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Match Group's New COO: Hesam Hosseini

Match Group has appointed a new COO and new CEO, shaking up the executive team in hopes of a turnaround after several disappointing quarters.

Spencer Rascoff has taken over from Bernard Kim as CEO, and Hesam Hosseini was promoted to Chief Operating Officer, and will take the reins in April. The company also announced Gary Swidler will step down as President but will remain as an advisor through July.

Hosseini served as CEO of Evergreen & Emerging Brands for Match Group, one of the bright stars in recent months for the company. Some of its smaller, more niche apps under his direction have shown growth while the company’s star app Tinder has continued to decline.

An investigation into Match Group by nonprofit news organization The Markup and Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network found that the company had information about users who were reported for sexual assault, but did not ban them from its apps, publicly identify them, or report them to authorities.

This report follows the company’s ouster of CEO Bernard Kim, who was not able to turn around the company’s revenue decline over the past several quarters. He was replaced by Zillow Group Inc. co-founder Spencer Rascoff.

Now, Match Group is facing the fallout from this investigation.

Match Group is refocusing the strategy for its most popular dating app Tinder, the company announced this week. It faces increasing pressure from activist investors to improve its financial forecast.

Match Group said in its recent investor day meeting that it plans to “prioritize improving user experience over monetization,” According to Bloomberg. The idea is if Tinder moves away from its reputation as a hookup app it can reverse the continued decline in paying users.

The company also shared that revenue will be flat or in decline through 2026, but will start to turn around in 2027 with slow, single-digit growth, according to Bloomberg. Shares in Match Group fell during the meeting as these proclamations were made.

Young singles in India are turning to new and unexpected platforms to expand their networks, including LinkedIn for dating and Bumble for finding a job.

According to India Today, a recent survey from DatingNews.com found that 61 percent of respondents aged 35 to 40 said they have found their dates on LinkedIn. And 52 percent aged 20 to 40 said they looked to apps like LinkedIn to find dates.

Traditionally, LinkedIn has been a networking platform for careers, but lately people have been turning away from dating apps and gravitating to other social platforms, and especially to LinkedIn. At first, this trend was being reported in the US, but now it seems to be global.

In time for National Coming Out Day on October 11th and Spirit Day on October 17, a new report was released by GLAAD in partnership with eHarmony that explores the way dating apps intersect with how the LGBTQ+ community shares their identities and sexual preferences.

The report details how non-binary, trans and LGB+ daters express (or don’t express) themselves and their preferences over dating apps, and their differences in experiences on these platforms.

Overall, Gen Z daters have been much more likely than previous generations to come out on a dating app. Sixty-six percent of Gen Z daters came out before they were 18 years old, and 93 percent came out by age 22, compared to only 40 percent and 76 percent of Millennials, respectively.

New gay dating apps like Scruff and Archer are positioning themselves to capture a bigger portion of the LGBTQ+ online dating market as Grindr complaints and technical issues rise.

Grindr has long been the most popular dating app for gay daters, but recently people have posted complaints on social media and online forums, saying that they are experiencing technical issues, not getting access to the features they paid for, and other problems, according to Mashable.

This year, Grindr has experienced significant bugs and periods of downed service. At the same time, it has asked its users to pay more to access certain popular features, including limiting both “taps” and “explore” features and requiring them to buy subscriptions.