Good morning and welcome to the Match Group Fourth Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Lance Barton, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Joining me on the call today are our CEO, Mandy Ginsberg; President and Incoming CEO, Shar Dubey; and CFO and COO, Gary Swidler. Mandy and Gary will review the investor presentation that is available on our Investor Relations website and then open it up for questions. Before we start, I’d like to remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate, or similar statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in our earnings release and our periodic reports filed with the SEC. Over to you, Mandy.

Thanks, Lance. This is a bittersweet moment for me as I’ll be stepping down as CEO at the end of the month after 14 years here at the company. I want to thank everyone listening today, especially investors who’ve been great supporters of this business over the last few years. It’s been an emotional decision for me, because I love this company and I passionately believe in our mission to help people find meaningful relationship. But after a challenging few months for me personally, it was the right decision, and it is never easy to leave a place you love, the timing seem right as we expect to start a new chapter as an independent company. More importantly, there is an incredible leader who is taking the reins from me. I’m extremely excited that Shar Dubey will be taking over as CEO of Match Group on March 1. She’s been an incredible partner of mine for 14 years, most recently acting as Match Group President. She knows these businesses inside and out. As COO of Tinder, she ran product and revenue among other areas there and has been instrumental in that business’ success. Shar was trained as an engineer at IIT in India. Not only is she a brilliant, analytical and action-oriented executive, but she is just an amazing people leader. Her instincts on growth levers are unparalleled. She unquestionably has the vision and experience to take this business forward. I’m confident we won’t miss a beat during this transition. Gary and I are going to walk you through the slides. We have Shar to be on for any Q&A you might have. Let’s jump into the slides, starting on Page 4, to talk about how fantastic our results were in 2019, and while we’re confident, we’re well positioned for…

Thanks, Mandy. Before I jump into my remarks, I just want to thank you for all the years of dedicated service to this company and to the dating category. You have influenced so many peoples’ lives both our customers and our employees. You’ve been an inspirational leader, and all of us at the company have loved working with you. You’ll be missed, but I know we are in terrific hands with Shar as our CEO. We all wish you much health and happiness. Now let’s turn to the company’s performance. As Mandy said, we had a phenomenal 2019 and believe the business is in excellent shape heading into 2020. We have a clear strategy for continued global growth and we are executing well on our plans. Let’s first review Q4 and then I will discuss our outlook for 2020 in more depth. On Slide 10, you can see the total average subscribers grew 19% in Q4, the same strong level as in Q3 2019. Tinder added 1.54 million subscribers on a year-over-year basis, 36% growth. Tinder’s Q4 subscriber additions were impacted by changes to the cancellation flow contained in Apple’s iOS 13 upgrade, and particularly by Apple’s force adoption of iOS 13 for all users globally in December, which led to a higher level of cancellations and we had been expecting had the upgrade path been more voluntary on the part of users. Non-Tinder subscribers grew about 1% in Q4 year-over-year. This was the first quarter of year-over-year growth in non-Tinder subscribers since Q4 2016. On last quarter’s call, we said that we expected non-Tinder year-over-year subscriber growth in Q4 and that came to pass. The growth has been driven by an array of brands including Hinge, Pairs, OkCupid, Chispa and BLK. In Q4, overall company ARPU was up $0.01…

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from John Blackledge of Cowen. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks, 2 questions. First, Mandy, congratulations on your strong leadership and execution; and, Shar, congratulations on being named CEO. Shar, just kind of curious about your view of the strategic direction and investment strategy for Tinder and the non-Tinder assets relative to Mandy’s view. And then, second question would be, Gary, aside from iOS 13, any other kind of swing factors for the 1-million-plus Tinder net add guide for 2020? Thank you.

