Barry Diller taking Tinder, OKCupid owner public.
Match Group, a unit of Diller’s IAC/InterActive media conglomerate that operates online-dating sites like Tinder, Match and OkCupid, filed for an initial public offering late Friday. Internet media company IAC controls 100% of Match Group, but said in June that it would publicly sell less than 20% of the dating division to inject fresh capital into the fast-growing business.
The company filed regulatory documents Friday with an offering size of $100 million, a placeholder amount used to calculate fees that will probably change. Match Group’s Securities and Exchange Commission filing notes a goal of raising $100 million through the IPO, though such figures are typically revised before the company begins trading.
IACI 0.85 % , which owns Match, would retain control of more than 50% of voting rights after the IPO under its ownership of Class B shares, which have 10 votes apiece. It’s seeking a listing on Nasdaq under the ticker MTCH. “I’ve long felt that as entities grow into size and maturity, it’s healthy to give them separation and independence from a mother church,” IAC Chairman Barry Diller said in a prepared statement in June.
Match, which also owns the Princeton Review test-prep service, racked up $148.4 million in net income on sales of $888.3 million, according to the filing. But this week grocery store chain Albertsons and retailer Neiman Marcus postponed IPO plans because of a volatile market that has made it hard for companies to command the valuations they desire. Tinder, the buzzy millennial-minded brand started in 2012, brought back co-founder Sean Rad as chief executive officer in August, less than a year after he stepped down.
In three years, Tinder has become one of the top revenue-generating apps in the United States, a major reason for analysts’ excitement about the company’s fortunes. The dating site, known for its easy smartphone interface that lets users swipe right if they like a potential match or swipe left if they don’t, has captured the cultural zeitgeist, generating articles analyzing its impact in publications including Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Match says a single dating app can’t serve the varying needs of the half a billion people it estimates could benefit from online dating, so its approach has been to run many of them.
The apps generate revenue through fees for special features and subscriptions, with about 4.7 million paying members across the portfolio as of Sept. 30. Earlier this year, Avid Life Media Inc.’s AshleyMadison.com, a dating app for infidelity seekers, announced that it hoped to raise $200 million in an IPO in London this year. Analysts say the breach hurt its chances of floating shares anytime soon. “While we have invested heavily in the protection of our systems and infrastructures and in related training, there can be no assurance that our efforts will prevent significant breaches in our systems or other such events from occurring,” the company said in its filing. Match did not separate the financial performance of each service, but said that together they brought in $49.3 million in profit on $484 million in revenue during the first six months of this year. Tinder charges users a fee—between $2.99 and $19.99—for special features such as taking back swipes and matching outside of a 100-mile radius, and OKCupid also has paid memberships with extra features.
On Wednesday, the San Francisco maker of credit card-reading devices filed under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, for companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue, like Match.