Tinder. Right swipe that on Tinder.
Hi, everyone. I'm Faye Iosotaluno, CEO of Tinder. It's so great to be here with you this morning. When I joined Match Group in 2017, I saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to supercharge growth in the dating category. Central to that opportunity was Tinder, which had already revolutionized how people met and interacted online. It was the world's fastest-growing dating app, and to date is responsible for 100 billion matches and over 500 million relationships. Isn't that incredible? And as you heard in the video, our app is making a profound difference. People of all backgrounds say that matching with people on Tinder has helped them learn about who they are and what they're about, meet people when building a new life in a new city, discover the love of their life, and so much more.
Today, Tinder fosters more first dates, relationships, and yes, even marriages than any other dating app. And since January, I've had the honor of serving as its CEO. It's a privilege to work on a product that brings people together, and I'm determined to make the next chapter Tinder's best yet. That means moving quickly and innovating, and it also means being clear-eyed about the obstacles we face. Tinder has been hugely successful for over a decade, but today faces some user concerns and growth challenges. It's clear that we must do better for our users and, in the process, build an even stronger business. And I'm here to tell you that I have a firm understanding of the challenges, how to resolve them, and build for the future. I've put in place a team and a plan to get us to where we need to go.
We've made progress this year, laying the groundwork for an exciting product roadmap for 2025 that we believe will ultimately change the trajectory for Tinder. We're confident that next year, we'll see visible signs of progress in the app and improvements in key metrics, setting the stage for financial progress thereafter, and we strongly believe that AI will have a significant impact across our daters' journey, improving everything from profiles to recommendations to the safety of our platform, dramatically improving the Tinder experience and the health of the business, and today, I'm going to tell you how we plan to do all this to build a durable Tinder for the future, so let's start with a bit of context. When Tinder was founded in 2012, it exploded onto the dating scene with product innovation that changed everything.
The Tinder swipe feature transformed the online dating experience into something that was mobile-first, widely embraced, much more fun, and appealing to young people, the largest dating demographic. Within four months of launch, it was the number one dating app in the U.S. Within about a year, it was the number one dating app in APAC. And in just over a year, it was also the leader in Europe. Engagement grew to 1 billion swipes in less than two years. No other dating app has ever experienced this global growth. And it grew virally. There was very little marketing spend. Instead, it was all word of mouth. People loved using the app, and it grew to be one of the most recognizable brands in the world, becoming synonymous with online dating. Swipe right, swipe left, and it's a match became a part of everyday language.
Today, 47 million people are using Tinder to foster connections across the globe in any given month, a scale still unmatched by multiples in the industry. In any of the 190 countries where Tinder is available, we have an unsurpassed ability to match you with someone you'll be excited to meet. Brand awareness of Tinder among 18-24-year-old singles hovers around 90%. Our brand has penetrated every age group, every demo in most corners of the world. While Tinder was growing its user base, it was also growing its business. Starting in early 2015, we created a powerful monetization engine, building new products that users wanted to pay for to make their experience even better and getting more desired matches. In those early years, because of our scale, Tinder achieved best-in-class AOI margins in dating and within broader tech at over 50%.
In the process, we created a highly sophisticated capability to test and tune offers and pricing in every part of the world. As a result, our global direct revenue soared more than 10x between our first full year of monetization in 2016 to full year 2023, driven by exceptional payer and RPP growth. Now, it's important to call out that our key focus remains revenue growth, not specifically RPP or payer growth, and of course, profit. We are the single largest revenue-generating dating app on every continent. But as time progressed and we focused more on revenue and growth, profitability, we focused less on controlling our brand narrative and evolving the product within the changing landscape. And that's led to recent pressures on our growth. Through 2022, Tinder's growth was nonstop.
As BK alluded to, we saw particularly strong engagement during the COVID period when users were isolated and sought to connect with others. Since then, we've seen pressure on Tinder's monthly active users driven by some of the changes in socialization and the dating pain points BK mentioned. As a dating app with a lot of Gen Z users, this had a particularly significant impact on Tinder, as well as Tinder's perception of it being just a hookup app, which is particularly concerning for women. We've also made a series of necessary trust and safety features and enhancements to foster a clean ecosystem at Tinder starting in mid-2023, which added further pressure to Tinder's MAU, given the increased prevalence of bad actors and people not really on Tinder for its true purpose. Taken together, this has led to declining MAU at Tinder since 2022.
While a lower number of users make growing revenue challenging, through monetization initiatives, we were still able to continue to drive payer penetration and revenue growth until late this year, so it's clear that our top priority is getting user growth back on track through a series of focused product improvements and a better brand narrative, and through this, we will unleash renewed growth for the business. We have a strong foundation to build on: three differentiated advantages that we're leveraging to get the business growing again. First, Tinder has unparalleled scale. There is no dating app in the world with our size or presence. People try Tinder more than any other dating app, whether they're just starting to figure out what they want in a partner, or just looking to have fun, or even if they know they want a serious relationship.
Second, Tinder is the world's most iconic dating brand, with unsurpassed brand awareness and cultural relevance. When someone wants to try online dating, Tinder is first on their mind. Finally, third, Tinder is fun and easy to use. This has been true since the invention of the swipe and a key reason people love our product. Our focus now is innovating on these unparalleled core strengths to reignite growth. I believe that as much as Tinder benefited from the smartphone bursting onto the scene in the 2010s, we can now leverage AI to transform the user experience and drive our next leg of growth. We want Tinder to be winning each new generation of daters.
This requires us to ensure Tinder remains a dynamic, culturally relevant brand and product, that it offers a safe platform where you can meet authentic people, and it creates features that ease the anxiety of new daters, from easier onboarding and profile creation to greater assistance through the matching process. We also need to make sure Tinder works for everyone. Our scale means people come to us with different needs and expectations. We need to better understand what each person wants and give them an experience that meets those objectives, and we're building AI tools to do just that, and last, Tinder must create excitement again. Spending time on Tinder must be worth people's time and not feel like a chore. Dating is hard enough already. We want to make Tinder a fun experience that you share with your friends and feel good about.
With all this in mind, we've created a clear three-pillar product strategy. First, we're fostering a clean ecosystem to ensure Tinder showcases great people that users have confidence they can meet. Second, we're improving user outcomes to make sure Tinder gets everyone a great match and date, which we think is especially critical for women, and third, bringing the fun back to online dating. This product strategy builds on some features we've already released this year. In 2025, Tinder will begin to offer more ways to connect with new people than what exists in the app today. We're adjusting our focus to be on product innovation beyond monetization, making sure our drumbeat of features meets and delivers for the changing needs, expectations, and behaviors of daters today. Now, none of this is easy or fast, but it is what must be done to return Tinder to growth.
Let's start with fostering a clean ecosystem. Helping people find meaningful connections of all forms is the reason why Tinder exists. It's not the features. It's not the design. It's people at the core of the experience. That's why we need to make sure that people on Tinder are authentic, truly there to date and bring their best selves forward. We've been hard at work this year testing a number of new features to ensure people are authentic. I'm excited about a Liveness Check using biometric screening for users, a first of its kind in the industry that we expect will reduce bad actors. In initial testing, we've seen the largest reduction of reports related to bad actors from any single trust and safety initiative we've implemented, as well as improvements in authenticity ratings from both men and women. We also plan to mandate face photos.
In tests where we've required face photos, we've driven a meaningful reduction in engagement with bad actors, allowing people with quality profiles to shine through. We also believe we can better assist users to build their profiles, helping them bring their best selves forward and raising the bar for everyone. This includes tools like the AI Photo Finder, which Will just discussed. We'll be adding this tool in onboarding and not only be able to recommend great photos beyond selfies, but also infer insights through photo metadata, which we can use to improve our matching, and that's just to name a few critical initiatives we have underway. We're committed to making the Tinder experience more authentic and safer than ever before, but we're not stopping there. Ultimately, we want this authentic experience to lead to meaningful connections, which is why we're also building to improve user outcomes.
As the largest gateway to new relationships, Tinder has a very dynamic and diverse user base. For instance, on age, while our user base skews towards Gen Z, we have a substantial number of users across age groups, and their needs are very different. For example, young users are more gender fluid, and a higher percentage of them identify as LGBTQIA+. Across relationship intent, we range from users who are still figuring out what they want to people ready for long-term commitment. So Tinder must understand and meet these differing user needs. Developments in AI continue to help us understand users and their preferences better and better. While machine learning and AI have powered our recommendations since 2018, we're now taking our work to the next level. With traditional ML, we were able to utilize both behavior signals and basic structured data to make direct connections between profiles.
When people say they like the outdoors, we can find and connect them with other people who like the outdoors. With advancements in deep learning, we were able to understand the content of photos and bios and learn user behavior through their preferences that they were showing in the app. We can make connections through direct information, outdoorsy photos, or other behaviors, and now, with more advanced AI, we can learn from far more data points, details, and inferences to make more nuanced, meaningful connections. We can learn what the strongest connection could be between related factors like travel, sports, and adventure for someone who likes the outdoors. Thanks to groundbreaking advancements in deep learning and Gen AI, we're improving the recommendations we offer to each user. More and more, it will feel like the potential matches users see are personalized just for them and their relationship goals.
In 2025, we'll continue to push boundaries so that we deepen our understanding that we gain about users, uncover more nuanced connections between them, and be more responsive with our recommendations in real time. This will be another powerful unlock driving better matches for our users. Historically, Tinder gathered fairly limited information from users, but data is so crucial to improving matching, especially with new technologies like AI. We spent considerable time this year building new ways for users to tell us more about themselves. We've also introduced new ways to present that information to others to spark consideration. For example, we can now show if two potential matches have friends in common, which helps users view each other with more trust and a greater sense of authenticity.
We've seen that users were more likely to like a recommendation when they had a mutual friend, 10% more likely for men and even more than that for women, depending on the country. We've introduced new ways to discover people and enhanced relevance by adding relationship intent and relationship type paths in our Explore area. We've also added a Likes You label to certain profiles to help users more quickly identify potential matches. We'll build on this work and show even more relevant information to users as we offer more ways for them to tell us what matters. What users have already told us matters is gender fluidity and sexual orientation. We've launched new ways to support this through enhanced onboarding, a real need, especially for women and the LGBTQIA+ community, and we'll continue to refine our recommendations and explore work to support these users.
All of this, with many other initiatives focused on helping our users achieve better outcomes, leads to greater word of mouth about success and ultimately creates a flywheel that helps sustain growth over the long-term. These initiatives are showing signs of success with existing users today. We've seen women's match coverage, the percentage of women receiving matches, improve, indicating that more women are finding worthwhile recommendations that are converting into matches. This increases the likelihood that they'll find someone they want to engage with and actually go on a date with. We expect as women receive more matches, men's match coverage will subsequently improve. As you can see, as we've launched initiatives like I've described, we've accomplished step function level changes in daily matches per women user.
Our thoughtful and consistent work has resulted in a 12% increase in this metric this year, and we're shooting for even more to ultimately drive to great conversation and dates. As we head into 2025, we're excited to launch more new features to build on this momentum and continue to reinforce that Tinder is a platform that can deliver no matter what connections a user is seeking, and this work isn't just helping people with what they do on our platform, but also how they feel. We want to bring the fun back to the Tinder experience. In 2025, we'll start adapting the Tinder experience to make it even more fun and engaging. For many young users, especially women and in different cultures around the world, dating in group settings with friends is actually the preferred way of dating. It feels safer and lowers the pressure.
With this in mind, we'll be launching a new Double Dating feature, which allows users to team up with a friend and match with other pairs. When we launched Matchmaker, which allowed users to ask friends to weigh in on their recommendations, we saw that women were 2.5x more likely to like a recommendation endorsed by a friend. When we launched our Share My Date feature, we saw the sentiment of feeling unsafe drop to its lowest level. And as I previously mentioned, users of Friends in Common are more likely to like a recommendation when there's a mutual connection. So we know dating with friends matters, and this will be a foundational theme on which we layer more ways to involve friends in the Tinder experience.