Thank you, John. This is actually a great question for me to start my first call with. And I know some of you are wondering if and what changes with this change. I want to say if there ever was continuity and strategy and operating rhythm with management change, this is probably it. Mandy and I have had a long partnership, obviously, but we worked very closely in running this business, particularly over the last couple of years and my taking over does not change our core strategy. At the highest level, the way I think about it, we are a technology company in the service of a very fundamental human need, the need for love and meaningful relationships. Mandy and I have seen this category develop in the U.S. and Western Europe. When we started, about 3% of people met online. And today, that number is over 40%. But not only is it now the number 1 way people meet in development markets, there are now independent studies that show that these relationships that started online are actually stronger and happier than traditional ones. So we’re now committed to bringing the same level of success in much of the rest of the world, where we think category penetration is still quite low. So in the near term, our growth levers continue to be Tinder, international, video and new bets that both Mandy and Gary mentioned like Hinge, and our demographic-specific apps. But I did want to take a slightly longer and broader view and point out a couple of things about our business. I’ve been here a long time, but what gets me particularly excited now about this category is that we have both technology and consumer behavior and acceptance reach a point that allows us to evolve our products from an almost pure introduction service with a swipe and search to match, to message type of a paradigm, to a much richer, live and fun experience for people to discover, meet and flirt and truly date online. And this is going to allow us to create new surface areas on the app for our users to engage with. And in turn, this opens up new monetization mechanics we haven’t tried on our apps before. The other thing I want to point out, we have a very large global and a high intent user base. And we monetize a rather small portion of it through a small number of revenue features and a limiting subscription model. We haven’t yet tried offering additional products and services that enhance their dating journey. I personally have a long experience with product and revenue. And I know the teams are working in some interesting new engagement and monetization mechanics across our various platforms, including Tinder. And I hope to be able to talk more about these as the year progresses. Gary, you want to take the second one?

Sure. So, John, I know there is a lot of focus, obviously, on the net-add number, in the 1 million. I just want to remind you again, we focus on driving revenue at Tinder, not particularly driving just the sub-number, just the ARPU number. So we look at it in combination. Sitting here today, 1 month into the year or so, what we’re saying is that we think we can do a million sub additions or better for the year and we have a lot of confidence in hitting that target. We know it’s an important target to hit. But as I talked about in my remarks and Mandy talked about in her remarks, there is a lot of different swing factors that are going to affect the trade-off that we make and kind of where each of these KPIs namely ARPU and subscriber additions land, and Shar just talked about it as well. We’re focused on tailoring the product in the Asian markets, which may lead to more a la carte and more ARPU, less than subscriber list. We’re focused on a lot of different prognosis. We’ve got an extremely busy product roadmap at Tinder all through this year. And so, as we’ve seen on a platform of scale, like we have at Tinder, even small things can sometimes lead to significant win. So we’re going to try a lot of different things. We have a lot of confidence. We’ve got a lot of interesting things to roll out. And I think if we execute better, if we get some bigger wins than we’re expecting, that number of 1 million certainly could be higher. But it will depend on what we choose to focus on and where we have success, whether it’s on the a-la-carte side, whether it’s on the subscriber inside or whether it’s on both of those things, which obviously would lead to upside for us overall. So that’s what we have to do. We’re busy executing this. We got a lot of confidence in the Tinder team and the product team that they can execute. We got a lot of things to consider and we’ll certainly see how the year plays out. But we’re mindful of the revenue goals we need to deliver. Subs are clearly a component of that. And we’re going to make a number of trade-offs as the year progresses to land in a place that I think everyone will feel good about.

Thank you.

Thanks, John.

The next question comes from Doug Anmuth of J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking the question. Gary, I was hoping you could just go into some more detail on the 4Q sub dynamics. You talked about iOS 13 ramping up late in the quarter. Can you give us – it sounds like that’s more of a churn thing. Can you give us a sense on how you feel about gross adds in the quarter, and also whether there were any other factors that may have impacted? Is there any way to quantify iOS 13 and then how that plays out as you go into these first few months of 2020? Thanks.

Yeah, so, again, I tried to go through some of that in my remarks. But I know there is a big question that you all have and there’s a lot of moving parts to it. So let me try to kind of step people through this methodically. So unlike a lot of apps out there like Netflix, where people rarely just to delete the app entirely from their phone, maybe they cancel their subscription, but they don’t necessarily delete the app. Daters behave differently. As they meet people, as things are happening in their lives, they do tend to delete the app and reinstall the app as well. So we are a periodic usage business, which is different than a lot of the other subscription businesses that you are used to seeing. And so, these Apple changes that were made did affect our business more than many other subscription businesses that are out there as they changed the cancellation flow. And what we do see is that, for people who delete the app, when they hit that new cancellation flow for the first time, we see an elevated level of cancellations. It’s not the case for the second or third by the time they encounter that cancellation flow. So now we’ve seen a few months of data on this and we’re confident that that’s the case. It’s really the first time that they encounter that new cancellation flow. And what we’ve been able to see as this has rolled out is that the curve that we see on the elevated cancellations, really follow the adoption curve for the iOS 13 upgrade. So the cancellations ticked up with a little bit of a delay, but they basically ticked up as iOS 13 was adopted. And so, that started kind of in…

