Earnings call transcript: Grindr beats Q3 2025 forecasts, stock rises

Grindr reported strong third-quarter 2025 earnings, surpassing both earnings per share (EPS) and revenue forecasts. The company's EPS reached $0.16, exceeding the anticipated $0.12. Revenue came in at $116 million, surpassing the forecasted $113.33 million. Following these results, Grindr's stock rose 3.03% in after-market trading, reflecting investor confidence in its performance and future prospects.

Key Takeaways

• Grindr's Q3 2025 EPS of $0.16 exceeded forecasts by $0.04.
• Revenue grew by 30% year-over-year to $116 million, beating expectations.
• The stock price increased by 3.03% in after-market trading.
• The company launched new AI-powered features, enhancing user engagement.
• International expansion presents significant growth opportunities.

Company Performance

Grindr demonstrated robust performance in Q3 2025, with a notable 30% year-over-year revenue increase, driven by an expanding user base and innovative product offerings. The company's strategic focus on AI integration and international growth contributed to its strong results. Compared to previous quarters, Grindr continues to show consistent growth, positioning itself favorably within the competitive social networking industry.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $116 million, up 30% year-over-year
• EPS: $0.16, compared to a forecast of $0.12
• Adjusted EBITDA: $55 million, up 37% year-over-year
• EBITDA Margin: 47%, up 2 percentage points
• Free Cash Flow: $51 million
• Share Repurchases: 25.1 million shares for $450 million

Earnings vs. Forecast

Grindr's Q3 2025 results surpassed expectations, with revenue of $116 million exceeding the forecast by $2.67 million, a 2.36% surprise. The EPS of $0.16 beat the forecast by 33%, reflecting the company's efficient cost management and revenue growth strategies. This performance marks a positive trend compared to previous quarters, where results were generally in line with expectations.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings announcement, Grindr's stock rose by 3.03% in after-market trading, closing at $13.53. This movement reflects investor optimism about the company's ability to exceed financial expectations and sustain growth. The stock's performance is notable given its 52-week range, with a low of $11.73 and a high of $25.13, indicating a recovery from previous lows.

Outlook & Guidance

Grindr provided optimistic guidance for the remainder of 2025, expecting full-year adjusted EBITDA between $191 million and $193 million, with an EBITDA margin exceeding 43%. The company anticipates revenue growth of 26% or greater, supported by upcoming price changes and the introduction of an AI-powered premium tier in late 2026.

Executive Commentary

CEO George Arison highlighted Grindr's unique position in the market, stating, "Grindr is often the first place they learn about being gay, explore gay culture, and find all types of connections." He emphasized the importance of international markets, saying, "We want to be present there as the social transition changes." Arison also underscored Grindr's AI strategy: "We do want our product to be turned into an AI-native product."

Risks and Challenges

• Market saturation in mature markets could limit growth.
• Regulatory challenges in international markets may impact expansion.
• Dependence on user engagement for ad revenue poses a risk if engagement declines.
• Economic downturns could affect discretionary spending on premium features.
• Competition from other social networking platforms remains intense.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about Grindr's international expansion strategy, AI integration, and user demographics. Executives addressed these concerns by outlining plans for global growth, detailing new AI-powered features, and highlighting the company's strong engagement among younger demographics.

Full transcript - Grindr (GRND) Q3 2025:

Janine, Operator/Moderator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Grindr's third-quarter 2025 earnings call. My name is Janine, and I will be your lead operator for today. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. To aid our question, please press star one again. I would now like to turn the call over to Tolu Adeofe, Grindr's Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Tolu Adeofe, Head of Investor Relations, Grindr: Thank you, Moderator. Hello and welcome to the Grindr earnings call for the third quarter 2025. Today's call will be led by Grindr CEO George Arison and CFO John North. They will make a few brief remarks, and then we'll open it up for questions. Please note, Grindr released its shareholder letter this afternoon, and this is available on the SEC's website and Grindr's investor page at investors.grindr.com. Before we begin, I will remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our outlook, future performance, and future prospects. We should not rely on forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today.