We're also planning to make dramatic changes in the way people can meet on Tinder, benefiting existing users and attracting new users. In 2025, we'll be introducing a new AI-enabled discovery feature that will get to know users and what they're looking for. To do so, the feature will leverage insights from our Photo Finder as well as new and fun questions that allow users to express themselves better. Tinder will utilize AI to leverage these new data points across our huge platform to suggest a small curated set of potential matches. This will enable users to get to the right possibility for them faster, addressing a key user pain point. The information about each user can either be included in their profile or could be kept private by the user.
This new discovery experience will complement the core experience well, allowing users to navigate Tinder's scale of potential matches with much less work. So let me bring some of these features for you to life now. Today, we're following Gemma, a 22-year-old woman in L.A., as she tries out Tinder's newest features designed to make finding connections easier, more authentic, and a whole lot more fun. Our phone screen here will show everything from Gemma's perspective.
Gemma just took the plunge and downloaded Tinder. As she opens the app, a few questions pop up. Her name, her age, location, and what makes her tick. She quickly enters her details, taps Next, and her Tinder journey is already underway. Next, Gemma completes a new Liveness Check to help verify her profile's authenticity. With real-time feedback guiding her through the quick process, it's a breeze.
Once she's done, her fellow Tinder users will see that Gemma is the real deal. It's an easy step that adds a whole lot of trust, and it's the first time she's seen this in any dating app. With her permission, Tinder glances at her camera roll and works its AI magic. No more endless debates over which selfie is the one. Tinder makes the toughest part of profile creation effortless and fun. It's like having a trusted friend by your side, helping you through some of the hardest parts of getting started. Now, Gemma can dive into swiping with confidence and style.
With just a few clicks and a little help from AI, Gemma's profile is ready. We're making profile creation effortless, but effortless doesn't mean low quality. With features like AI-powered photo suggestions and a Liveness Check, an industry first, Tinder is setting a new standard for authenticity. We're maintaining our differentiator as the easiest and most inviting dating app to join while using technology to level everyone up. Let's see what she encounters next.
Gemma dives into swiping. She notices something cool. Profiles now highlight shared interest, mutual friends, and other things in common. With more people on Tinder than any other app, the possibilities feel endless, but smart tools help her spot connections that truly stand out, like Tom, a fellow Trojan with five friends in common, and he also studies Industrial Design. The choice is crystal clear. Gemma swipes right, and it's a match. Could this be the start of something special? While waiting for Tom's reply, Gemma discovers Tinder's new Double Dating feature, which lets her team up with a friend to match with other pairs.
With a quick tap, she invites her friend Violet to join the adventure because sometimes your bestie is the perfect person to help you break the ice or make you feel at ease on that first date. Violet and Gemma link their profiles and start swiping on other pairs of friends. It doesn't take long for Gemma to spot Pete and Mike. With a quick swipe right, the Double Dating fun is officially underway. Gemma wastes no time kicking off their new four-way group chat. Before they know it, they have plans for a double date playing pickleball this weekend.
With Double Dating, Gemma and Violet can team up, bringing a fun social element to their experience. We know that dating is not a solo activity today.
Whether it's swiping for a friend, lowering the pressure of meeting someone new, or enjoying the safety and comfort of a group outing, dating is better with friends. From our prior work, we know outcomes improve on Tinder when your friends are involved. In 2025, we'll put friends more front and center in that journey. Next, Gemma spots another new feature that uses AI to help Tinder find Gemma a match. Through this experience, Tinder will be augmenting our photo first experience and making Tinder a user first experience. We're using AI to get to know our users far better than we do today without sacrificing any of the fun and ease. This will transform the experience of what to expect from Tinder.
By tapping the icon, Gemma embarks on an AI-driven experience that's meant to uncover what truly matters to her. She selects politics, extroversion, and work-life balance, empowering Tinder to begin building for the first time ever a deeply personal understanding of who Gemma is and what she's looking for. Next, with Gemma's permission, Tinder takes a broader look at her camera roll. From concerts to clubs and camping, Tinder pieces together a richer picture of who Gemma is.
As Gemma engages with prompts, Tinder gets to know her better. Gemma likes lively bars and going out on a Saturday night, which means she's likely to be extroverted. Behind the scenes, AI works dynamically, not just aligning with her preferences, but also introducing new possibilities she might not have considered. With every interaction, Tinder curates an experience that balances familiarity with fresh discovery, connecting Gemma with people who resonate and surprising connections that might spark something unexpected. Soon, Tinder introduces Gemma to Andrew, her personalized recommendation.
Andrew hits so many of the things that matter to her. He's also liberal, an avid runner, and loves a good night out, and seems like he'd introduce her to so many new things. What really catches her attention is Andrew's photo of him doing ceramics, giving her the perfect opening to start a conv ersation. Who knows? Maybe their first date will be at a pottery class, shaping something new and fun together, the start of something exciting.
With this new discovery experience on Tinder, users will be able to discover potential matches in an entirely new way than before. Our new AI-enabled experience helps make matches feel personal, highlighting those little details that make connections special.
With AI, we're able to tap into our unsurpassed scale and identify more connection points to uniquely present each daily curated recommendation that highlights great qualities and compatibility versus just relying on the photos. This experience keeps the user at the center, learning more about Gemma in a fun way each day, not just on the day she created her profile. We then work harder for her behind the scenes to find her a great recommendation and put that recommendation forward in a simple and persuasive design that is new and novel to Tinder.
As we've seen, Tinder's new features make it easier than ever before for people like Gemma to find connections that feel genuine and exciting. From photo selection to Double Dating and personalized discovery, on Tinder, there's something for everyone. You can see why I'm so excited about the future we're building at Tinder.
Many of the initiatives I've talked about today have had foundations set this year and are in active development right now. I expect them to dramatically improve the Tinder experience starting in 2025. We also plan to continue to take aggressive actions to get bad actors off of Tinder. I expect some of these could result in MAU declines, but importantly, lead to fewer bad actors on the platform. In our test of Liveness Checks in one small market, we've seen a meaningful decrease in bans of bad actors, as well as a modest decrease in daily active users, but improvements in authenticity ratings for men and women. We're now starting to test this in markets that are more representative of our global audience.
While some of these trust and safety features may lead to declines in our user base, by earning the ongoing trust of our users and giving them a better experience, our business will be stronger over the long run. And I firmly believe it's the right thing to do morally and for business value. By fostering a cleaner ecosystem, delivering better user outcomes, and bringing the fun back, I'm confident we will build a Tinder for the next decade. We'll share updates on these key objectives through the course of 2025 to demonstrate our progress. While we've been undertaking the broader transformation of the Tinder experience, we've also been hard at work to reclaim the brand narrative that we've allowed others to have too much control over.
Beginning in 2023, for the first time, we started to invest deliberately and strategically on a brand platform that allows us to speak more directly to users. Our flagship, It Starts With A S wipe campaign, which reinforced that Tinder is for all relationship possibilities, was a resounding success and started to shift the perception of Tinder away from being just a hookup app. But that was just the start. Brand perception takes time to change and requires consistent effort and focus, especially for a high brand awareness product like Tinder. So this year, we've continued to create relevance, excitement, and affinity for our brand around the idea that many types of great outcomes happen on Tinder. Ads that included a relationship starts every three seconds on Tinder reinforced that Tinder works for daters and created the highest brand consideration lifts ever for us.
As we implement an aggressive product roadmap in 2025, we'll strategically use marketing to amplify how our product evolution helps users. We expect this will create an even more powerful brand narrative around innovation. Together with a better product experience, we'll improve brand perception and ultimately drive Tinder's top of funnel trends. Let's take a look at some of this great work and its impact.
Hey. Do you believe in love at first sight? BK is talking about you. So hot. I'm going to go see I go tip, but apparently he's going to make me a green flag. Yeah, what's up? It's Wanda checking in. I'm teaming up with Tinder. Me and GloRilla. Join Tinder, you're my star match and help your college win a free concert.
I love seeing all these moments from this year, and not only are they clever, it's changing how people view us.
The perception that Tinder is mainly for hookups has decreased 12 percentage points in the U.S. and the U.K. since our brand work began two years ago. This is a big move in a short period of time. We're going to keep investing to drive home the message that Tinder delivers against many types of outcomes. We've shown that we can make a huge difference with a limited budget, and we don't plan to dramatically expand our marketing spend. Our user growth must be product-led. We'll supplement exciting product innovation work with marketing to build awareness of the great features we're introducing. Putting it all together, you see how much time we've put into ensuring we have the right people, the right product strategy, and the right level of innovation to lay the foundation for Tinder's next great chapter.
We're entering 2025 with fresh momentum, with a renewed focus on meeting our users' evolving needs, excited to deliver to them a steady stream of new features that we started building this year, refusing to allow ourselves to ever be complacent and determined to keep innovating at full speed. Next year will be another year of investment in the product. We'll continue testing, launching, iterating, and executing many of our initiatives. I expect many of these new features to gain traction throughout the year. We project slightly better year-over-year MAU trends through 2025, and with that, as the foundation, even better year-over-year MAU trends in 2026 and 2027. As our product momentum builds over the next three years, we expect direct revenue to decline low single digits year-over-year in 2025, excluding the impact of FX, or mid-single digits year-over-year on an as-reported basis.
We expect improving trends thereafter with flattish direct revenue growth in 2026 and low single-digit growth in 2027 on an as-reported basis. I'd like to tell you we could see faster financial performance, but the reality is that these turnarounds take time. I'm confident that we now have the right plan and the right focus to help us achieve the results we want. We'll make responsible and thoughtful investment decisions to continue to drive category-leading margins. I expect our AOI margins to remain roughly consistent with 2024 levels of about 51% throughout the next three years. If we see unexpected momentum from our new initiatives, we may decide to invest more in product development and marketing to accelerate the pace of our plans.
Tinder has been an incredible business for the past decade, and I'm confident that we will do the work we need to do to make it an incredible business for the next decade and beyond as well. Thank you. Okay. Now we're going to take a quick break, and then when we come back, we'll hear from Justin McLeod, the Founder and CEO of Hinge. Enjoy the break.
Hey, everyone. I'll just give you a second to take your seats. Thanks. Hi, everyone. I'm Justin McLeod. I'm the Founder and the CEO of Hinge.
I am really grateful, and I'm excited to be here today and have the opportunity to share our story about how we earned our reputation as the dating app that's designed to be deleted, where tens of millions of people have come to go on great dates and find meaningful relationships, and to not just meet anyone, but the right one for them, and ultimately get off the app. So I hope by the end of this presentation, you are going to see why I am so excited about what we're building here at Hinge and our vision for the future, and why I think it's going to be so transformative for us and, frankly, for the entire category. So I'm going to talk about three things today. First, I'm going to share about how Hinge has successfully created the leading dating app specifically for intentional daters.
Those are those people who are really willing to put in that extra amount of effort because they're looking to get into meaningful relationships. I'm also going to talk about how we've really created a sustainable business that is growing and is going to continue to grow despite broader challenges in the category. Then I'm going to show that thanks to AI, Hinge is leading the way into a new era of monumental transformation. It's going to unlock more innovation and more value than anything that's come before. I think it's really going to exceed even what was unlocked by the smartphone. Then finally, I'm going to explain how our growing business momentum is setting us up on a path to achieve, by 2027, direct revenue of $1 billion. Let's dive in and talk about why Hinge is different.
Now, we pride ourselves on knowing our daters, and we regularly ask them what they're looking for on our app. And as you can see in this chart, the vast majority are intentioned daters, and they're saying that they're looking for long-term, meaningful relationships. Now, this is by design. For us, success isn't measured by engagement and retention. Instead, we've crafted an experience that's really optimized for the end of the funnel, helping people get out on great dates as quickly and efficiently as possible. That's why we say that we're designed to be deleted. Our goal is to help our daters find love and ultimately get off the app, which is kind of a weird thing to say at an Investor Day, I know.