Yeah. The only thing I want to add, I know, we’ve said in the past about the stock effect of new features that we launch and how – when we expose a new feature to the entire user base you see an abnormal increase in gross adds and then eventually that levels out. This is sort of – think of this as elevated terms in reverse, right? And so as the vast majority of our paid members encounter this new experience for the first time, we’re seeing an elevated level of termination, which ultimately is going to level out.

Great. Thank you both for the details.

Okay. Thanks, Doug.

The next question comes from Kunal Madhukar of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for taking my question. Question regarding the Facebook Dating and the impact on other brands. So on its fourth quarter call, Facebook said Facebook Dating is going to really well, it’s become one of the top dating services, and we expect to continue growing. So we get that consumers use multiple apps, and given Facebook’s immense global user base, it is not surprising that they may very well be one of the top dating services. At our conference last year, you had shown some statistics that’s tested that Facebook Dating did not really impact Tinder. What about other brands? How is that impacting other brands or not impacting other brands?

Sure. Let me take that one, Kunal. So as you said, I mean, despite the fact that Facebook launched dating over a year ago internationally and then late last year in the U.S., our fundamental view has not changed. And it’s not changed just because that’s what we thought, it changed based on the data that we’re seeing. Awareness, certainly for Facebook Dating, is growing, and they’ve been promoting it inside of their app. And of course, we are not going to underestimate Facebook, given how many millions of millions of users are on their platform and the friction is low, so why not have people try it? So why wouldn’t people try it? That said, we watched pretty obsessively every KPI across all of our brands. And we really have not seen any correlated negative impact across any of those brands, even the brands that we were more concerned about, that we thought there could be more overlap, but we just haven’t seen it. There has been a lot of multi-app usage, so people under 35 were using 3 to 4 apps that’s still growing. And so not surprising that one of these apps or there could be incremental usage as a result of Facebook, given sort of how long the friction is. We also – we haven’t seen an impact in any other platforms. We’ve also been watching clearly on Tinder, too. We believe there’s very little overlap on Tinder, which is obviously our largest app is young people, 19-year olds, 18-year olds, 20-year olds, they’re just not signing up for Facebook, which is not surprising since that’s probably where their parents would be. And over time, places like in Asia, the more people who use products and the more rich the competitive landscape is, we actually think could help normalize this category and raise – the tide that raises all ships. It actually could be beneficial for the category purposes. So we are still cautious, and we’ll never have too much interest around this, because they’re a big player. But we think that we can compete, and the reason we think can compete is because we will continue to aggressively innovate our products. And that’s the one thing we do every single day, and we do think that, that provides some advantage.

Thanks, Mandy. Wish you the best.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Eric Sheridan of UBS. Please go ahead.

Thanks so much. Maybe 2, if I could, one on earnings. Mandy, a lot of investors have also reached out, passed along, thanks for leadership over the last couple of years in the public domain and wishing you well going forward. More back to earnings, maybe for Gary. Gary, just thinking through the revenue commentary on Slide 15, you talked about Tinder giving most of the growth and comparable level of incremental revenue dollars. Turning away from Tinder can you just walk through maybe the building blocks of the non-Tinder business, how that momentum through 2020 progresses, and understanding some of the investments behind building that momentum as well. Thanks so much.