Some of the risks that could cause our actual results to differ from the views expressed in our forward-looking statements have been set forth in our earnings release and our periodic reports filed with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024, or any subsequently filed quarterly reports. During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most closely comparable GAAP financial measures, are included in the earnings release we issued today, which has been posted on the Investor Relations page of Grindr's website and in Grindr's filings with the SEC. With that, I'll turn it over to George.

George Arison, CEO, Grindr: Thanks, Tolu, and hello everyone. The Grindr team delivered another awesome quarter, with revenue of 30% year-over-year and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 47%. The results put us in a great position as we finish the year. Today, we're increasing our expectation for full-year 2025 adjusted EBITDA to a range of between $191-$193 million, implying a margin of greater than 43%, and we are reaffirming our revenue growth outlook of 26% or greater. Our new CFO, John North, will walk you through the results in a moment. We're thrilled to have him join Grindr. He's led high-performing finance teams at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies and served as a public company CEO. He's already become an invaluable partner to AJ and me as we execute on our long-term vision.

Over the past three years, we've focused on expanding Grindr's product service area, delivering more capabilities and high-quality experiences for free and paid users alike. On page four in my shareholder letter, you'll see a chart showing that our product expansion has been tremendous, creating enormous value for users and driving higher conversion, more revenue capture, and an increased revenue per pair. Grindr now offers a richer, more effective experience powered by strong technology and a broader feature set. Users adore products like Albums, Boost, TravelBoost, ViewedMe, and RightNow. Through GenAI, we're giving users access to powerful features like chat summaries, discovery, and profile recommendations. All in, we've made the Grindr app more magical, dynamic, and rewarding than it was just a few years ago, and we're only getting started.

Expanding both our product service area and the value we've created for paying users has put us in a strong position to test subscription price changes for the first time since 2018. We asked new subscribers in a large set of test markets to pay slightly more to experience a de minimis impact on our paying user base, with retention exceeding even our most optimistic projections. We're deeply grateful for our paying users' vote of confidence in our direction, demonstrated by their willingness to invest more for the new value and capabilities we've built. Over the next few months, we'll continue gathering data and prepare for a global rollout early next year. Concurrently, in one country, we've begun alpha testing a new AI-powered premium tier designed for power users who want the most advanced and magical experiences.

Think of it as the flagship first-class cabin of Grindr, with features that simply were not possible two or three years ago before GenAI. This tier targets a smaller segment interested in higher-value products offering distinctive user benefits and a meaningful revenue opportunity, beginning in late 2026 and accelerating in 2027. Our rich free experience remains central to Grindr's power, fueling the unmatched scale and vitality of our network. Capturing revenue through exceptional value-added features enables us to continue bolstering an already rich free experience and to maintain the open conversational architecture that makes Grindr unique among any gay or straight platform. That will always remain our top priority. A defining strength of Grindr is its ability to renew itself with new users. Every year, gay and bi men all over the world join as they become adults.

Grindr is often the first place they learn about being gay, explore gay culture, and find all types of connections, from casual dates and hookups to love, to work-hard mates, to friendships. This generational influx keeps the platform vibrant, relevant, and ever-growing, with younger cohorts driving engagement across the network and older ones driving monetization. To help illustrate this characteristic, which is very unique to our platform, we have included a one-time demographic disclosure with our shareholder letter. It highlights why Grindr's strong, consistent engagement, especially among users aged 18 to 29, who make up a majority of our global user base, positions us for durable, long-term growth. We recognize that many of our investors are not Grindr users, and hope these insights make our user dynamics and community more tangible to you.

Overall, the product and business are performing exceptionally well, and the team remains laser-focused on delivering more value and more success to our users every day. Before I wrap up, I'm sure everyone has seen the filings from two of our large shareholders, Ray Zage and James Liu, proposing to take Grindr private. The board has formed a special committee of independent, disinterested directors to evaluate the proposal. The committee is working with its own independent financial and legal advisors. From the company's standpoint, that process will run its course. Our team remains unwaveringly focused on execution. We are fortunate to work every day on things we love that bring happiness to millions of people and make a world that is more free, equal, and just.