But what we found is that by striving to be the most efficient and effective dating app, our daters become more likely to tell their friends and also more likely to pay. And so ultimately, what we found as a business is that by really investing and making our daters successful over long-term, and that's that sustainability thing I was talking about, we ultimately become much more successful. So how does this come to life? How is Hinge different? You're probably wondering. I'm going to show a short video.
Hinge all starts with mandatory detailed profiles when onboarding onto the app. We require six photos, three conversation prompts, and information about their interests, values, and lifestyle, substantially more than other apps. Once users are on our app, we want to help foster meaningful connections. We do that by bringing more thoughtfulness and weight to liking.
To initiate a conversation with someone on Hinge, you must like or comment on one of their photos or prompts, which makes the process feel more human and intentional. Another way we're fostering meaningful connections is with the feature we launched called Your Turn. It's a badge that signals to users when it's their turn to reply in a conversation, which has dramatically increased responsiveness. Building on that innovation, earlier this year, we released Your Turn Limits.
Now, when a dater isn't responding to enough of their existing matches, they can't like or match with new people. As a result, we are able to provide a more efficient dating experience. We've launched a survey we call We Met. If we suspect a match went on a date, we ask if they met in person and get their feedback. We are the only major dating app that takes this extra step. We're proud to report that three-quarters of dates resulted in a dater wanting to see their match again, and we're confident this number will grow over time.
So, as you can see, for us, it's really like the formula for us is really it's about quality over quantity. And there's really a whole symphony of features here that come together to tell that story. It's not like one individual thing. Daters come on, they create full profiles, they take thoughtful actions, and in return, we can better match them with the person that they're looking for. Also, as a byproduct of this approach, we are getting incredible, very uniquely detailed data. And this is the exact kind of data that can supercharge AI models. And we're going to talk more about that later. Now, let's dive into our marketing approach.
We've created a strategy to really cut through the noise and amplify what makes us special. The first component of that is a highly focused message, and it really cements our unique positioning in the market. Now, it comes through in our tagline designed to be deleted. It comes through in our campaigns that you saw earlier, where our beloved furry icon, Hinge, meets its demise as people fall in love and delete the app, and most recently, in our success stories, which we share in a variety of forms across nearly every channel. This is all to let people know that Hinge is the place for intentional daters who are looking for meaningful relationships, and also, by the way, we support this marketing strategy with a product strategy that is equally focused.
We only focus on intentioned daters, and we don't spend time spreading ourselves thin and trying to focus on friendships or business connections or casual encounters or anything else. We really stay focused. Now, the second component of our marketing strategy is a focus on the three audiences that we really believe drive dating culture, and that is women, Gen Z, and the LGBTQIA+ community o to reach these audiences, we forgo a lot of the forms of traditional marketing, and instead, we really just focus on building trust with authentic content, using relatable stories and experts. Finally, on international growth, we believe that it is better to be the number one or the number two dating app in fewer larger markets than, once again, to spread ourselves thin across the globe.
And so our first focus internationally was on our English-speaking markets of the U.S. and the U.K. and Australia, I'm sorry, the U.K., Canada, and Australia. And then once we had strength in those markets, we expanded to continental Europe, where we are now gaining traction quickly. And to understand why our story is resonating, I do think it's really helpful to actually see the work that we're putting out in markets. So I'm going to show one more short video.
At Hinge, we're focused on providing real value and helping daters get on great dates around the world. We share data, advice, tips, and expertise through date reports driven by in-house research. We believe you can't date well if you don't feel well.
So this year, we supported Gen Z-founded social groups and clubs to foster stronger community connections, launched a 100-page phone book filled with ideas to unplug, and developed brand experiences that encourage new ways of connecting in person. Our Oracle in the Hingie afterlife, comedian Patti Harrison, celebrated real Hinge stories by welcoming their unique deleted Hinge's. Yes. If you didn't connect Tony and Mel over a shared love of bowling, these two would have missed out on a fulfilling relationship.
While in Europe, we highlighted the real human moments leading to Hinge's deletion. [Foreign language] Because word of mouth and success stories give people confidence and optimism, we shared them year-round. Did you mind telling us the story of how you first met? Online. We met on this cute little app called Hinge. What we're most proud of is what daters feel and have to say about Hinge.
So that's the world that we're building here at Hinge. And if you look at our numbers, people are responding. So first, with regard to women, we maintain close to gender parity on our app. And that's particularly successful for a dating app, obviously. And actually, I think if you look at our gender ratio and then you look at downloads and MAU across our core markets, you'll find that Hinge has more women in our core markets than any other dating app, period. And while I know that we talked about earlier how they are supposedly dating less than previous generations, the fact is Gen Z represents our largest and fastest-growing segment. And they're growing across all of our markets. And they're about 50%, 60% of our user base overall.
And then among LGBTQIA+ communities, we continue to see outsized growth because of our focus there. And they now make up about 15% of our total daters. Now, let's take a look at international growth. In our non-U.S. core markets of the U.K., Canada, and Australia, we are the number one most downloaded dating app. In continental Europe, we are only two years into our expansion there, and we are already the number two dating app in the region. And we're number one in the Nordics, and we're number one in France. And by the way, here in the U.S., Hinge just recently surpassed our nearest competitor, becoming the number two most downloaded dating app. Now, our work hasn't just led to growth in downloads, of course. It's also led to growth in revenue. In Q3 2024, direct revenue grew 32% year-over-year in the U.S.
It grew 36% in our core international markets, and it grew 98% in Europe, so we are successfully translating user growth into revenue growth, and I know that while in Europe, it's a relatively small slice of the pie right now, it is fast-growing, and what we found is that when we enter a new market, as we get further penetration and as we get further brand recognition, more liquidity on the app, we see that revenue per user number is starting to climb over time, and so that comes with the investment over time. Now, revenue per payer, it remains best in class at Hinge at over $30, and average monthly payers continue to grow. We had 1.6 million last quarter. Now, this is strong growth and momentum across the Board, and I expect it to continue, as I talked about the sustainability thing earlier.
Another reason for that is the strength of our team. We have an incredible team at Hinge. A good strategy, after all, is nothing without strong talent and strong culture to bring it to life. Now, culture is paramount at Hinge. It's really the number one thing I think about as a leader. We wrote a book on it. It just had our second edition. We give it to all of our employees. You can actually look and you can download it on our website. Along with a genuine commitment to our mission, we are able to attract top-tier leadership talent from companies like Netflix, Spotify, Google, Tesla. At our company, 90% of our team said that they are proud to work for Hinge and that they would recommend it as a great place to work.
And even more impressive, our Annual Voluntary Attrition rate among employees is truly astounding: less than 4% voluntary turnover per year. Frankly, this team is as excited as I am to bring our mission to life. We believe that we are only beginning to tap into what's possible when it comes to intention dating. Thanks to AI, the best is yet to come. And Hinge is perfectly positioned to lead the way into this new paradigm. Now, I started Hinge in 2011, and there were no dating apps at the time. So I've had a front-row seat to their evolution. And back then, I saw the opportunity that smartphones and social and big data presented in order to disrupt dating. But I and my team came up short in those early years because popular apps with the swipe feature moved faster, were quicker, had more resources.
And I'll admit that was like a pretty tough time for me when I started Hinge in 2011 through like 2015, 2016. But as popular dating apps became more popular, another insight emerged. And it was that precisely the thing that made these apps so easy and approachable also made them less effective for intentional daters. So we rebooted Hinge back in 2016 to address that opportunity, creating an experience that asked more of our daters but delivered more in return. And shortly afterward, Match Group invested in us, and then they later acquired us because they saw the same opportunity that we did. And now, here we are in 2024, and we are in the midst of another pivotal moment. I know this because I've seen and anticipated the prior stages of evolution in this category. I lost in the first one. I led the most recent.
I can sense when big changes are about to occur, and let me tell you, right now, with AI, we are about to see a transformation in dating that is more significant than anything that's come before, including the smartphone, and it's going to unlock blockbuster possibilities, in particular for intention dating. Now, that's important because as far as we've come, intention dating is far from a solved problem. People are complicated, and love is hard, and while AI is not going to be a panacea when it comes to the very deeply and personal problem of love, I can tell you that it is going to transform the dating app experience, taking it from a Do-It-Yourself platform to an expertly guided journey that leads to far better outcomes and provides much more value to our daters.
All of us at Hinge are excited to lead the way into this new reality. Our vision for the future has two elements. The first is personalized, intelligent matching. The second is effective coaching for struggling daters. Now, let's start with matching. We talked a lot about how Hinge captures a significant amount of in-depth information about each of our daters. But there are still limits to what we can currently do. If a dater likes someone, was it because of their outdoor adventure picks or because of their smile? If they passed on a profile, is it because they're a banker or because they didn't get their jokes? Right now, we can't tell. As a result, people often have to go through a lot of profiles to get out on a great date.
But imagine a future where daters speak directly to our algorithms, not in Morse code with their likes and passes, but in their own words about what's important to them and what they're looking for. Now, that is precisely what we are building at Hinge: a brand new recommendation system that can handle unstructured and nuanced information to deliver much more thoughtful matches. Right now, we are testing version 1.0, and we're using just a small portion of the data that we eventually plan to integrate. And while our tests so far have only applied to a fraction of the recommendations that we're serving, we are still seeing double-digit gains in matches per user. We're also seeing increased subscription revenue, proving out what I talked about earlier, which is that when we make our daters successful, we become successful. Now, this is hugely exciting.
Hinge is already known for the quality of our recommendations, and we believe this overhaul of our algorithm is going to represent a step function change that daters are going to tangibly experience. We expect an initial global rollout of this new algorithm in Q1 of next year, and this is just the starting point. Throughout 2025, we're going to get better and better at incorporating information we already have about our daters. Even more exciting is that we're going to be able to incorporate new kinds of data by asking our daters richer, more nuanced questions about who they are, what they like, who they're looking for. We'll also be able to solicit qualitative feedback on individual recommendations, so if you're not liking the people that we're suggesting, you can just tell us directly what we're missing and how we can do better.
Now, this is truly a new paradigm, one where daters are going to have the ability to give deeper signals and more thoughtful signals directly to our matching algorithms. And as a result, we're going to be able to match our daters with a level of efficiency and precision that up until this point has simply not been possible. And as we make recommendations, we're going to be able to give our daters insight into why. So today, people often make snap judgments, quickly skipping over potential matches that could have led to a great date or something more. So imagine a world that we can go beyond the profile, offering insights into why we believe two people are going to be compatible, unlocking opportunities that they otherwise might have missed. We plan to begin testing these warm introductions in Q2 of next year.
And everything I've just talked about so far, all of this, this is just the first pillar of our AI strategy. In addition to personalized, intelligent matching, we can also help daters who are struggling through the process. As I said before, dating isn't easy. And today, many of the people using Hinge really struggle to get out on that first date or sometimes even to get that first match. And they don't know why. Is it the photos they chose? Are they not sending enough likes? Are they waiting too long to ask a match out on a date? It's hard for them to know. Now, for years, we've collected insights to share with our daters on how to navigate the process and what works. We've re-released reports to the press. We've put articles on our help center. But let's be honest, most people don't read these things.
And if they do, they don't really know how to apply them to their daily lives. But in the future, with AI, we're going to be able to provide people on Hinge with all of this information and much more, but in an entirely new form. We're essentially going to be able to build the world's most knowledgeable dating coach that can give our daters just the right advice at just the right moment in their journeys, helping them from everything from making a good first impression all the way up to building a lasting connection, guidance that's personalized just for them. Now, let's take a look at one early example of what I'm talking about: prompt feedback. So as you saw earlier, all Hinge profiles have to answer three prompts. And some answers that people provide are great, but some, let's say, need a little help.
And so now with AI, we can provide that help. So if a dater just says, "Brunch is their favorite thing to do on a weekend," we can encourage them to go a bit deeper to say what they like to, where they like to go, what they like to cook? And we're not going to tell our daters what to say. Rather, we're going to use AI to help them show off their best selves in a way that is authentic to them. Now, the test results of prompt feedback have been dramatically positive, reducing the incidence of poor-quality answers by more than a third while also doubling the incidence of high-quality answers. And we expect a full rollout of this capability very early next year. Also, next year, we plan to test ways AI can help daters start conversations and get out on dates.
