By Ricardo Lezama 
Last week’s earnings call for Match, the parent company of Bumble, Hinge and Tinder, showed that their 2024 was not quite meeting analyst expectations and declined a considerable amount on Tuesday, at one point declining 8 percent. Nevertheless, expectations were somewhat mitigated by potential growth elsewhere.
The downturn has led to a new CEO, Spencer Rascoff, replacing Bernard Kim. Rascoff is better known as the founder of Zillow, the speculative real estate application that has helped drive home inflation. Presumably, the FOMO from that platform is what Match wants for Tinder.
Save Us Coloreds
In a conference call, the mostly white executive board of MATCH pinned the hopes of their company on what they call ‘Emerging’ verticals e.g. non whites. While Tinder originally centered around the vices and likes of European Americans, the product has now advanced around diversification to include more potential users and experiences. Match overall has sought to create new apps and verticals to optimize this because of the inherent lack of engagement seen year over year.
What’s more, the company does not seem to want to be transparent over how their once flagship platform is dying.
There is some clever reorganization that should be interesting if not an all out warning for investors. According to Gary Swinder, CFO, “over the course of 2025, we’re going to see moderating declines at the Evergreen brands (Tinder, POF), and we’re going to see continued nice strong growth at the emerging brands”.
In light of this, the new MATCH brands label their audience based on intercultural affinity: BLK, Chispa and Yuzu, the latter an Asian focused application that launched in 2024.
Chispa is the Hispanic language and marketed version of Tinder as well. Ample marketing has been observed in social media and Univision.
A Muslim oriented vertical, ‘Salaam’ is also a part of this mix.
MATCH’s solution from an earnings standpoint since last year: merge “Evergreen and Emerging” so that the two vertical types cancel out the lackluster performance of Tinder. The obvious flaw here is that there will be little transparency as to which vertical or application is performing best.
There will be no logic or verification on whether verticals are not just cannabilzing the same online dating friendly dating app users. There is also the free potential alternative of a Meta simply reigniting Facebook dating to leverage pre-Generative AI technology.
As people increasingly resent the lack of cultural awareness, there is something to be said about a company that was once accused for white bias on Tinder now profiting off the very people marginalized ten years later. The moment users realize they are part of a desperate companies diversification portfolio, the experience will feel trite.
Subscriber Decline
The decline in subscribers was reduced to hundreds of millions in lost revenue. The expectation is that the buckets of money will be recovered with a more engaged audience that reuses the tech stack from Tinder. The merger is essentially a cultural localization of Tinder products to new demographics.
In fact, during the conference call, the efficiencies of reusing their engineering was highlighted. No new technology stack could be advertised except for the photo verification which has been rolled out to many of their applications. There were some prompt references regarding textual AI, but these seemed like mere clever applications of other’ generative AI or open sourced models.
There is something to be said about anecdotal evidence around lack of ID verification. If emerging verticals are to be the grand savior of Match, then what can we make of the potential export viability of these applications in emerging markets. LATAM is fantastic at adopting Uber and any other rideshare application from abroad, but the difficulty is always the ability to guarantee safety.
Given the aforementioned, will MATCH have the ability to guarantee Chispa does not become another threat space? I doubt it.
The lack of attention placed on validating identities, even in the United States, has an even riskier effect in localities with fewer policing. There is something to be said about how dangerous the lack of individual ID’s can be in a place like Colombia or Mexico where confidence scams and robberies are common. Thus, the subscriber based features, like passport etc. are useless in either the flagship product or the emerging verticals.
If the pitch to investors is the reused tech stack across verticals, but the tech stack is already lacking, then the likelihood of needed improvements is not likely in the horizon. That is to say, the very much needed safety features for increased engagement are nowhere near their internal software development cycle, thus, no growth in the near future.