Sure. Happy to do that. So if you go back in time a little bit, we’ve been talking about Tinder being our growth driver and then the non-Tinder brands in aggregate being flat. And we were saying we’re going to try to get those back to growth. And the reality now is that a lot of the brands in the non-Tinder bucket have returned to some level of growth. So we think it was significant that we achieved overall subscriber growth of non-Tinder brands year-over-year in the fourth quarter. That was a milestone that we were shooting for, and I mentioned that we hit it. And our plan really is to drive overall growth from the non-Tinder brands in 2020. And the fact the subs grew in Q4, and that we see the trends that are positive at a large number of the non-Tinder brands, gives us confidence that we’re on the path to get there. So I think that the growth will start out pretty modestly in 2020 – in the early part of the year, but it will ramp and progress over time as we get through the year. And so we feel good about that. Obviously, kind of where we end up on our overall guidance range will be impacted by how much growth we’re able to drive out of the non-Tinder brands as well, of course, is where we end up specifically on the Tinder side, but those are some of the swing factors in the outlook. I think, when you kind of look at the individual brands, and I highlighted some of this in our – in my remarks, Hinge is starting to grow nicely we feel great about the progress you made user growth wise. We’re starting to get to the point now where…

Thanks so much for the color.

You’re welcome.

The next question comes from Brent Thill of Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Gary. North America revenue declined sequentially for the first time ever, is this all related to the Apple iOS change or any other reasons behind that in North America?

Let me take that. I think this is not the way that we look at the business, and you shouldn’t either. Year-over-year trends are much more important in all our businesses, including Tinder. There’s just real seasonality in our business, there always have been since I’ve been here, especially quarter-to-quarter in Q4, because people in Q4 sort of obvious, they focus more between in the U.S., for example, Thanksgiving and Christmas, more on their families and less on dating, naturally and we see that showing up in our numbers, and I bet that if you look at 2018 Q3 to Q4, you probably see sequential revenue growth is negligible as well. We just expect there to be a deceleration between those 2 quarters. And then also in Q4, it’s the lowest marketing spend for most of our businesses, that’s when it’s just not ideal time to spend marketing, because you just don’t have the right sense of attention and mentality for daters. And in fact, this year – past year in Q4, we had lower marketing spend at Match, the lowest we’ve had at Match, because we’ve been pulling spend back. We are excited about the year-over-year subscriber growth of the non-Tinder brand and we do think that this does set us up well for next year. So I would, again, sort of not look at the sequential, because it’s not really the right way to look at it, but the year-over-year is probably the more relevant metric.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Benjamin Black of Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks for the question. And Mandy, congrats on a great run and we wish you all the success in the future. I have a quick question on Hinge, how would you say trends are there? Trends in terms of features, users, monetization, geographic rollout, how these tracking against your internal expectations? And separately, how would you describe the competitive environment at Hinge and what are some of the lever that you think you can pull in 2020 and 2021 to help narrow that ARPU and conversion gap you mentioned with Tinder? And then separately, sales and marketing came in well below outlook. How much of this was related to the timing shift that you mentioned? And what portion do you think could be attributed to perhaps a newer run rate going forward? Thanks very much.

Let me take the Hinge question, and then Gary can take the marketing one. The last couple – so, first of all, we feel great about Hinge. So the last two years is really focused on user growth. And now, I’ve talked about, kind of putting the spotlight on monetization, which includes new revenue features, merchandising, pricing all the things that we have done for many, many years and have a proven playbook. There are number of proven revenue features on Tinder and our other brands that we just haven’t put on Hinge yet. And we think that that’s a real opportunity. And, of course, we sort of make whatever feature relevant to Hinge and adapt that feature to the Hinge ecosystem. But, like I said, this is sort of we’re really, really early on, the early innings of the monetization playbook on Hinge. And to the extent that we focus on pricing, that’s obviously won’t drive subs, but we’re going to find the right mix that optimizes revenue. So we’re not too hung up on sub number or ARPU, we’re just trying to figure out the maximization of the levers. And then you asked about competition. It is clear that Hinge is incredibly competitive and it’s gaining huge traction among the relationship minded millennials and not just in North America, but international markets, we see really nice growth in the UK and Australia. Hinge targets a different segment of the market than Tinder, for example, because its users tend to be more serious, not that there is not some overlap, but Tinder’s core demo is really that young college audience. It’s more around – it is just more social, little bit more fun. And Hinge is mostly for urban millennials that are like, okay, I have job now, I need to get serious about my life, including my dating life. And so, we think that having this product for this place in the market really fits beautifully into our portfolio. And we think it is definitely competitive and we are seeing it gain ground against other competitors in that relationship-focused space.