Once again, today, many matches fail to get past just a couple of messages and generic openings like, "Hey, what's up?" or the culprit way too often, right? And moving forward, by helping our daters get started, not with generic pickup lines, but with topics that are personal to them and their match, I think we're going to be able to meaningfully increase the rate at which matches turn into dates and then relationships. And once they get going, we're going to be able to help them take their online chemistry into the real world. Now, by 2026, I think we're going to be moving beyond simple tips and nudges and moving into much more complex territory, helping users through the ups and downs of their dating journey with empathy and compassion and support. Now, the possibilities here are truly endless.
Ultimately, we want Hinge to be more than just a highly intelligent matching platform. We want to be a trusted source of support and guidance, and together, these two capabilities are going to deliver a dating experience that today is almost unrecognizable, both in terms of its effectiveness and its humanity, and I am confident that we are going to be able to deliver that. That confidence is based on Hinge's track record of bold bets and innovation, and it's also based on the significant volume of our very high-quality data. Now, finally, let's talk about growth. I'm sure you all want to talk about growth. First and foremost, doing what we just talked about, there's three primary levers at our disposal, and the first one is doing what we just talked about: using AI to build exciting new offerings that help our daters find success.
Now, this is not only going to accelerate word-of-mouth growth, but it's also going to vastly expand the opportunities we have to offer paid products to our daters. The second is AI-enabled optimizations. Now, up until this point, I've only talked about how AI is going to help our daters. And the fact is, it's also going to help our business more directly. AI-enabled personalization of offers and discounts and other forms of merchandising should generate significantly more revenue from our existing suite of paid products. Now, the final lever is international growth. We believe that the strategy we most recently deployed in Europe can be repeated in other markets around the world, establishing a solid user base and then driving revenue growth. I am excited to announce today that we're going to be launching in Mexico and Brazil in 2025.
In 2026, we're going to push further into Latin America and start to look towards parts of Asia. We are beyond excited to bring our mission and our product and our dedication to supporting daters worldwide. Now, with all of that, I believe that we have a clear path to $1 billion in direct revenue in 2027. We can achieve that by adding approximately $150 million a year annually over the next three years through a combination of both user growth and monetization initiatives, and we expect that to drive both payer and RPP numbers. In terms of profitability, we believe that over the long-term, Hinge can be a roughly 40% AOI margin business. We're at 30% today. We expect to maintain similar margins again next year, and we're projecting to be around 35% or higher by 2027.
Now, that said, given the emerging opportunities presented by AI, I believe the next few years are going to be a very right time to invest in talent and technology to move fast and seize the moment, and we're going to continually evaluate our levels of investment and opportunities to accelerate our growth. And we may decide to invest further if we are confident it's going to generate incremental revenue growth and profitability in the longer-term, or even as close as 2027, we could be making some investments in the near term that could push us well beyond even $1 billion, and so, as you can see, overall, we are well positioned for incredible growth and sustainable growth. S o I've been working at Hinge for almost 14 years, and I am amazed by how far we've come. It's been an incredible journey.
And yet, I truly believe that we are just at the beginning. I'm going to leave you with this. When I set out to build Hinge back in 2011, I envisioned a whole new dating experience enabled by smartphones and by social. An investor after investor told me there wasn't a place for another dating service. The market was saturated. There wasn't anything interesting left to do in dating. But the fact was, as we all know now, that the dating category at the time was just getting started. And now, with AI, we are on the threshold of an even more transformative era for dating. What I presented today, it's just a taste of what's possible. There are some things that we're working on at Hinge that I can't even talk publicly about yet.
But I can tell you, I have never been more excited about the future of Hinge. On our current trajectory, we're on a path to $1 billion in direct revenue in 2027. But I'm thinking much bigger as I imagine the possibilities that AI is going to unlock. Now, the fact is, human intimate connection is one of our most basic human needs. And at a time when people are feeling lonelier than ever out there, we are an organization deeply committed to our mission to get our daters in relationships and off the app. Now, they're counting on us to succeed. And by continuing to pioneer innovation in the category, you can bet that we're going to deliver for them and for you. Thank you very much. And I look forward to taking your questions.
Meet BLK for Black singles. [Foreign language] Upward, the number one dating app for Christian singles.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Hesam Hosseini. I'm the CEO of Evergreen & Emerging Brands, or as we call it, E&E. And I'm excited to dive into our story with you today. As you just saw, we're home to the pioneers of online dating, like Match and OkCupid, which still help millions of singles each year find the right person for them. We also oversee some of our most innovative emerging apps, like Archer and BLK, which help fulfill our mission of creating meaningful connections for everyone, whether you're Black, Christian, or a gay man, just to name a few of the segments we serve. Now, I've been at Match Group a long time, 16 years, in fact. So I've seen a lot of change.
I can tell you this: the work we're doing at E&E has never been done before at our company. Today, I'm going to talk about the big bets and bold steps we're taking to serve our wide range of users and how that delivers value for all of Match Group and our shareholders. First, a little backstory on how our organization was created. Back in 2020, we began looking for new ways to accelerate growth at two of our promising young brands, BLK and Chispa, which serve the Black and Hispanic communities, respectively. Both had really big potential. But like most startups, they didn't have the resources to move quickly or at scale. We thought, what if we supported them with tech and talent from other parts of our portfolio, namely our Match business? The results of this collaboration blew us away.
BLK and Chispa were able to grow much faster and with lower investment by working more closely with the Match team. And we started to build more shared teams across the two organizations. BLK and Chispa got instant access to talent. And Match was able to operate with a lower cost base. So two years ago, we made the strategic decision to put that learning into practice, forming E&E, bringing our longstanding brands together with our emerging brands. And we created a new playbook to unlock upside for both sets of brands. First, we created shared teams that work across the entire org. They provide high-quality resources for each brand, even our smaller ones. That frees up the brand teams to focus relentlessly on differentiated product and marketing. Second, we're in the process of unifying our tech to drive savings and velocity gains.
The brands that have moved to the shared platform are doing really well. For instance, OurTime, which is our brand for the 50-plus audience, was the first to migrate to the shared platform. At that time, it had flat to declining revenue. This year, it has grown direct revenue 20% year- over- year. Third, we've merged our largest teams, Match and Meetic. They have similar products with similar brand positions, but operate in different countries. They're transitioning to a single cohesive product still marketed under their respective brands, but now leveraging their combined scale to deliver more impact with fewer resources. Two years in, it's clear that our playbook is working on a lot of fronts. Our emerging brands generate $140 million of direct revenue annually. We are leaner and have improved margins. We are faster at getting features to market.
Most importantly, we're providing a better experience for our users. The results of this strategy speak for themselves. On the Emerging side, you'll see our brands have continued growing rapidly. Direct revenue has grown 30% annually over the last two years. At the same time, we have moderated the declines on Evergreen, where direct revenue, excluding live streaming, has improved from a 15% year-over-year decline back in 2022 to an expected mid-single-digit decline next year. Put together, we've now reached a point where we believe Emerging direct revenue is substantial enough to offset declines at Evergreen in the second half of next year, excluding the impacts of FX. On an as-reported basis, after a slightly down revenue year in 2025, I believe we will achieve low single-digit revenue growth in 2026 and 2027. We're also on track for step-change improvements in profitability.
Since we formed E&E two years ago, we've improved AOI margin four percentage points from 22% in 2022 to an expected 26% in 2024. And we expect to deliver at least 30% AOI margins in 2026, once the cost savings from our consolidation efforts are fully phased in. Our Evergreen brands operate at higher margins, similar to Match Group's overall margins, while our emerging brands are at lower margins since they are still in their investment phase. So in the past two years, we've set up a strong organization and a strong technical platform. We've improved direct revenue trends and made a big leap in profitability. And now we're gearing up to build a future of dating for the users that we serve. First, by continuing our success in launching and acquiring new brands.
Second, by unlocking the benefits of operating as one, or as we say, build once, deploy everywhere, and third, by using our platform to be a testing ground for Match Group. Let's start with the new brands. Our playbook has proven we can accelerate apps at all stages of their life cycle, whether it's a startup focused on building its user base, like Archer or Yuzu, or brands where we're investing in user growth with a secondary focus on monetization, like Upward or The League, or brands that have now reached significant revenue and are scaling their profitability, like BLK and Chispa. Our strategy works for all of them. That's why when looking at the emerging portfolio as a whole, we are confident we will achieve continued and sustained growth at solid margins. That's true for the brands we incubate in-house, as well as potential acquisitions.
Take a look at the work we're doing with targeted relatively small acquisitions. A year ago, we acquired Salams, an app focused on Muslim singles in Western markets. This helped Match Group reach a key new demographic. Salams is the dating app for Muslim singles, serving a growing community that hasn't always found what they're looking for on other apps. We're seeing results. Once we acquired Salams, we were able to rapidly deploy our best practices, growing direct revenue over 50% year-over-year since the acquisition. Going forward, we believe that identifying brands with strong value and significant post-acquisition upside is a smart use of Match Group capital and a win for singles around the world. The second part of our strategy is unlocking the benefits of operating as one. Many of our brands operate at a smaller scale, given the specific demographic groups they serve.
But together, we have 12 million monthly active users and can make investments in best-in-class features that we can build once, deploy everywhere. For example, let's say we want to build a new matching system to improve the number of dates our members get. Before, we would have had to build this separately for each of our brands, which was really inefficient. Now we can build it once and roll it out to all our brands at the same time. And just imagine that approach with dozens of product features over time. A common platform also makes sure we are ready to adopt the latest AI technology for our brands, taking full advantage of the Match Group investments that Will spoke about earlier. This improved velocity will be game changing for our apps.
Another game-changing area is how we're leveraging our combined scale to cross-promote users across our apps and help our members find exactly what they're looking for. So let's say a user starts on Match and they're a single parent. We could invite them to check out Stir, our app designed for single parents. Or if a user is on OkCupid and they're a high-intent dater, we could promote Hinge or Match. Our custom-built technology powering this makes the switch easy by seamlessly transferring the user's profile to the other app. And we've been executing this strategy for around six months, and it's already helped drive incremental revenue growth within E&E. And we're just getting started. We believe that with advanced AI and targeting, we can identify the right users at the right time and suggest another one of our apps that might also be a fit for that user's goals.
Looking ahead, we believe that this cross-selling approach could lead to even bigger impact across the whole Match Group portfolio. The last pillar of our strategy is using our shared platform and our multiple brands to drive rapid experimentation across Match Group. One place that's happening is Yuzu. Yuzu is an emerging app for the Gen Z Asian American community, and it's also a place where we're testing an entirely new way to connect people. Yuzu offers a unique interface that lets users choose between a social-only mode or a combination of social and dating, and because the app uses our shared platform for standard features, it really allowed the Yuzu team to focus on all types of new and creative ideas. Let's take a look at what the team came up with.
S o I'm in a new city, and I don't know anybody. Yuzu lets me find other Asians in my area. Let's go check it out. I downloaded Yuzu, and guys, making friends is so, so easy .
This social-first approach has shown great promise, leading to more engagement, particularly from women. We've also started monetization on Yuzu, and despite it being more of a social product, early results have been better than expected. Yuzu launched with an entirely new way for users to connect, and it has shown that we can rapidly experiment and find new ways to serve users, especially Gen Z. We have more ideas in the pipeline, including how best we can apply all these learnings at other Match Group brands.
Just two years in, E&E has fundamentally reorganized how we work, resulting in strong growth for our emerging apps, new bets through innovation, incubation, and select M&A, and our operating-as-one approach is driving expanding margins and increased product velocity. For full year 2025, I expect direct revenue to be down low single digits year-over-year, excluding FX impacts on live streaming, or down mid-single digits on an as-reported basis, and for 2025, we plan to continue improving AOI margins versus 2024. In 2026 and 2027, I expect we can deliver low single-digit direct revenue growth on an as-reported basis with at least 30% AOI margins. We believe this growth will come due to continued growth at emerging brands that will more than offset moderate declines on Evergreen, and we're continuing to help all our users find meaningful connections, no matter who they are or what they're looking for.