Grindr has enormous potential to create value while continuing to deliver a product of deep importance to its users, and our job is to keep driving towards that. That is all we will say on this matter at this time, and we will not be taking any questions about it on today's call. Thank you to the Grindr team for delivering outstanding results we are reporting today. We are proud of what we have achieved, excited for a strong finish to the year, setting the stage for another standout year in 2026. Now, here is John to cover the results.

John North, CFO, Grindr: Thank you, George, and it's great to be here with all of you. I look forward to meeting many of you in the near future. I'm excited to be a part of Grindr and what the incredibly talented team is building. I've known and respected George for a long time, and the Grindr business model is among the most powerful I've ever seen. I see my role as further strengthening the finance organization, expanding our capital markets relationships, and ensuring the company scales efficiently and profitably as we deliver on our vision. As George highlighted, we had a phenomenal Q3. Total revenue was up 30% year-over-year to $116 million. Adjusted EBITDA of $55 million was up 37% year-over-year, resulting in two points of margin improvement to 47%, a record for Grindr. Our direct revenue grew 25% year-over-year, while indirect revenue was up 56%.

Our ads business was the primary driver of outperformance in the quarter, as we saw strong results from international third-party advertising partners. In the core app, revenue growth was driven by our strength in our Unlimited tier, which this year saw the introduction of additional duration options and feature updates, alongside the ongoing success of our Weeklys product across subscription tiers. Our user KPIs were strong, with an average of 1.3 million paying users in the quarter for an improved penetration rate of 8.6%. Average MAU totaled 15.1 million, and RPU was $24.70. Our adjusted EBITDA margin performance reflected the strong flow-through of our revenue, outperformance to the bottom lines, as well as higher capitalized product development costs. Operating expenses, excluding cost of revenue, were up 9% year-over-year, largely related to people costs as we execute on our innovation roadmap, including our AI initiatives.

Grindr's net income for Q3 was $31 million or $0.16 per diluted share, compared with $25 million or $0.09 per share a year ago. We generated approximately $51 million in free cash flow in the third quarter. Year to date, we've repurchased 25.1 million shares of our common stock for approximately $450 million, leaving us with $50 million remaining under our current authorization as of September 30. Our board regularly reviews capital allocation plans, including options for attorney access cash. Turning now to our guidance, our strong Q3 results give us increased confidence in our 2025 outlook. As George mentioned, we now expect our full-year 2025 adjusted EBITDA will be between $191-$193 million, implying a margin greater than 43%, and we are reaffirming our revenue growth outlook of 26% or greater.

As I noted in the P&L review, our 30% total revenue growth in Q3 was largely driven by outperformance in our ads business, which we do not expect to repeat in Q4. Recall that in our 2024 fourth quarter, we benefited from a large one-time brand campaign. In conclusion, Q3 was a very strong quarter that reinforces Grindr's powerful business model. We're in a great position to deliver on our annual guidance, which we increased earlier this year and are advising upward today. With that, we'll open the call up for some questions.

Janine, Operator/Moderator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. I would like to remind everyone to press star one if you would like to raise your question. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. Our first question comes from the line of Andrew Marek from Raymond James. Sir, your line is open.

Thank you for taking my questions. Wanted to talk quickly on pricing first. I think you've mentioned in the past, and your payer conversion rate kind of points to this, that given that Grindr had a little bit farther to go in terms of product breadth, that getting users to pay at all was one of the biggest milestones that you would make as a user. I guess in light of that, how do you balance that philosophy of raising prices versus getting people to pay at all? Is the increased price a potential higher barrier to make that first purchase?

George Arison, CEO, Grindr: Hi, Andrew. Good to talk to you. We are obviously excited for users to pay if they've not paid before, but we also believe it's important for users who are getting a lot more product in the paid tiers and a lot more value to pay a little bit more for that value. The price changes are, I think, fairly minor in the large scheme of things, given the amount of value that we've added to the product. We have seen significant growth in our number of paying users. The change over the last three years has been pretty significant. As you know, I think we went from something like 6.5% to 8.5%. I think that speaks for a lot, especially given that MAU has also grown dramatically in that time period. Secondly, we want to maintain a very robust free offering.