In terms of the marketing shift out, we beat our EBITDA expectations. And that was in part driven by a marketing shift out. It probably was in the neighborhood of $5 million or so. There are couple of reasons for that. I mean, first of all, the fourth quarter is generally a time where we tend to be pretty judicious, because it’s not a great time to spend marketing dollars and get strong returns. And so, when we don’t see opportunities, we just kind of save the money and push it out to the next quarter. And so, that was a part of what was going on, given it was Q4. We didn’t see returns that we thought were appropriate. We didn’t spend the money. And then the second, which I alluded to in my remarks is there were a couple of places where we are planning to spend marketing dollars. In India and in Australia for our Tinder brand as well as our OkCupid brand, that because of things that were going on in the countries there, protest in India and wildfires in Australia, which obviously were totally out of our control, we decided it didn’t make sense to spend those marketing dollars in those countries. So we’re going to come back as things have calmed down and spend that, hopefully in the first quarter. So I don’t think it’s right to say that this is kind of a new kind of run-rate level. I think we’re going to go back to our more typical levels of marketing spend. And we have a lot of things underway to do that. Q1 is a good marketing spend quarter for us. We’re planning to try to be aggressive across a lot of these brands, where we see the opportunity for growth as well as a lot of these new bets that we want to drive in 2020. So our strategy remains unchanged, even though we did have this dip in sales and marketing as a percent of revenue in Q4, because our job is to drive growth and we want to make those marketing investments. And we’ve got a lot of platforms where we see positive signs of potential growth or growth itself that we want to invest in. So I think you have to look at Q4 as an artificially low level and some things that are out of our control that drove the shift out, plus the discipline we typically have in Q4 especially and we’re going to kind of go from there.

Great. Thank you.

And the last question today will come from Michael Ng of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Thank you for the question. This one is just on Tinder. So with the new revenue features concentrated in second half and primarily focused on a la carte, power users, can you just talk a little bit more about the single-digit-growth outlook for ARPU in 2020? How should that phase throughout the year? And are there any examples of the a-la-carte opportunities that you see for Tinder that you can share with us today? Thank you.

I can take this. Mandy and Gary already talked a little bit about Tinder’s roadmap cadence and the focus on a la carte. So maybe I try to lay out a framework of how to think about monetization on our platform models generally, and then Tinder specifically. So if you think about content platforms, you mostly pay for access and subscription models make sense there. On platform such as games, you pay for advantages. And it lends itself more to a consumable pay model. We are sort of a unique in a lot of ways. Up until about 3 years ago, we had only pay-for-access subscription models on most of our platforms. And then we started experimenting with a couple of pay-for-advantage features, on Tinder particularly. And they’ve done really well and they already contribute north of 25% of our direct revenue. So we think we have a real opportunity to do more on the pay-for-advantage area and hence the focus on a la carte. I can’t get into specifics of what it is that we’re planning, but we’ve got some cool stuff, the teams experimenting with. And then, one other part of what we’re saying about these Asian markets in particular, these are markets we are starting to play meaningfully in, but consumers are not used to the recurring subscription model. And so, in these markets there is a real opportunity to tailor even our access features into more of a pay-as-you-go model. And so, that’s where sort of the trade-off between subscribers and ARPU plays out. We’re going to do a lot of experimentation this year. Ultimately as Gary and Mandy keep saying, we are in the business of maximizing revenue and that’s what we’re focused on. And we’ll see how it all sort of levels out, but there is going to be a lot of work in this area for Tinder this year.

Before I wrap up, I just wanted to quickly say just one last word, which is, thank you so much for all the support from the people on this call and our investors. I did debate how transparent I should be about my personal life and I’ve always been an open book. We’ve always been a company that’s been very transparent and I kind of made that bet. And the outpour and the kind words have been humbling. So thank you for that. The last group of people I feel like I need to thank are the people at this company, and of course, in this room. It has been an honor to come to work with these incredible human beings that I’ve got to work with every single day. With Gary, in his expanded role as COO, and Shar, who you guys are going to love getting to know. And I just think that they’ve got the experience, the passion, and the vision to take this business forward. And I would wish them luck, but they really don’t need any. They really have what it takes in the future. And there is oftentimes that Shar and I would tell the team and the Board, we got this. And I can guarantee you, they got this. So, with that, thanks for joining the call and thank you for everything.

This concludes the question-and-answer session and the Match Group conference call. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.