We're proud of the foundation we built. I believe even greater things are on the horizon. And we're excited to keep sharing our progress with all of you. Thank you. [Foreign language]
Good morning, everyone. I'm Malgosia Green, CEO of Match Group Asia, based in Singapore. I've been with Match Group for almost seven years, and I have to tell you, I have one of the most interesting and rewarding jobs in the world. I get to help people find connection and love in one of the most dynamic, rapidly growing, and diverse regions. As a trained engineer, I'm inspired to work with some of the brightest talent. And as a business leader, I'm excited to bring their innovations to a global stage. We've built a strong foothold in Asia, and the growth potential is huge. Online dating penetration there is just 7%.
That's only a fifth of that of developed markets. This low rate means big opportunities to drive millions of new users and drive substantial growth. I oversee Asian-based brands, Pairs, and Azar. In addition, I manage the Asia go-to-market teams of our global brands, such as Tinder. Asia is also home to our AI central engineering team that supports all of Match Group. You heard Will speak to that earlier in the presentation. Azar is a social video chat app targeted primarily at Gen Z. They often crave a flexible, experience-focused way to connect without the pressure of traditional dating. In Asia, Tinder serves a broad spectrum of dating intents through its key differentiator of being fun and easy to use. By adapting and localizing our marketing campaigns to resonate with local audiences, Tinder is the number one dating brand in the region.
Korea, Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, have been particularly fast-growing markets for Tinder. Pairs is tailored for serious dating and daters who are looking for committed, long-term relationships. It operates mostly in Japan, though we see opportunities across Asia. The online dating market in Asia is unique. Roughly 60% of revenues come from serious dating. In Asia, serious dating often leads straight to marriage, unlike in the West, where it may mean exclusivity or long-term commitment. By building on Pairs success in Japan and then replicating it in other key markets, we aim to capture more of the serious dating revenue segment and drive long-term growth across Asia. We see particular opportunities in India, several Southeast Asian markets, and Korea. That's where we plan on expanding first, given the large market opportunity and the team we have on the ground there. Now, Pairs accounts for 10% of all marriages in Japan.
That's incredible, and here's why it works so well. Pairs emphasizes quality matches in several ways. First, men must pay to message, and that attracts a serious and committed user base. Second, ID verification is mandatory. Pairs works closely with the Japanese government and was the first to use their official and highly secure verification card. Third, profiles are highly detailed, like matrimonial profiles. They include income, family background, and even blood type, and that reflects what's important to daters in Japan. All of this helps ensure a safe, trusted, and serious matching environment. This approach has been particularly effective with women, who make up over half of Pairs' user base. Now, one of my favorite new features on Pairs this year is Real Mind Match. It addresses Japanese daters' concerns about authenticity and compatibility and has already been adopted by over 600,000 users in just six months.
This feature was created with insights into Japanese daters' preferences. We found that due to fear of judgment, daters often avoid sharing relationship criteria openly, such as their views on affection or finance. Real Mind Match allows them to share personal values and criteria privately with the app. This helps our matching algorithms focus on shared values and life goals rather than superficial traits. Real Mind Match has also uncovered some key preference differences among genders. For example, 60% of men are comfortable with public displays of affection compared to only 18% of women in Japan, and the results speak for themselves. By refining the algorithms to reflect these insights, we've achieved better match quality and higher reply rates. Our marketing strategy in Japan has also evolved to better align with our users' needs and behaviors.
A year ago, as shown on this TV ad, we focused on the emotional excitement of finding love with Pairs. Let's have a look.
[Foreign language]
And yet, our research revealed that 90% of Japanese singles want to find a partner. We don't need to convince them of this; they just don't know how. And to address this, our latest ads show singles how Pairs with features like Real Mind Match make this possible. This strategic pivot in our approach bridges the gap between skepticism and acceptance and builds real trust by showing our platform's real value.
[Foreign language]
Let's take a quick look back in time. Japanese dating apps struggled coming out of COVID. They retraced some of the gains during pandemic highs. But we're happy to see that the dating market in Japan is showing signs of recovery. As a result of product innovation combined with the particularly effective first-ever TV advertising in the Japanese market, Pairs is outperforming other apps in the market and has reaffirmed its leadership position. Our top-of-funnel metrics, such as downloads and registrations, have not only stabilized but are now on an upward trajectory, making a positive year-to-date recovery.
As mentioned earlier, despite some of the COVID-related headwinds impacting the category in Japan, Pairs has remained largely resilient, with flat year-over-year direct revenue trends over the last 12 months on a local currency basis. For the next few years, on a local currency basis, we expect Pairs to see low single-digit direct revenue growth in Japan and incremental revenue growth from expansion into other Asian markets.
Pairs' margin is expected to be in the low 30% range by 2027. Now, let me introduce you to Azar, built by Hyperconnect. It's a one-to-one live video chat that enables instant, real-time, face-to-face conversations. Now, Azar is not a dating app, but Azar does cater to Gen Z's desire for flexible, experience-focused connections. It provides an engaging way to meet new people without the pressure of traditional dating. Azar is powered by AI in two ways. Our sophisticated real-time AI matching algorithm is optimized to deliver quality conversations, and AI helps make Azar a safer and trustworthy environment by actively monitoring interactions. Azar is also fast-growing. We're witnessing impressive year-over-year growth in both users and pairs. As of Q3 2024, MAUs were up 14%, and pairs were up 29% year-over-year, and Azar is performing exceptionally well in Europe.
Its appeal to Gen Z has driven remarkable growth in users and pairs. Our success in Europe has made us confident about our expansion of Azar to the U.S., and that began in late Q3. Early signs from the U.S. market are very promising, and we believe the TAM is very significant.
Oh my God, who is she? Looking like money when I step on the shoe. Ooh, we feeling..[Foreign language] Are you on Azar? Make new friends! What did you study? I did violin. I hear the violin right there. We in the... Oh my God, dang, bro! Hey, hey, hey! You talking second. [Foreign language] Whatever that means. It means nice to meet you. [Foreign language]
Overall, Azar has shown solid revenue momentum over the last few years, with increasing profitability. We're confident Azar can grow direct revenue at a solid double-digit pace over the next few years on a local currency basis, as it continues to expand globally. Additionally, Azar is tracking to above 30% margin by 2027. Now, turning to our outlook, we expect Match Group Asia, and that includes Pairs and Azar, to deliver high single-digit direct revenue growth in 2025, excluding FX impacts and the shutdown of Hakuna, and then about 10% direct revenue growth on an as-reported basis in 2026 and 2027, with AOI margins expanding to at least 30% by 2027.
Match Group Asia altogether has been significantly impacted by FX trends over the past few years, which is outside of our control, but we remain confident in our ability to grow the business in local currency over the next few years, so with low penetration of dating apps in the region, we believe there's plenty of room for growth at our apps. We also see significant expansion opportunity for Pairs to deliver a serious dating app to more users across Asia.
With Azar, we believe that we're just scratching the surface of how far it can grow to capture Gen Z's need for meaningful connections in a fun new way. We're tapping into entirely new audiences, and the app's rapid growth in new markets shows the enormous potential in this space. We're excited as we execute on these plans for Match Group Asia. I expect that at some point today, all of you will download Azar, which takes less than a minute to register. See you on there soon.
Meet our customers: Annie, Benito, and Carla. Whether current, new, or returning, we attract users via marketing campaigns that position ads in the wild and in targeted places. Those ads fall within three distinct categories. The first is brand marketing, which focuses on building trust and brand affinity. Success is measured via brand awareness or perception and by organic registrations and reactivations. The goal is not to drive immediate revenue, but to build user growth over time. The second is performance marketing: paid ads to get potential customers to act immediately. This is Match Group's specialty, and it's managed in-house through a central buying team. Performance marketing enables us to optimize for ROI based on the lifetime value of a subscriber.
And the third is a mash-up of the first two: a combination of paid ads and brand exposure. The result? An emotional connection forms between the user and the brand. So, that's a marketing campaign. Our other marketing strategy? Word of mouth. Like after a promising date, Benito tells his friend Diego about the app, and then Diego joins too, which brings us to our next topic: keeping users invested and enthusiastic. Here's our criteria: efficiency, engagement, safety, and above all, a user needs to walk away from the experience feeling understood. Now, what happens if somebody gets involved in a relationship? That's great news. A successful match is a win for our users and the brands. It doesn't disrupt the business because we don't focus on churn. Dating is episodic by nature. Often, users leave an app and return to it multiple times. So, reactivation is key.
Last topic: how we make money. All our apps offer multiple tiers of subscriptions, which are primarily available on monthly or weekly intervals. When a user subscribes, they get certain benefits: greater access inside the app. Certain benefits can also be purchased à la carte. Most users go back and forth between using an app for free and paying for it. We call that our freemium model. Free users are vital to the dating app ecosystem because they create a larger and more diverse pool of potential matches. They also provide additional value, so we can further tailor the experiences and improve algorithms. These free users can convert to paying users over time, which we call payer penetration. They're essential to our monetization strategy. We focus on delivering exceptional value at the right time so that the paid experience maintains its value.
While subscriptions and à la carte features make up the bulk of our revenue, we also bring in a small amount of money from advertising. As you probably realize, there's a bunch of variables in our business model. Sometimes what's good for a relationship might seem bad for business. But here's how we see it: a successful connection means a personal recommendation is just around the corner. And so is a new customer.
Hi everyone. I'm Gary Swidler, President and CFO of Match Group. It's great to see all of you here today and to get a chance to showcase the great things about our company. Steve Bailey and I are going to walk through how we plan to drive meaningful shareholder value over the next three years and beyond. Our shareholder value equation centers on four pillars.
First, durable revenue and strong profitability through our distinct portfolio approach and constant reinvention of dating, which got us to where we are today and that we expect will continue to drive solid performance in the future. A new cross-company initiative called PoP+, which we believe will drive enhanced operating leverage and revenue upside. In case you're wondering, we call it PoP+ because we already have a powerful portfolio, and now we're adding a little plus to it. Prudent capital allocation is the third pillar, enabling us to invest in our business while leveraging our strong free cash flow to return meaningful amounts of capital to shareholders. And fourth, how all this work positions us to deliver strong free cash flow, which, when combined with our capital allocation strategy, should lead to what we believe are very attractive shareholder returns.
I will take you through the first two pillars before turning it over to Steve to bring us home. Our incredible portfolio of apps has delivered durable revenue and strong profitability over the past five years. Over this time, we grew both total revenue and AOI at a CAGR of over 10% through increases in both Revenue Per Payer, or RPP, and payers. RPP has increased from $14 to $19, and payers have increased from $12 million to over $15 million. As singles began dating less and their expectations of dating apps evolved, category user growth has slowed. This has been particularly pronounced at Tinder, but we've still been able to drive continued revenue growth through monetization initiatives such as weekly packages and pricing optimizations. These initiatives created noise in our financial metrics, increasing RPP while reducing payers.
But they had little to no impact on most users, given the majority of people use our apps for free. And they were clearly the right thing to do for the business, as they increased our revenue. While revenue growth over the last two years has been below our expectations, our profitability has remained strong. We're confident our track record of using technology to evolve our portfolio of brands, coupled with our financial discipline, will lead to durable revenue growth and strong profitability over the long-term. We operate a well-tuned portfolio model, similar to how many of you oversee your investments. Our diversified portfolio consists of brands at differing growth stages. We actively manage our brands to generate returns. And our scale enables us to invest in and experiment with new initiatives while taking a manageable level of risk to build future engines of growth.