I think one of the things you'll see in the shareholder letter, in the disclosure, is that younger users, who constitute a vast majority of our user base worldwide and nearly a majority of our user base in the U.S. and the U.K., tend to pay at a much lower rate than slightly older users. On page eight of the letter, you'll see that 18-22-year-olds have the lowest payer penetration, and then that kind of increases dramatically as we go to 30-39 or 40-49, et cetera. We kind of have a two-parted strategy, right? On the one hand, we want as many young users coming into the product and having a really awesome experience through a very robust free offering where they can use all the features that we offer, including being able to talk to anybody for free with no limits.

We're the only product of our kind that has that, whether gay or straight. From there, we want people to be able to pay for the value-added services that we offer them. What we're learning is that people who, as they age and get older, end up getting more value from the features that we offer in paid tiers, and they're willing to pay for those. What we've seen in our price testing, as prices have changed, is that we've had very little to de minimis change in our conversion rates when you compare new prices versus old, which is really great, and it speaks to the fact that people value the products they're getting in those paid tiers. A couple more things on that. Number one is we do monetize our free users through ads.

Obviously, we've had a significant increase in our ad revenue over the last three years as well, and we continue to do very well there. I think that's an important component of that equation as well. We have thought about whether we should offer a cheaper tier as well for users who might want to not have ads at all but are not quite ready to pay for Extra because they don't need the value that Extra includes in terms of features and products. That's something we're still thinking about. I don't want to promise either way that we'll do that, but that's certainly a possibility as a way to get more people to potentially be payers. If you do that, you actually won't have that big of a revenue impact because the price point on that would be fairly low.

Lastly, I think the important thing for us is by creating a lot more product value, we are now asking people to pay a little bit more for that. This is not just a price raise for the sake of a price raise or because we want to make more money. It is to ensure that users who are enjoying a lot more value in the experiences because the Extra and the Unlimited tiers are way more robust today than they were three years ago. As a result of a lot more product area that we have created in those tiers, users are actually paying for the value they are getting from those tiers.

Got it. Really appreciate that. Maybe if you could just give us a quick update on how some of the newer products, especially thinking of something like RightNow, is trending in terms of things like engagement metrics and to the extent that you can measure them, things like user satisfaction or outcomes. Thank you.

I do not really have much new to say on that beyond what we have said before, which I will be happy to repeat. I think the way we tend to think of our products is launch a lot of product surface area. Some will be free, some will be paid. We want to have a robust free offering, and some things that are more special might be offered to paying users only. With Right Now, our objective was to dramatically increase the surface of a free product so everybody who is on Grindr, whether paid or free, can utilize Right Now and enjoy it. Somewhere between 20-25% of our users posting Right Now at least once a week. Over 75% of our users look at Right Now postings.

What most people are in right now, which I think shows a really high engagement, and we are very happy about that. Obviously, there is a lot more that you can do with Right Now. I was in New York a couple of weeks ago where we have the mapping feature in Right Now on as well. I'll be totally honest, I was not sold on the idea of mapping in Right Now when the team first went after it. When you're in New York and are seeing the product kind of in your hands, it's a really incredible, magical experience and looks really, really nice. I think people really like that. We are really happy with where the product is trending. Normally, we don't really share a lot of.

Product metrics, but I do want to call out again, in the shareholder letter, we did share a very extensive disclosure on our user base and kind of how that is split out. The fact that we have. In the U.S., for example, 15% of our users are ages 18 to 22, 31% of our users are ages 23 to 29. That's 46% of all Grindr profiles are kind of in that age range of 18 to 29. That, to me, is something that kind of speaks to the uniqueness of Grindr as a business and a product. The fact that younger generation really likes what they're getting in the product, and it's very much working for them.

As long as our products are accomplishing the idea of bringing young people into the product as they become adults, as a rite of passage, like it has for the last 15 years, I think we're in a very strong position.

Got it. Thank you very much.

Janine, Operator/Moderator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Blackledge from TD Cowen. Sir, your line is open.

