Online dating isn't growing like it used to. Can Match Group find a new growth engine?

The dating giant, which spun off from IAC in June 2020, is going through its most turbulent period since becoming independent. Revenue growth dropped to just 0.2% in 2025, attracting activists Starboard, Elliott, and Anson Funds, who pushed for a turnaround or a sale. Under this pressure, management replaced the CEO in February 2025, but the stock continued to fall. Meanwhile, in August 2025, the company paid the FTC $14 million for deceptive advertising, with oversight lasting ten years. Amid the storm, the question remains whether Tinder's fragile stabilization in early 2026 will hold.

Key points

Match Group owns over ten dating brands, including Tinder and Hinge, and reported Q1 2026 revenue of $864 million and EBITDA of $343 million.
In March 2026, Tinder recorded its first registration growth in two years, with direct revenue reaching $455 million in Q1 2026, but paying users continued to decline, down 5% to 8.6 million.
Hinge is accelerating, with revenue rising from $396 million in 2023 to $691 million in 2025, and adding another 28% to $194 million in Q1 2026; management's target is $1 billion in revenue by 2027.
In mid-July 2026, the stock was trading around $39 (market cap $9.1 billion), with an EV/EBITDA multiple of about 11x, half its ten-year median; analyst target prices range from $32 to $58.
The company returns 100% of free cash flow to shareholders; in 2025 it bought back $789 million in shares, net debt is 2.4x EBITDA, and it expects 2026 cash flow of $1.085 billion to $1.135 billion.
Hinge founder Justin McLeod left in December 2025 and founded a rival AI dating app called Overtone, which Match Group itself backed with $18 million in July 2026.

Match Group is the world's largest portfolio of dating apps and at the same time one of the cheapest valued tech companies with high profitability. The stock is trading well below its historical multiple, while the company generates over a billion dollars in free cash flow annually. This low multiple reflects a real conflict within the business: Tinder, the group's long-time growth engine, has lost users and revenue in recent years, while smaller brand Hinge is growing by tens of percent per year. Q1 2026 results showed the first signs of Tinder stabilizing, but the question remains open. This article seeks to answer whether Match Group is an undervalued cash generator or a company whose main product is structurally aging faster than the rest of the portfolio can replace it.

Match Group isn't just Tinder

Most people think of Tinder when they hear the name Match Group. The reality is much broader; the company today owns dozens of brands:

Tinder
Hinge
Match.com
Meetic
OkCupid
Plenty of Fish
BLK
Pairs
Azar

The portfolio is internally divided into four reporting segments. Tinder and Hinge operate as standalone brands, the Evergreen & Emerging segment groups older products like Match, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish, and the Match Group Asia segment includes Azar and Pairs. In 2026, the company merged the Asia segment organizationally with Evergreen & Emerging to save costs.

This raises the first important question. Is Match Group a bet on online dating as a category, or a bet on the company's ability to own and operate several of the best platforms for human relationships simultaneously? The answer has a fundamental impact on how to approach the stock. If the problem is specific to Tinder as a product, the portfolio of additional brands gives the company room to redirect capital and talent to where growth actually exists. If the problem is structural and affects the entire swipe-dating category, even a strong portfolio won't protect the company.

Tinder: the former growth engine that started sputtering

What went wrong

For years, Tinder was the main source of revenue and profit for Match Group. Recently, however, user growth slowed and then turned negative. The company itself openly admits that it long focused on monetization at the expense of user experience and is now investing in improving the product, trust, and safety. For 2026, Match Group expects Tinder's direct revenue to decline at roughly the same pace as in 2025, partly due to user-experience product tests and costs associated with expanding identity verification.

Signs of stabilization

But Q1 2026 results showed the first positive signals:

Tinder direct revenue reached $455 million, up 2% year-over-year,
paying users fell 5% to 8.6 million,
revenue per paying user rose 7% to $17.56.

The decline in monthly active users slowed to about 7%, and new registrations returned to year-over-year growth for the first time in nearly two years in March 2026. User retention also improved. Match Group is also increasing Tinder's marketing budget by $50 million to about $230 million to support this turnaround.

Is Tinder broken, or just mature?

If Tinder's problem is primarily a product and marketing misstep, today's weakness could be an opportunity, because fixing the product would bring users and revenue back. But if the problem is structural – if the younger generation as a whole is leaving the random-swiping model of strangers' profiles – no cosmetic product tweak will reverse it. Surveys suggest it's more a combination of both. A Forbes Health survey from summer 2025 found that 79% of Gen Z feel dating-app burnout, the highest share of any generation. At the same time, 72% of young users question the authenticity of profiles, pointing more to a trust issue that can be addressed with product tools than to evidence that people have stopped wanting to date.