We have brands in the early growth stage, like Azar and Yuzu, that are focused on building awareness and acquiring new users. They tend to operate at a loss or at low margins, prioritizing user, not revenue growth. They represent new bets for the future of the portfolio. On the other hand, we have mature brands like Match and OkCupid, which have been around for decades. They've reached scale and are in a managed state of decline with high margins and limited levels of investment. Because they are so well-established and well-known, they can continue in this state for a long period of time. They generate strong cash flow, which we use to help fund the earlier-stage brands in our portfolio.
Then we have some brands that are somewhere in the middle of the growth lifecycle continuum, like Hinge and Azar, where we're focused on balancing user growth, revenue generation, and profitability. These brands also include Tinder, whose unmatched scale and global footprint give it real staying power. As Faye discussed, we're focused on making the right levels of investment to return to user and revenue growth while continuing to generate category-leading profitability. Supporting all these brands is our central management team. We're continuously evaluating our various brands to properly manage their lifecycles while leveraging best practices and driving efficiencies across the portfolio. We strongly believe this portfolio model enhances both revenue durability and profitability for the company over the long-term. To illustrate why, I want to dive deeper into two great success stories for us: Tinder and Hinge.
As you've seen, Tinder has grown from essentially no revenue in 2015 to a $2 billion top-line business for us today. Even more impressively, it has category-leading margins. From 2020 through 2022, Tinder's AOI margin was over 55%. We've recently reinvested some of that into product development and marketing to reignite some of the initial viral growth that has slowed. We've been very methodical with our investment. Over its history, Tinder has generated significant cumulative AOI for us, approximately $6 billion since launch, which we've used in part to fuel other investments across the portfolio. One of those investments was Hinge, which we initially invested in when it was still a small app, early in its stage of finding product-market fit. We spent a few years with the Hinge team, investing step by step in its product and marketing.
Today, Hinge has grown into the second-largest app in our portfolio, with huge runway remaining globally. We've been able to create a playbook on how to build businesses in this category. It's central to our portfolio approach and is a playbook that's hard to replicate. We're able to use profits generated from mature brands to fund investments in newer brands. We're able to offer these new apps support from our central infrastructure and our extensive expertise in the dating category. As a result, these brands are unburdened by the overarching costs of being a standalone business. They don't have to spend time or money testing different monetization or marketing strategies because we often already know what works and what doesn't. These brands can access central services like Legal, Accounting, HR, as well as support in critical areas like trust and safety.
Our track record shows that this model works, which is why we're constantly investing in emerging brands that we hope will one day become winners in our portfolio. As a result of the differing lifecycles of our brands, our portfolio is continuously evolving. Tinder has been our biggest success story and now accounts for almost 60% of our direct revenue. Back in 2019, the Evergreen brands generated over one-third of our direct revenue. Today, those brands still make significant contributions to the portfolio, but they represent a much smaller portion of our direct revenue because Hinge and MG Asia have grown into larger businesses. Hinge now generates about 15% of our direct revenue. As the strongest brand in the market right now, we expect that percentage to continue growing over time, and as Hesam and Malgosia discussed, we see opportunities to grow E&E and MG Asia as well.
Reinvigorated growth at Tinder, as well as new apps that we build in the future, could also change this picture. Our reinvestment strategy has led to about two points of AOI margin compression since 2019. But looking ahead, we expect to deliver meaningful margin expansion over the next three years, given the high operating leverage in our business. There have been three main drivers of AOI margin trends over the last five years. First was the need to invest more in Tinder product and marketing as viral growth slowed and we embarked on a product-led turnaround. While this product investment has not yet paid the anticipated dividends, as Faye outlined, we expect it to do so over the next few years. Second was a shifting portfolio mix. Over the past few years, higher growth but lower margin brands have come to comprise a larger percentage of our portfolio.
We acquired Hinge and Hyperconnect, both of which have margins below Match Group levels, given they are earlier-stage businesses. And third, margin expansion across our businesses. With the exception of Tinder, AOI margins have actually improved across our key businesses, including at Hinge and Hyperconnect, over this period. Expanding margin across our brands, which has always been our key goal, nearly offsets the impact from the shifting portfolio mix. This has all set us up to continue to reinvest for future growth and to expand total company margins over the next three years through continued operating leverage enhanced by the PoP+ initiative. Now let me turn to the PoP+ initiative. This is an initiative which we recently kicked off, and it's focused on operating more effectively as a connected portfolio of brands to drive both margin and revenue upside.
This initiative centers on four areas: reducing duplication of central and brand functions, increased sharing of operational infrastructure, cross-selling our customers, and better sharing of data and expertise across our brands. Let me explain each in a little bit more detail. First, we plan to reduce duplication of central and brand functions by streamlining teams and processes, which we expect to lower G&A costs over the next three years. We've done some of these things at E&E already, but there is more opportunity to do this across Match Group. Next, we plan to share more operational infrastructure across our brands by better centralizing back-end functions like CRM, billing, customer care, and trust and safety as examples. We're still early in the evaluation phase, but see real opportunity to lower cost of revenue through these efforts. Again, this is something we have recent experience with at E&E.
Additionally, we're working to drive incremental revenue through cross-selling initiatives, enabling users to move more seamlessly between our apps, maximizing multi-app usage, and therefore revenue to Match Group. Some of these initiatives are already underway. Finally, we believe better sharing of data and expertise across our brands may ultimately have the biggest impact. We expect efforts in these areas will spur innovation across the portfolio and result in better user experiences both in our existing apps and potential new apps. This data sharing is also critical for our AI work, which you heard about from Will, and it's dependent on leveraging data to drive better user outcomes. Personally, I intend to focus on the PoP+ initiative as we move forward. I'm very optimistic that there is a lot more we can do to operate efficiently and more effectively and to increase collaboration across our organization.
The PoP+ initiative also will enable us to integrate any third-party apps we acquire more effectively. And it also enables our smaller brands to gain competitive advantages by leveraging the fact that they are part of a bigger, better-resourced portfolio. We expect to drive operating leverage across several key areas of the P&L through both continued financial discipline and the PoP+ initiative. Within cost of revenue, we expect PoP+ to impact operating costs like web hosting, CRM, and billing. We expect these savings and reduced broadcaster fees as a result of our exit of live streaming to offset expected continued App Store fee headwinds. On that topic, we believe there continues to be pressure on Apple and Google from multiple jurisdictions, especially in the EU, to change IAP fee policies.
In the near future, the European Commission can begin levying fines under the Digital Markets Act if it determines that Apple or Google are not in compliance with its terms. While the exact timing and extent of any changes are hard to predict, we expect IAP fees to be reduced over the coming years, which could provide material upside to our margins, given that we have not incorporated any reductions in IAP fees into today's outlook. We expect PoP+ to reduce G&A as a percentage of revenue by streamlining operations and reducing duplications across our brand and corporate functions, as I just discussed. We also expect leverage in sales and marketing costs across the portfolio, with increases in marketing primarily happening at Hinge.
Product development costs are expected to be flat as a percentage of revenue, with leverage at each of our brands, except Tinder, where we plan to continue to invest in product talent to execute the turnaround. We will, however, be watching this closely to ensure that the expected benefits materialize. We will also be looking for opportunities to get leverage from this line item as we embark on our PoP+ initiative. The opportunities to meaningfully improve margins that I just reviewed are incremental to our LTM 37% AOI and 26% OI margins, excluding impairments, which are already very strong relative to our consumer internet peers. Additionally, we believe we prudently manage stock-based comp expense, as it also compares favorably to peers at around 8% of revenue, a level which we expect to continue to maintain over the next three years.
This, coupled with low levels of depreciation and amortization, leads to strong operating income margins relative to peers, and now I'm going to hand the reins over to Steve, our incoming CFO, to share more about our capital allocation strategy, our financial outlook, and our total shareholder return algorithm. Before I do that, I want to say how excited and thrilled I am for Steve to be taking this role. We've worked together for a while now and have been preparing for this transition.
He knows our business inside and out and has actually been at the company longer than I have. For football fans, Steve's an Eagles fan living in Dallas, which shows he's tough, and this year shows he's also very smart, and he continues the trend of Match Group CFOs with good hair, although he is the first one ever to have a beard. He's going to be a great leader at Match Group for many years to come. And so with that, please welcome Steve.
Thank you, Gary. Gary doesn't give many compliments like that, so I'll take it. Thank you. Appreciate it. And love the Eagles joke. In all seriousness, I have big shoes to fill, but I'm excited to step into the role and spend more time with you, our analyst and investor community, and with this incredible management team to drive long-term success at Match Group. Prudent capital allocation is the third pillar of our shareholder value equation. Our first priority is organic investment in our business, which we will continue to do in a financially disciplined way as we see opportunities to drive growth. That means smart investments in product and marketing in particular, as well as new ideas and innovations.
Second, we plan to return at least 100% of free cash flow to shareholders over the next three years. Third, while our primary focus is squarely on better execution at our existing businesses, we will continue to look at M&A targets opportunistically. We have a strong track record of M&A and dating, and we've generated a lot of value doing it over the years. As you heard earlier today from Hesam, E&E has had success acquiring niche brands and leveraging Match Group best practices to accelerate growth and free cash flow. We evaluate these opportunities through a build versus buy framework as we look for ways to leverage E&E's shared platform and to drive growth. We will maintain a high hurdle rate for any new acquisitions with a focus on cash flow accretion to our business.
Our strong free cash flow allows for the appropriate levels of organic investment and the committed levels of capital returns, with plenty of flexibility for targeted M&A. Since resuming our share repurchase program in 2022, through the end of Q3 of this year, we have returned $1.7 billion, or 85% of free cash flow, through share repurchases. We have repurchased 40 million shares and reduced diluted shares outstanding by almost 10% since we restarted our program, and this is net of equity issuances. We expect share repurchases this quarter to be approximately one-third of free cash flow. We have stayed out of the market since announcing Q3 earnings, given the material information shared today. We expect to end the year having deployed approximately 75% of free cash flow for repurchases.
We plan to resume buying under our stated approach as soon as our window reopens after our earnings release in February, and we expect to begin the year with slightly more cash on hand than we had anticipated, which will be available for capital return. Our strong capital allocation strategy is enabled by strong profitability and high free cash flow conversion. We expect to convert 70%-75% of AOI to free cash flow over the next three years. While still very strong, this is lower than in previous years, mainly due to us becoming a material federal cash taxpayer in 2023 as various tax credit carryforwards have been utilized. We expect to have fully utilized all carryforwards in 2025. We also anticipate slightly higher cash interest expenses over the next few years as our existing fixed-rate debt starts to come due in a higher-rate environment.
It's important to note that our free cash flow conversion is also impacted by the timing of Apple payments. This can have a roughly 10-point impact on conversion rates in a given year. A typical year includes 12 payments. Certain years, like 2023, had one fewer payment, while other years, like 2024, are expected to have one additional payment. We expect to have normal 12-payment years in 2025 through 2027, based on all available information. In 2025, we expect to generate nearly $1 billion in free cash flow, slightly less than we anticipate in 2024, due to the additional Apple payment expected this year. We expect approximately $1 billion in free cash flow in 2026 and approximately $1.1 billion in free cash flow in 2027, with more normalized year-over-year growth rates in those years.
We have a strong balance sheet with gross leverage of 3x and net leverage of 2.3x . Our strong cash flow generation allowed us to quickly delever following our separation from IAC in mid-2020, after we took on leverage and paid a large dividend to shareholders. We also prudently refinanced our debt when rates were low and pushed out maturities to 2026 and beyond. Our debt maturities are spread out relatively evenly through 2031, and as we refinance our debt over the coming years, our interest expense is expected to increase only modestly. Going forward, we will target net leverage of 2x-3x , depending on a variety of factors, including the macro environment and risks and opportunities we see in our business, and that brings us to our last pillar, our total shareholder return algorithm.
Before I get to that, I want to take a few minutes to give an update on our Q4 performance, our new $1.5 billion share repurchase authorization, and our new quarterly dividend. I'll also review some changes we plan to make to our quarterly earnings materials. First, an update on Q4 performance. On an FX-neutral basis, we expect to be within the Q4 outlook range we provided on the Q3 earnings call for total company revenue and for Tinder direct revenue. On an as-reported basis, we expect to be under the outlook provided on our Q3 call due to total company FX impacts that are currently about $15 million more than expected, with about two-thirds of the impact at Tinder. We still expect to achieve Match Group AOI margins of 36% for the full year 2024.