Hey there, it's Logan Wally on for John. Thanks for the question. Just looking at top of funnel, MAUs grew nicely again in 3Q. Could you discuss any trends which drove the top of funnel users higher in the quarter? Also, in 2Q, you called out some significant removal of bad actors in a certain region. Could you just update us on any similar efforts globally in 3Q and then looking forward, just based on health of the platform? Thank you.

George Arison, CEO, Grindr: Thanks for the questions. First, let's start with what it is that we actually report. We report mostly active devices, not users and not profiles. A lot of Grindr users have more than one profile, and those are pretty hard to debug in terms of are they one individual or two. That happens for many different reasons. Some people might have a profile that is more friendship-focused, and they might have a profile that is more casual dating-focused, and they have different information on those profiles. We definitely do not discourage that and are happy with users having more than one profile. The best way for us to debug what we report is mostly active device, not user.

I think it's really important for people to understand, especially when they try to compare it to external data, which, as we have spoken before, tends to be perpetually wrong about Grindr information. I think in part because people don't pay attention to what it is that Grindr actually reports. Secondly, our ecosystem is really. The health of the ecosystem is really important to us. As we see bad actors come into the ecosystem, whether those are spammers or other types of bad actors, we take actions to remove them. Over the last two to three years, I think all social networking companies would validate this. Spammers have become more sophisticated with GenAI, and that means that you have to become more sophisticated in fighting them. As we do that, it can impact MAU. In Q2.

In the first half of the year, there was a significant impact on MAU, and we've spoken about that. It doesn't always impact MAU when we go after bad actors because some bad actors have profiles that don't have a device ID associated with them. They do that by spoofing Android devices. That's a known kind of flaw with the Android ecosystem that you can do. When we remove actors that are bad, that don't have a monthly active device, they don't get associated with MAU one way or the other because they were never in our MAU in any way. When we remove bad actors that do have devices, they do. Thirdly, we have never really done much to drive MAU growth. Our MAU grows almost completely organically through word of mouth.

As I said earlier, Grindr is a rite of passage for people as they turn 18. If they are gay, they come to Grindr as a way to figure out who they are, what it is like to be gay, to start meeting people for any number of types of connections. Organically, our MAU tends to grow really nicely. We are very happy with our MAU growth. Frankly, the numbers that you are seeing in terms of growth are very much in line with our long-term guidance assumptions that we shared at Investor Day a year and a half ago. Lastly, I will call out again the disclosure towards our user demographics. You could not have the demographics that we have in our profile set that we share on page seven and eight unless you are attracting a lot of new users.

It would be impossible to have 15% of the user base be 18 to 22 in the U.S. when only 9% of the U.S. adult male population is in that age cohort unless you're constantly attracting people who are young and attracting them at very high rates. That is even more true internationally in places like India and Philippines, et cetera, where older users are still stigmatized and might not feel comfortable being gay, while younger users are coming out and more comfortable. In those places, our user base is even more heavily young. A lot of our focus is ensuring that we continue doing that through the right product initiatives so that we serve this younger adult male cohort as well as we possibly can.

Great. Thanks, George. Maybe one other question just on the premium tier. You mentioned that it'd be designed for power users. Could you give us any kind of an idea of how many power users are on the Grindr platform? What percentage of overall users might kind of fall into the bucket that you're designing the subscription for?

Yeah. The premium tier was a significant component of what we envisioned in terms of the long-term strategy that we shared at Investor Day because we knew that a lot of our investments would be around AI features, which are really magical and previously were not possible to build. We are building those and making them available. We just think that the amount of value that we will be generating through those features and products for people, we will see. I think people need to be prepared to pay for the value that they'll be getting from that. That tier is meant for our power users and for a very select set of people. We do not expect a huge number of people going into that, but it will be priced appropriately for that. We have something like, I think, 350,000 Unlimited subscribers.

If you imagine that 20% of those subscribers switched over to Unlimited, I think you'd have—sorry, to the premium tier, you'd have a very nice kind of growth in our revenue because that's a significant dollar amount at the price points that we are thinking about. I would call that like a good home run. If 30% or 40% or 50% of our Unlimited users switch to the premium tier, then you'd have a grand slam because it'd be like an incredible result. I don't know which one of those is going to happen. That's why we need a few quarters of testing and learning to understand what happens. I do know that the kinds of features that we offer in this new premium tier are pretty magical. I think a lot of people will be very happy with them.

