Hinge's Direct Revenue grew by 39% in 2024, driven by expansion in the U.S. and Europe. This highlights the success of Hinge's strategy and its importance to Match Group's overall growth.

Match Group began consolidating some legacy brands' platforms in 2023 to decrease operating costs, which may affect user experience for some brands. The company expects to continue focusing on recruiting employees in technical functions such as software and product at growing brands and where critical needs arise, as well as to hire a number of employees and contractors to support our innovation and artificial intelligence initiatives.

Pairs plans to expand into other Asian countries in 2025. Pairs began advertising on television in 2024. We expect the advertising to continue to increase Pairs' brand recognition while we work to grow users through various product initiatives and by partnering with local governments to improve declining marriage rates in the country.

While Match Group is consolidating platforms and initiating cost-saving measures, operating expenses still increased in 2024. This suggests that the initiatives may not be fully offsetting other cost pressures.

Match Group is actively working to integrate AI technologies into its services and introduce new features, such as AI photo selection and enhanced recommendation systems. This indicates a commitment to innovation and improving user engagement.

The company has experienced significant changes to its senior leadership team, including the appointments of new Chief Executive and Chief Financial Officers. These changes and any future significant leadership changes or senior management transitions involve inherent risk.

The industry for social connection apps is competitive, with low switching costs and a consistent stream of new services and entrants. Some of our competitors may enjoy better competitive positions in certain geographical regions, user demographics, or other key areas that we currently serve or may serve in the future.

As the distribution of our services through app stores increases, in order to maintain our profit margins, we have taken steps, and in the future may need to take further steps, to offset increasing app store fees by decreasing traditional marketing expenditures, increasing user volume or monetization per user, consolidating back-office and technical functions, or by engaging in other efforts to increase revenue or decrease costs generally.

Users of our services have been, and may in the future be, physically, financially, emotionally, or otherwise harmed by other individuals that such users met or may meet through the use of one of our services. When one or more of our users suffers or alleges to have suffered any such harm, we have in the past, and could in the future, experience negative publicity or legal action that could damage our reputation and our brands.

A large portion of customers use multiple services over a given period of time, either concurrently or sequentially, making our broad portfolio of brands a competitive advantage.

Brand is very important. Users generally associate strong brands with a higher likelihood of success and more tools to help the user connect safely and securely. Generally, successful brands depend on large, active communities of users, strong algorithmic filtering technology, and awareness of successful usage among similar users.

The industry for social connection apps is competitive, with low switching costs and a consistent stream of new services and entrants. It is possible that a new service could gain rapid scale at the expense of existing brands through harnessing a new technology, such as generative AI, or a new or existing distribution channel.

In 2023 we began consolidating some of our legacy brands' platforms to decrease operating costs. In addition, in 2024 we announced an enterprise-wide initiative to further leverage our portfolio approach and decrease operating costs by, among other things, reducing duplication of certain functions across the Company and sharing more operational infrastructure across brands.

As of December 31, 2024, we had approximately 2,500 full-time and approximately 10 part-time employees, which represents a 2% year-over-year decrease in employee headcount.

As the distribution of our services through app stores increases, in order to maintain our profit margins, we have taken steps, and in the future may need to take further steps, to offset increasing app store fees by decreasing traditional marketing expenditures, increasing user volume or monetization per user, consolidating back-office and technical functions, or by engaging in other efforts to increase revenue or decrease costs generally.

We intend to further leverage our existing capabilities and advances in technologies like artificial intelligence (“AI”) to improve our existing services or introduce new services or features in order to better satisfy existing users and to expand our penetration of what continues to be a large available new user market.

Additionally, Al algorithms and training methodologies may be flawed and datasets may be overbroad, insufficient, contain biased information, or infringe third parties' rights. If the content or recommendations that Al applications assist in producing are or are alleged to be deficient, inaccurate, offensive, biased, infringing, or otherwise improper or harmful, we may face reputational consequences or legal liability.

As we seek to further integrate Al technologies into our services, compliance with existing, new, and changing laws, regulations, and industry standards relating to Al may limit some uses of Al and may impose significant operational costs.

The company has authorized share repurchase programs, indicating a belief that its shares are undervalued. During the year ended December 31, 2024, we repurchased 22.2 million shares for $752.7 million under the January Share Repurchase Program.

On January 21, 2025, the Company repaid the Term Loan in full utilizing cash on hand.

The Company expects that 2025 cash capital expenditures will be between $45 million and $50 million, flat to 2024 cash capital expenditures.

The Company's code of ethics applies to all employees (including Match Group's principal executive officer, principal financial officer, and principal accounting officer) and directors and is posted on the Company's website at https://ir.mtch.com under the heading of “Corporate Governance.

The size of our user base is also impacted by a number of other factors, including competitive products and services and global and regional business, macroeconomic, and geopolitical conditions. For example, wars in the Middle East and Ukraine have led to reduced usage of our services as well as the decision to suspend our services in Russia.

For example, the EU's Digital Services Act (the “DSA”), which went into effect in 2024, imposes additional requirements on technology companies around moderation, transparency, and the overall safety of their platforms.

Concerns about harms and the use of dating services and social networking platforms for illegal conduct, such as romance scams, promotion of false or inaccurate information, financial fraud, and sex-trafficking, have produced and could continue to produce future legislation or other governmental action.