As it relates to Tinder's new user declines on iOS that we discussed on the most recent call, they remain stable at lower levels but have now fully recovered to the early September trendline. This is consistent with what we assumed on our prior Q4 outlook. We announced earlier today a $1.5 billion share repurchase authorization to support our buyback plans and a $0.19 quarterly dividend, which we expect to pay on a quarterly basis going forward, subject to market conditions and approval by our Board of Directors. This quarterly dividend equates to a $0.76 annual dividend, and at our current share price, would imply a more than 2% annual dividend yield. This will add a predictable, consistent form of capital return to shareholders, and we expect to have the capacity to increase the dividend in the future.
Beginning next quarter, we plan to make several changes to our earnings release materials. BK, Gary, and I are managing the portfolio as a whole to meet our revenue growth, margin, and free cash flow goals. As we make choices to drive efficiency and invest in innovation and expansion, which we have always done, they could have differing impacts on our business units, but our goal is to maximize total company financial results. While we thought it was important today to give you the building blocks of our three-year outlook at the business unit level, moving forward, we plan to provide only a total company outlook. This allows us the flexibility to fully maximize our portfolio value and is consistent with our management approach.
We plan to continue to disclose actual results for our four business units each quarter, which we began doing in Q3 because it provides appropriate transparency, but we will no longer provide an outlook at the business unit level on a regular basis. We also plan to change the format of our quarterly earnings releases to provide clearer, more consistent information to investors. We will no longer release a shareholder letter. Instead, we plan to provide a press release, prepared remarks in writing in advance of the call, and a presentation highlighting key metrics and trends in the business. We have included a summary of what historical disclosures and forward outlooks we plan to provide in the appendix to today's presentation. Now turning to our three-year financial outlook. Each business leader laid out for you today their strategy, product roadmap, and expectations for future performance.
While each business unit's growth and profitability are important components of our overall success, we believe the portfolio approach we laid out for you today provides multiple paths to achieving our financial goals over the next three years. We expect Match Group total revenue growth to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 4%-6% from 2024 to 2027. On an FX-neutral basis, and excluding live streaming and Hakuna, we expect low single-digit year-over-year Match Group total revenue growth in 2025. On an as-reported basis, we expect approximately flat Match Group year-over-year total revenue growth in 2025, which is impacted by an expected nearly two-point headwind from foreign exchange rates. This incorporates the specific business unit outlooks that the leaders outlined earlier in the presentation.
With continued strong direct revenue growth at Hinge and improving direct revenue growth across Tinder, E&E, and Match Group Asia, we expect Match Group total revenue growth to improve to mid-single digits year-over-year in 2026 and mid-to-high single digits year-over-year in 2027. There is no fundamental reason why we cannot have continued strong growth at Hinge and a return to growth at Tinder if we evolve Tinder's product to address the expectations of today's daters, especially given the high multi-app usage in the category. Category expansion through AI-led product innovation and/or an increase in dating activity more generally could provide meaningful upside to this outlook. We are committed to expanding AOI margins to 39% in 2027, one point of margin expansion each year over the next three years on average, through continued financial discipline and our PoP+ initiative.
We believe 39% AOI margins would be among best in class and are especially strong considering the significant IAP fees we pay. Our financial focus over the next three years is on maximizing free cash flow. We expect to generate over $3 billion in cumulative free cash flow over the next three years, which we plan to deploy towards share repurchases in addition to the dividend. We plan to use at least 75% of our free cash flow for share repurchases. We expect to deploy roughly $2.5 billion of free cash flow towards share repurchases from 2025 through 2027 and to reduce net shares outstanding by 15%-20% over that period. The number of shares we repurchase at any particular quarter is done in consultation with our Board of Directors and could vary depending on a number of factors, including prevailing market conditions.
We expect free cash flow per share to be approximately $5 in 2027. Through the combination of share repurchases and the dividend, we are targeting returning at least 100% of free cash flow to shareholders over the next three years while maintaining a target net leverage of 2x-3x. Today, we're setting clear financial targets that we expect to deliver over the next three years, and we think there are multiple paths to achieving our financial goals. If product innovation results in higher Match Group revenue growth than we expect, our high operating leverage will help us achieve our margin targets more easily, giving us the flexibility to either invest more back in the business or to expand growth, or if revenue growth is more muted than we expect, we can pull back on investment and focus more on cost reduction efforts.
We are confident we have the right strategy, the right plan, and the right team to achieve our three-year targets, and we are committed to delivering on these financial goals. Thank you so much for your time and attention today. I hope you are as excited as I am about the future of Match Group. We're going to take a short break now and begin the Q&A session.
Okay, we've covered a lot today. So let's get to questions. Let's dive in. BK, let's start with you. Our first question is on market opportunity from Cory Carpenter at JPMorgan. You talked about 250 million people who aren't using dating apps as a key unlock for growth. Can you talk in more detail about how you plan to reach those users?
Look, we have a huge market opportunity ahead of us. Only 12% of online daters, or daters period, are actually going online using dating apps. That's a big, big market of people that we can go after around the world. Our product strategy, our company ethos really centers around product innovation, centered with really fantastic marketing. As I look across the stage and our portfolio of brands, I believe we're the best positioned to go after all these folks around the world who are looking for love. I look at the Tinder roadmap, and I could not be more confident in the things that we're building, coupled with this fantastic foundation that we have with marketing. I believe virality can begin again with Tinder as we deliver against this product roadmap. Or with Hinge, geographic expansion. It's really incredible to see the performance of Hinge as it's taken over Europe. It's really, really exciting.
And I think there's so much incredible opportunity ahead of us. Or Azar. I mean, what an exciting app. I think everyone during the break probably downloaded it or are trying it right now. You can get quick into an almost instant conversation with anyone around the world. I believe we have the best portfolio approach to go after this huge market opportunity for us.
Great, thank you. We have a question on Tinder strategy for Faye from Eric Sheridan at Goldman Sachs. In terms of three-pronged Tinder strategy, how should investors think about the necessary investments in product, technology, and marketing in terms of both depth and duration? And when would you expect this strategy to be fully rolled out and impacting the user behavior?
Yeah, we've been investing more in Tinder's product development and marketing over the last few years, as you heard today. It's been really important for me to make sure I have the right team in place for us to accomplish what we need to do. We have an ambitious roadmap. We're going to continue to build off of it. There are more initiatives beyond that, and I don't think of it as a duration of, you know, we start now and we end in six months.
This is an ongoing strategy that we'll continue to focus and invest in, but I'm confident we have the team that we need to execute, and that's their primary focus today, and I think the marketing work we've been doing has been incredible, and in my mind, coupling that marketing work with the product innovation that's going to happen in 2025, that's where we'll see even more effective spend, and that's something we haven't done as much of. And so that will be a new lever for us as we look to invest in marketing.
Question on Hinge monetization, Justin. Yep. From Curtis Nagle at Bank of America. Can you speak to the monetization opportunity for Hinge? Currently, Hinge's subscriber penetration rate is at about 13%. Could the brand get to a rate similar to the 21% at Tinder long-term?
I think the high level is yes. Certainly, we can continue to grow subscriber penetration. There's a number of things that are accounting for that number. One is we're early in our journey in a lot of our international markets, which is dragging a bit on that number. But as we increase liquidity and as we increase awareness in those markets, we see subscriber penetration start to go up.
Another thing is, as I talked about earlier, we're going to continue to offer new features into our paid subscription products. So that's another lever as we continue to release new AI features. And another thing is that we're just early in our journey. I mean, we have a very small monetization team. We literally have like one product manager right now on monetization. And we haven't done a lot of the work yet to get sophisticated on pricing and personalization and discounts and things like that, which can meaningfully increase that penetration over time. And this also doesn't even account, by the way, for things like new à la carte features. We still kind of just have roses and boosts as we think about the future. There's other opportunities for new à la carte features.
So there's like a whole lot of levers at our disposal to which I think is the bigger question. It's less about subscriber penetration, just overall revenue per user. And I still think we have like a considerable way to climb on that number.
Great. We have a question on AI strategy, Will, from Ygal Arounian at Citi. The AI products and strategy look somewhat different across the different products, especially Tinder and Hinge. How do you think about different gen AI needs across different brands, and what kind of overlap is there?
Well, first, what I would say is that I think it's a beautiful thing that we do have differentiated AI roadmaps. I think that's reflective of the fact that there's a huge diversity of creative ideas across our AI teams in the portfolio. Hopefully, that gives users a lot to anticipate, a lot of interesting new features out there on the horizon. Next, what I would say is that, you know, the fact that we have these differentiated AI roadmaps is actually intentional.
That is a side effect, essentially a planned side effect of our AI org design, which I mentioned during the presentation today, which is the hub-and-spoke model. The spokes at each business unit enabling brands to create tailored solutions, you know, with the folks that best understand each brand's ethos. Then the hub at the central level enabling the sharing of ideas, the sharing of code, and the propagation of technology across the board and deduplication of efforts.
The last thing I'll say is that even though we have this strategy where we are sharing AI modules across the portfolio, that doesn't mean that there's necessarily overlap in the brand functionality. For example, the AI Photo Finder example that I mentioned today as well, we've integrated that in both Tinder and Hinge. But in actuality, because each brand has its own unique brand ethos, the way that people use each app is actually different. And therefore, the profile photos on Tinder tend to be different than the profile photos on Hinge, which means the underlying data is different. So what that means is that the AI Photo Finder will actually recommend the same for the same individual user, it'll actually surface different photos depending on which app is being used. So there's a lot of incredible differentiation even using this AI module strategy.
I can actually add something really quick about that. I think this really plays to the point we were talking about earlier that this is a marker of an incredible tectonic time in the market because of AI, so when you think about social and mobile, there was a whole proliferation back in 2012, 2013, 2014 of very different types of ways of approaching the market because new technologies and new platforms were available, and so you saw a big divergence in terms of how people were approaching, and then over time, as that technology became more mature, you started to see it come back and converge a bit as people figured out the kind of winning practices and what really worked, and then it kind of merged, and then they started to become more and more similar over time.
Now what we're seeing is divergence again, precisely because of AI. And that actually speaks to the power of being part of a portfolio is because we actually have a number of different brands with different positionings and different leaders, which can be a real strength at a time when there's a lot of disruption. It's almost like an evolutionary process. There's a lot of change in the environment. So having a lot of diversity is actually a huge strength with that. And we can figure out what works and what doesn't and share those learnings very quickly across the portfolio.
Great, thank you for that. We have another question on Hinge, but this time, Steve, I'm going to let you take it. It's from an investor. For Hinge, you're forecasting approximately 20% top-line growth and $1 billion revenue by 2027 with 35% + AOI margins. Yet Tinder margins were over 50% at similar revenue and then proceeded to expand beyond that. Why shouldn't Hinge margins approach similar levels over time, especially since Hinge ARPUs are much higher?
Yeah, I think, look, the Tinder situation and the Hinge situation is a little bit different. Tinder grew rapidly, virally with no marketing spend for many years. Its marketing is still only 1% of revenue today. That's like nothing we've seen in the dating category before or after. And we may never see it again. Hinge growth is very strong. 30% margins is a strong profitability margin for its sort of evolution in its life cycle with still ample room to go. We talked about 35% + over the coming years. And I feel very confident we can get to 40% and above by 2029 and beyond.
I don't think, sitting here today, I think of Hinge as a 50%+ margin business. But we'll have to see how things play out. Hinge is taking an approach where they're going methodically, market by market, with a really well thought out brand positioning and strategic marketing campaign. That's worked very well for them. They're going to continue to do it. It does take a little bit more marketing spend than what Tinder was spending, which was almost nothing back when it was sort of expanding globally. So I just think it's a little bit of a different situation, but still a phenomenal business.