At no point have we thought about it as something that a very large percentage of our overall user base will utilize. This is very much meant for our power users who can benefit from the unique features that will be put into that tier or that have already been put into that tier. Quite frankly, I think I am one of maybe five people in the United States who is in the beta because the beta is starting somewhere else. When you use Grindr with these features, it is a very, very different experience. We were entering a fairly senior product candidate about two weeks ago and kind of walked him through what it is like on the app.

He's like, "Wow, that's really, really special." I really very much hope that everybody else feels the same way as this tier kind of expands more broadly to being available to more people. I would not expect to have a global rollout until, at the earliest, sometime in H2 next year.

Yeah. Maybe, George, if I can just jump in and add on to that. The one thing I want to triangulate back to is that we are looking at continued investment in these enhancements that are going to bring new and exciting features and differentiation as we move forward. That has been contemplated in the three-year plan that we put out in the summer of 2024. We are going to finish the year at better than a 43% EBITDA margin, but I want to make sure we remind everyone that in that plan, we anticipated many of these investments.

We still think triangulating to the EBITDA margin range we gave at the time of 39-42% as you think about years 2026 and 2027 is an important point to keep in mind, and that you can't just roll forward what we may finish this year at as you think about next year and beyond. Great. Thank you both. I'll hop back in the queue.

Janine, Operator/Moderator: Thank you. Our question will come from the line of Andrew Boone from Citizens Bank. Please go ahead.

Thanks so much for taking the questions. Three for me, if I could. I would love to get an update in terms of international. Just how did that turn in the quarter and then any new initiatives you guys may have in terms of localization or anything else we should think about there. Gay Eye. George, can you just talk about the bigger opportunity with that product in the quarter and kind of what's your vision in terms of bringing more AI tools in terms of incorporating AI into the gayhood? And then lastly, just on advertising, can you guys just help us understand? It sounds like it was very strong in the quarter. What was the driver of that growth? Is there anything to call out? And then how do we think about that going forward? Thanks so much.

George Arison, CEO, Grindr: Great. Thank you for all that. I wrote it down, but hopefully I do not forget. If I do, please remind me. I am not ignoring any of the questions. They are all fun things to talk about. On international, what we said at Investor Day is that international is a very large opportunity for Grindr. I will walk you through kind of how we think about that. First, to preface, I think one of the main jobs of a CEO is twofold, right? Number one is to paraphrase another very prominent CFO or CEO whom I really admire, is to amp things up, meaning to put pressure for things to happen as fast as possible and as many things to get done as possible. I think everyone who knows me knows that I am constantly amping it up on the team.

Concurrently with that, another really critical place is to prioritize things properly. If you try to do everything, you'll get nothing done well. Finding the right prioritization on things is really important. There was a lot to do at Grindr when we got started three years ago, and we've been prioritizing things based on what we thought was most critical.

In total fairness, I think going after our international opportunity was not as top of a priority as some other things have been so far because those were more important either for the user base or from a perspective of what we wanted to achieve over the long term. This still means that international is a huge opportunity and is something that should be viewed as upside when you think about it from the long-term modeling perspective rather than something that we assumed would be the case in our three-year plan that we shared in June 2024. The way we think of international is in three buckets. First, in countries where we already have a pretty significant presence and those countries are economically advanced.

We believe that there is opportunity to continue driving more users to become paying customers and to pay for the extra value they're seeing from the added new features that we're building. Our pay penetration in Europe, for example, is lower than our pay penetration is in the United States. We'd love to do things that would help us drive pay penetration to be more akin to the US in mainland Europe, which we think is possible. Obviously, the US will continue to grow as well. I'm not saying the US is going to just stop growing, but if we could get them closer to US levels of pay penetration or even the U.K.'s levels of pay penetration, that would be a really big win.

