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Tinder’s paying users just keep running for the exits

Shares of the Tinder and Hinge owner were down 18%, as dating-app-makers navigate a postpandemic market.

11/7/24 2:20PM

Match Group is still struggling to attract more users. The company reported a 3% decline in total paying users — which constitutes the majority of its revenue — in the latest quarter, marking its eighth consecutive quarter of negative payer growth.

The company also projected flat year-over-year growth in sales for the fourth quarter, between $865 and $875 million, while analysts expected $903.5 million, per FactSet. Shares of Match Group fell 18.1% as of midday Thursday, making it the biggest decliner among S&P 500 stocks.

At least Hinge, the company’s fastest-growing brand, was a bright spot: the majority of the user loss came from Match Group’s largest and oldest app, Tinder. Paying users declined 4%, dragging direct revenue down by 1% from a year ago. Meanwhile, Hinge saw 21% more payers, leading to 36% direct revenue growth.

Meanwhile, rival Bumble was modestly higher. It had risen about 9% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after it reported earnings, but the stock’s gains moderated in regular trading today.

While smaller, Bumble seems to have fairly consistent paying-user growth. However, average revenue that each user brought in declined, and overall revenue was slightly down.

Since their 2021 peak, shares of Bumble are down nearly 90% and Match Group has slid more than 80%.

This leaves us with Grindr, which will report after the bell on Thursday. The company, conversely, has seen consistent improvement in its stock and paying users, yet it is going through somewhat of an identity crisis.

Together, Bumble, Match Group and Grindr make up about 85% of the online-dating market, Bank of America analysts estimate.

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Netflix made $1.5 billion from advertising last year, about 3% of its total revenue

The figure rose more than 2.5x last year, per the company.

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OpenAI’s ARR reached over $20 billion in 2025, CFO says

Sam Altman’s $500 billion artificial intelligence behemoth hit a major financial milestone last year, according to a new blog post over the weekend from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, as the company confirmed it had hit a more than $20 billion annual revenue run rate at the end of 2025.

Elsewhere in the blog post, Friar spent time addressing the company’s shifting goals, referencing plans to “close the distance between where intelligence is advancing and how individuals, companies, and countries actually adopt and use it.” As has become customary in the AI company press release genre, the CFO was also keen to tout the unending growth of the business, writing:

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”

And, perhaps most importantly for current backers and those keeping an eye on the private company before its rumored mega IPO:

“Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025. This is never-before-seen growth at such scale.”

That latest figure has certainly set tongues in the tech world wagging, just as the company announced it would begin rolling out ads to free and ChatGPT Go users. It also puts the chatbot giant a fair way ahead of competitors like Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

OpenAI Anthropic ARR race — Sherwood News

A business that scales with the value of intelligence

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”