We have a question for both Faye and Justin. So Faye, if you want to start, it's from an investor. How does increasing the LGBTQ + population impact Tinder and Hinge?
I think this is a phenomenal opportunity. I think you would agree. On Tinder, there are folks who come out on Tinder before they come out to their friends and family. I mean, this is the kind of role we play in the community. And it's such an important role. Today, 15%-20% of our users are part of the LGBTQ community. 30% of women in the U.S. are seeking women or seeking women and men. So we know this is a substantial portion of our users. And if it's a substantial portion, we want to be able to serve them. And that's why we made investments this year in something we call All-In. You heard me talk about changing onboarding so that we can better understand people who are coming in with their needs and how do we tune our recommendation, how do we tune the experience to address them.
In our Explore area, we also added new ways to be able to get to the types of people you're looking for faster. So this is also another area that is going to be a journey for us. But it's such a critical area that I know we will continue to invest and make sure that as folks turn to Tinder from the community, we're serving them as best we can. On top of that, you can see in our marketing, some of our best marketing creative is when we put LGBT love front and center. And that is, I think, reflecting how much what we stand for is resonating with this audience.
Certainly. So for Hinge, inclusivity is really baked into our ethos as a company. And it's been, I think, to our benefit over time, and sexuality is one element of how we think about that ethos.
It's baked into the product features that we offer. The overall positioning of our product is a very inclusive vision for what we offer to our users. We've been well ahead of the, I won't call it a trend, but like the rising LGBTQIA+ population. Most recently, like with the, we did something called an NFAQ campaign. We had this insight where daters who, queer daters often have fewer dating resources available to them. So we worked with creators out there and experts in the field and collected questions from that community and then published those on everything from billboards to our website. We've just found over time that by really paying attention to more marginalized communities, we can pick up on trends, we can pick up on user needs that when we actually really dig into them are actually applicable to us all.
So it's actually been a real wellspring and source for us for inspiration in our core product. And so that maintains, that continues to be a big, big part of our ethos. And so I think it only helps strengthen Hinge overall.
Great. Here's a question on our portfolio model. Gary, why don't you take this? It's from an investor. Can you explain the roles of central management team versus the brand leaders in the portfolio model approach?
Sure, it's an important thing to understand as it relates to our business. We want each brand to really build the best business that they can, the best product experience for its customer base, the best marketing narrative possible, the best culture for the employees.
And we want the brand leaders and the brand teams to wake up every morning and think about the brand and how to make it better and more successful and serve users better. That is really the job of the brands. The central team's job is a number of things. The first is to provide the brands with as many tools and resources as possible to make their jobs easier and their businesses more successful. We want to unburden them from things like accounting, taxes, some of the HR functions, as well as give them insights that we might have at a central level. We don't want brands doing something at their brand that we've already tried at another brand and wasn't successful.
But conversely, if we've tried something, whether it's a monetization feature or something else at one of our brands and we think it could work at other brands, we want to make sure that that brand undertakes that and we give all the learnings. Will talked earlier in his presentation about how we're sharing AI tools, which is obviously a critical area for innovation and it's an expensive area. So we don't want to replicate that multiple times. We're trying to do some of that work centrally. And as we do things like Photo Selector at Tinder, Hinge can refine it and also benefit from that tool inside of its business. The other couple of things that are worth highlighting as it relates to the central team is one, we need to allocate resources and capital.
And so we need to think through for every new hire or every dollar of marketing spend or whatever it might be, where should that dollar go? Because we've got lots of very successful viable brands and we in the center need to play the role of finding a way to meet the goals of the company itself, the whole company in terms of growth, in terms of margin, which is critical obviously to the stock price. And we need to make sure that we properly allocate these resources. And so we spend a lot of our time analyzing and understanding what resources and what investment is needed at each business. And we have a very robust process back and forth with the brands multiple times a year on a monthly basis to make sure we understand where additional investment might be warranted or frankly might not be warranted.
And the other thing that the central team needs to do is think about the strategy and vision for the company. Where else do we see opportunities? That is in part driven from the center. And if we see new opportunities evolving to serve more people, to capture more share, to expand geographically, places we don't currently have covered by our existing brand portfolio, we want to make those investments, make those things a priority and deliver on those objectives and goals. And so we're constantly seeding new apps, making some small acquisitions and building out those businesses to serve populations or provide experiences that we haven't provided before. And that role also of seeing down the road and trying to satisfy those opportunities is a critical function of the central team as well.
We have a question on the dividend, Steve, from an investor. What factor will drive the growth in the dividend? Is it reasonable to believe that it will grow in line with free cash flow?
Yeah, I think on the dividend, we wanted to start low at a place that's very comfortable, provides a good dividend yield and leave more room for growth from there. I think free cash flow will be a metric we look at very carefully, but we'll do that in consultation with the Board of Directors. We're happy with what we announced today. We said we'd leave more room to grow it in the future, and we'll have to see how it goes, but certainly free cash will be a primary metric we look at.
Hesam, we have a question for you from Robert Colbert at Evercore. Beyond cross-sell, what plans do you have to leverage cross-portfolio liquidity to catalyze growth across E&E brands? Would you ever consider creating a digital passport?
Yeah, so we're pretty early in cross-promoting users across our apps. And a digital passport is certainly on that same evolution. For our affinity brands, the cross-promotion initiative has actually helped reduce the cost of getting new apps off the ground. So I highlighted Yuzu earlier, which is a new sort of experimental approach to meeting new people. And our cross-promotion efforts have been able to have allowed us to get that off the ground with a much lower level of investment than we would have otherwise had to do. So it can be quite a strategic way to test new experiences. Going forward, we do expect a lot more upside from initiatives like that. And something like a digital passport would be on that natural evolution. Users are already using multiple apps. It's existing behavior. They're paying on multiple apps. I think we have an opportunity to help streamline that experience.
A question on the 2025 Tinder roadmap from Justin Patterson at KeyBanc. For 2025, Tinder's growth rate came in a bit below expectations. What gives you the confidence that these new AI features can drive improvement in future years?
I think it's important to note that we never think one specific initiative drives overall growth of the business. We really have many initiatives going on at once, each with a very particular purpose. What you heard me talk about today was an AI-enabled discovery experience that we're really excited about. We've put that in front of users and prototypes and have gotten very good feedback, which gives us more confidence that we're investing in the right thing. I think you've also heard from us collectively about how important AI will be for the category.
If you take our category, which is one of the most complex, if you think about compatibility, the ability to help people find each other. This is not transactional. Two people who can come together and build something meaningful. We now finally have better technology to understand people better and then also utilize that technology to talk to them and support them in ways that we've never been able to do before, so I think we're going to have a lot of initiatives that will be based on this technology. As Justin shared some at Hinge, I shared at Tinder, Will's got a lot going on in his world as well. But you also heard me talk about our Double Dating feature, and that's an initiative that's founded on a different premise.
That premise is around the value of friends in the dating process and how do we bring that into the experience, knowing that we've had signals of success in our prior work and now being very deliberate about what that strategy is going to be going forward. And so I really view it as a combination of initiatives that help us attract new users and really support our existing users that ultimately lead to the growth t hat we need.
Speaking of the power of AI in our products, we have a question for you, Will, from Nathan Feather at Morgan Stanley. As AI becomes a larger part of the product experience, how do you ensure daters still feel they are finding authentic human connections?
That's a good question. I mean, I think the beauty of AI is that it can learn about each of our users and best understand what they're looking for and really cater to those needs. And one thing that I do want to make sure that I mention is very important is the fact that actually when GenAI sort of exploded onto the market a few years back, we pulled together a team of cross-functional leaders from across the portfolio to develop and then publish our seven ethical AI principles when it comes to AI. And actually the first and foremost principle is authenticity. And the fact that when it comes to AI, we are not looking to replace human-to-human interactions. We believe that AI should be used as a tool that fundamentally enables humans to best showcase who they are.
So rather than, for example, having an AI talk on behalf of someone, the AI, as Justin showed in some of the Hinge roadmap, can actually sort of push someone to think a little bit further about the best thing to maybe say. So that's a really, really key part of our strategy and our AI principles.
We have a question on our PoP+ initiative.
Sounds like one for me.
From Eric Sheridan at Goldman Sachs, can you discuss more deeply how these portfolio initiatives might yield increased operating efficiency? How much is reflected in the base case of today's forward guidance?
Yeah, I mean, it's embedded in what we provided today, some of the benefits that we think we can get out of PoP+. If you look at the guidance, 300 basis points of margin expansion, I think we can get a couple hundred basis points out of G&A, and I think we can get at least 100 out of sales and marketing as well. So that's what we've kind of outlined in the presentation today. We're at the early stages of this and we're going to evaluate it. I think we want to be thoughtful about where we see risks and where we see opportunities. We don't want to do things that feel like they're going to create synergies, but then create other risks or other knock-on effects that are negative. But I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to create real benefits across the portfolio. Hesam has really been kind of our guinea pig on this.
He's been working on these kinds of initiatives for a while and he's combined among a number of his brands many of these efforts. I do believe we can take those learnings and apply them across the portfolio. We've started to do that with trust and safety. That's been our first area. That's an area where we think it should go across the portfolio. It's something that should be central and then every brand takes advantage of it. Nobody at any brand has a particular desire to build specific trust and safety features. They would rather consume those more centrally. As we look at our marketing approach, I think there's opportunity for us to centralize some level of decision-making. That doesn't mean that the brand narratives are going to be centralized. Those are going to remain inside the brands.
But some of the buying decisions, some of the ways we look at app store optimization, some of those things can be done on a more central basis. And we can play to the benefits of the scale of our portfolio as we implement contracts with different entities to say, instead of Hinge doing it specifically and Tinder doing it specifically, we do one Match Group contract, which everybody benefits from. So there's a lot of opportunity across the portfolio. We're looking at this extremely hard. We'll start to implement it over the course of 2025 and we're ready to get started on all of that.
We have a question from Jason Helfstein at Oppenheimer. And Justin, I think it would be great to get your thoughts on this. You talked a lot about KPIs today. Shouldn't the most relevant metric be how many users go on a second date? Are you doing anything to track this? And then do you use this information to make recommendation algorithm changes?
Well, in some sense, it kind of is in the sense that we send the We Met survey and we ask if this is the type of person that you'd want to see again. So we are definitely looking for successful first dates that want to turn into second dates. And it really comes down to practicality. What can we measure that we can reliably measure and that there's not a long cycle time, right? If we released a feature and then tested to see if it generated more marriages, we would have a three-year cycle time on all of the features that we test. And that's not reasonable.
So yeah, we find that people scheduling to get offline and for in-real-life dates is a really, really, really good proxy for us. And then we're always tracking to see how many of those good dates are actually turning into relationships to make sure that profiles remain authentic, that when you show up on a date, you feel like, yes, this is the person that I felt like I got to know in the profile and this feels like a good experience. And the fact that three-quarters of the time we get that right is actually like an astounding metric. I mean, the fact that three-quarters of the time you go on a blind date with someone essentially that you met on Hinge and you're like, yes, when I got on that date, I wanted to see that person again has been really, really cool.
And as the baseline we're working off of as we start to implement all these new AI initiatives, I think we're only going to get better and better at that.
Great. I think that is the last question we have time for. But BK, why don't you wrap us up?
Thank you. Thank you all. I know the last three years haven't delivered what we had anticipated. But I hope that you walk away today with the same level of excitement that I do for the opportunity for Match Group. We have a long-standing leading position in the dating business, a vast untapped market opportunity, an amazing portfolio of brands, a highly capable team, and industry-leading scale and financial resources in the right strategy to once again drive disruption in this category.
We are well-positioned to harness innovation to transform the user experience, satisfy existing users, and bring in new daters. We are committed to delivering over $3 billion of free cash flow over the next three years, which we plan to deploy towards share buybacks and the dividend. I'm confident that the next three years will be very rewarding for shareholders with manageable downside risk and significant upside. I hope that you will join us for this journey. Thank you all so much for your time and attention today.