That is one bucket of focus for international, is Europe and countries like Europe in terms of their economic development, get them to have more payers. Number two is countries where we have very large sets of users and do okay on payers, but we believe that there is still opportunity for people to learn that we exist and to use us, have a ton of user growth opportunity. Places like that are Brazil, Philippines, rest of Latin America, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, et cetera, and Asian countries like Thailand, Vietnam, potentially Cambodia. In many of these places, we know from research that a very large number of people in our user cohort know that we exist, and those that know about us use us.

There are a bunch of others that do not know about us because our brand recognition is not as high in those countries as it is, say, in the United States or the U.K. As they learn about us, we believe there will be opportunity for them to start using us, which we think will be very valuable. The third bucket is India, which should be called out separately because of its size. Ten years ago, it was illegal to be gay in India. Obviously, there is a ton of social stigma attached with being gay. It is changing for young users, as you can see from the data that we shared. We want to be present there as the social transition changes or happens and as more and more people become comfortable with who they are.

Kind of continue to be the primary product for gay people in India, like we already are, as many more of them become comfortable using our product. That is the kind of opportunity. A lot of what we need to do internationally is around localization of the product. That might be simple things like how we show up in a specific language in a given country. We do not use a lot of slang in how we describe ourselves in a lot of these places in our translations, and we probably should. Kind of how people communicate in those languages to what kind of imagery we show you in each of these countries. On a more advanced level, what kind of products do we build? If you go to.

New Delhi, for example, and you open up Grindr, the grid will look very, very different from what the grid looks like in New York. Everywhere, there are a lot of people who are discreet and who might not show their face or might not have a picture at all. In India, the vast majority of people do not show their face and a picture at all because it is still really hard to be gay. Maybe in a place like India, the grid should actually look a little bit different. Maybe we should allow people to have AI-generated photos that they can post. I am not saying that is what we would do, but you can envision through a product solving the problem of discreetness in India differently than you deal with it in other places because they have unique needs in that country.

Those are all things that we can do to help grow our presence. Obviously, through marketing, we can do a lot as well. We've spoken to Sheryl a lot about the fact that we have now launched our Spanish-speaking social media channels. We've also launched our first social show in Spanish. Those are the kinds of things we'll be doing in other languages as well, such as Portuguese and for specific countries like India as well. That's on international. When it comes to AI, we believe that AI, and I detailed this quite a bit in a document we shared last quarter about AI, incoming companies with a lot of data can benefit significantly if they start taking advantage of AI early before potential challengers are able to catch up with data.

Because AI is better with data, and if you are kind of at the forefront, you can make your product be very, very different from the technology point of view with AI. We do want our product to be turned into an AI-native product. That is very much what we have been striving to do by retraining models to be able to speak A, and I think we are doing a pretty good job at that. Then being able to use those models inside our product to do specific new experiences that previously did not exist. To start with, a lot of those experiences will go into the premium tier that I spoke about in the previous question and the shareholder letter. There will be things like insights where we will actually provide users with.

Detailed information about people that might be talking to that we can infer based on people's behaviors or conversations. Obviously, that will only be done with permission, meaning only people who agree to be part of our AI features will be able to see those features and will have those features or that information available about them in the app. Another kind of product that we've built through AI is called A-List, which goes through all your messages and creates a shortlist of people that we believe you should keep talking to and gives you summaries of conversations that you had with those people, brings together all the photos that you've exchanged with those people, all in a really nice summarized folder that makes it much easier for you to navigate the product.

You can envision that as a next step of that, we will add a little button that will be the Gay Eye button, and you can start asking Gay Eye questions about that specific user that you were previously talking to. If something that you discussed previously does not appear in the chat summary, you can say, "Hey, I believe we talked about XYZ. Can you get that information back to me to remind me what it is that we exactly talked about?" Very similar to what Grok is doing inside X, where you can actually get information about a specific post with a lot more detail. That would be quite, kind of, that's quite beneficial. Those are the kinds of features that we are working on.

I do not know of a lot of consumer-facing products that are doing the kind of stuff that we are doing yet, but the same way that Grindr invented the use of mobile in the way that it is used today, I think we will be at the forefront of using AI in the consumer experiences in the future. For advertising, I will switch over to John to speak about that.

Yeah, thanks, George. We did have a good quarter in terms of our advertising growth. That has been an area of focus, both through the TPA and then the direct piece. It is also a very nice contribution margin because it does not have the cost of sales associated that the subscriptions do, coming into the app stores. That tends to be more accretive to EBITDA, and we did see some benefit in that third quarter, you are right to call it out. More importantly, I wanted to focus and just remind everyone that last year we had a pretty significant direct advertising boost in the fourth quarter that we do not expect to continue this year, and that is contemplated in the range of guidance that we gave.

Certainly, we think this is an area that can continue to be focused for us and that it should give us opportunity for potential additional growth in the future. There is much more we can do here, and we've had good success with Brian and the advertising team, but we're going to continue to look for ways to grow that in 2026 and beyond.

Janine, Operator/Moderator: Thank you.

Thank you. Again, should you have a question, please press star one. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call. We have a question, by the way, from John Blackledge from TD Cowen.

Hi there, it's Logan Wally for John again. Just maybe one follow-up on the user base breakdown. It's really interesting. Could you talk maybe about any trends you've seen over time or since you've come on board, George, in usage amongst different age groups? Have you seen any trends among older age groups or younger age groups, like more engagement or less engagement over time? Do you think you may have any initiatives in place in the future to kind of boost engagement among specific age demos, like maybe older people, for example? Thanks.

George Arison, CEO, Grindr: Yeah. Great question. Thank you for that. We debated whether we should put in more, but we thought for competitive reasons, probably kind of what we shared made sense because we do have obviously data on the things you're asking. I'll try to speak to it directionally without being too specific because I thought that for competitive reasons, releasing more of that would be potentially risky. What we know are the following things. One is our young adults, meaning people in the 18 to 35 age range, tend to do a lot of communication with each other, but they also get messaged a lot by older users, and they respond to older users as well. Whereas the younger adult cohorts, such as 18 to 30, don't actually initiate a lot of conversations with older users themselves. Since we know that they actually do.

Respond to people who are older when they get messages, that is something that you could probably solve through product, right? I think what happens is a lot of younger adults, such as 18- to 30-year-olds, might feel uncomfortable messaging somebody who's older because they think, "Hey, this older person might want to talk to me." That is why they're not messaging out to them, but they're getting messages from them, and then they're willing to respond. That is something that we could solve through a product by having product features that kind of facilitate that a little better. We also do know from our older users, kind of in that 50-plus age demo, and I'm approaching that cohort soon, so I'm kind of learning about that more, is that sometimes they don't always feel as welcome in the app as they did before.

Meaning they all have Grindr accounts, but as they age, their priorities tend to change, and as a result, sometimes they do not quite feel as at home. We definitely can do things, I think, through a product to make that experience be better for them. That is part of the thinking behind the premium tier and the AI features with insights, right? Because part of what we can do with insights is tell a user, "Yes, this person is likely to engage really well with you based on what we know about you." I think that would be very helpful for users who are older who might feel a little bit uncomfortable with the app because their priorities today might be different, right? If you are a 45-year-old.

a 50-year-old guy with kids living in the suburbs, your priorities are probably different than what they were when you were in your 20s and frequented circuit parties a lot. I think those are the kinds of things that insights can really help solve, and that's something that we are envisioning. Obviously, older users do have more disposable income as well. I think the alignment there is quite interesting in terms of offering them better functionality that is unique through AI that also creates a lot more value for them and so is more expensive at the same time. Does that answer the question or any follow-ups on that?

Yeah, that's awesome. That's excellent. Thank you, George.

Thank you.

Before we close, unless there are more questions, I just do want to add one other thing. Grindr is an 18-plus product only. We do not allow people who are under 18 on the product. You cannot download the product if you are not 18 on either Android or iOS, and you cannot log into Grindr by creating an account on the web. We only allow you to create accounts through the app stores. Whenever I refer to younger users, I'm referring to people 18 and older, nobody below 18.

Thank you. This ends the conference call for today. You may now.

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