Grindr yesterday reported that its advertising business grew 37% in full year 2025, reaching $74 million in indirect revenue, up from $54 million in 2024 - a result that underscores how the LGBTQ+ platform is systematically building a second growth engine alongside its subscription business. The results were published on February 26, 2026, in the company's fourth-quarter and fiscal year 2025 shareholder letter alongside total revenue of $440 million, up 28% year-over-year.

For marketing professionals, the figures are significant. Grindr has now posted advertising revenue growth above 37% for the second consecutive year. In 2024, advertising revenue rose 56%, and in Q3 2024 indirect revenue climbed 43% driven by new native ad formats inside user inboxes. What once looked like an opportunistic spike now reads as a durable trend.

Advertising's growing share

Indirect revenue - Grindr's term for advertising income - reached $23 million in Q4 2025 alone, up 28% compared to $18 million in Q4 2024. For the full year, that $74 million represents roughly 16.8% of Grindr's $440 million total revenue, up from $54 million or approximately 15.7% the previous year. Advertising is not yet the dominant revenue source - direct revenue from subscriptions and in-app purchases reached $366 million in 2025, representing about 83% of the total - but the gap is narrowing incrementally, and management has signaled it intends to narrow it further.

According to the shareholder letter, advertising growth in Q4 2025 was "driven primarily by strong programmatic performance, reflecting continued demand from our third-party advertising partners and international strength." The company notes this performance came despite a "challenging comparison to Q4 2024, which benefited from a large one-time advertising brand campaign." Stripping out that one-time effect makes the underlying 28% indirect revenue growth in Q4 more meaningful.

Rewarded video and the free user strategy

One of the more technically interesting advertising developments in 2025 was the expansion of Rewarded Video. According to the shareholder letter, Grindr "expanded Rewarded Video, giving free users new ways to unlock premium features through ad engagement while increasing ads monetization." This format allows users who do not pay for subscriptions to temporarily access paid features - such as visibility boosts or filters - in exchange for watching short video advertisements.

The commercial logic is layered. For advertisers, rewarded video delivers a highly motivated, opt-in audience at a moment of active engagement. For Grindr, the format converts the attention of its roughly 92% of users who do not pay - approximately 13.7 million people based on 15 million average monthly active users and 1.26 million paying users - into advertising inventory without degrading the core free experience. During the Q4 earnings call, CEO George Arison described the ambition explicitly: the goal is to "unwind certain paywall dynamics and ad triggers based on user feedback," partially subsidised by increasing advertiser demand.

Direct advertising and brand partnerships

Beyond programmatic, Grindr is pushing harder into direct advertising. The company confirmed during the earnings call that 2026 priorities include "increased focus on direct advertising and brand partnerships." Direct deals typically carry higher CPMs than programmatic inventory, generate more predictable revenue, and allow for more creative campaign formats - all of which would improve advertising margin quality over time.

This move follows a trajectory PPC Land documented in 2024, when new direct brand advertisers from sectors including healthcare, entertainment, gaming, travel, and consumer goods began joining the platform. In Q3 2024, the combination of native ads in user inboxes and direct brand sales helped push indirect revenue to $12.4 million for a single quarter. That run rate has since roughly doubled on an annualised basis.

Grindr has positioned itself to advertisers on two fronts: the size of its LGBTQ+ audience - 15 million average monthly active users across 190 countries and territories - and the depth of engagement within it. According to the shareholder letter, users spend an average of 67 minutes per day on the app, more than 135 billion chats were sent globally in 2025, and users sent more than 12.8 billion taps. Those engagement metrics give advertisers multiple touchpoints within a single session.

The programmatic layer and international growth

Programmatic advertising accounts for much of Grindr's international indirect revenue growth. The shareholder letter attributes Q4 2025 indirect revenue strength partly to "international strength" in programmatic performance. International markets already represented a substantial share of Grindr's overall business - the company operates in over 190 countries - but programmatic infrastructure allows advertising demand to follow user density globally without requiring local sales teams.

This matters for media buyers operating across European or Asia-Pacific markets. Grindr's user base in lower-density markets, where gay men may represent a smaller fraction of the population and thus harder to target on mainstream platforms, can be reached through Grindr's existing programmatic stack. According to the shareholder letter, over a quarter of Grindr users are traveling at any given time, making geographic targeting both more fluid and more complex than on static social networks.

The privacy dimension of that programmatic operation has drawn regulatory scrutiny in the past. A Norwegian court upheld a €6.5 million fine against Grindr in October 2025 for sharing sensitive user data with advertising partners between July 2018 and April 2020 without valid consent. The case, initially triggered by complaints in 2021, established that even indirect disclosure of sexual orientation - such as revealing which app a person uses - constitutes processing of special category personal data under GDPR. For advertisers active in the EU, the ruling is a reminder that LGBTQ+-focused platforms carry particular compliance obligations.

Grindr's litigation-related costs in 2025 included $1.46 million in external legal fees associated with outstanding litigation or regulatory matters, including "the potential Norwegian Data Protection Authority fine and CWA unionization," according to footnotes in the shareholder letter's financial tables.

gAI and advertising targeting

Advertising at Grindr does not exist separately from the platform's broader AI strategy. The company's proprietary AI foundation - internally called gAI - is described in the shareholder letter as a three-layer system comprising models trained on gay culture, a proprietary architecture layer, and an application layer. PPC Land covered the gAI platform's launch in detail in August 2025, noting how the architecture creates targeting possibilities for advertisers within an audience that demonstrates higher than average education and income levels.

In 2025, the gAI foundation powered user-facing features including Chat Summaries, For You personalisation, A-Listconnection intelligence, and the Discover feature which surfaces profiles beyond immediate geographic proximity. By Q4 2025, AI agents were writing 60 to 70 percent of Grindr's new code, according to CEO George Arison during the earnings call, with productivity improvements of roughly 1.5x per engineer. These engineering efficiencies mean product iterations - including advertising formats - can be shipped faster than in prior years.

The Edge premium tier, now in testing across Australia and select U.S. and international markets, bundles AI-native features into a single differentiated subscription. According to Arison, Edge is "being really built as the core foundation of growth in 2027." While Edge's direct advertising implications were not specified, the tier's richer user behaviour data - conversations, preferences, match patterns - is the same substrate that powers more precise advertising targeting over time.

2026 advertising outlook

Grindr's initial 2026 guidance projects revenue of greater than $528 million and Adjusted EBITDA of greater than $217 million. Management noted the guidance "largely excludes potential revenue contributions from initiatives in testing and iteration stages, such as our Edge premium offering and Woodwork," but it does include continued advertising revenue growth. According to CFO John North during the earnings call, "continued growth in our advertising business, which was up 37% last year" is among the primary drivers in the guidance, alongside the rollout of subscription price increases for XTRA and Unlimited globally through the first half of 2026.

The XTRA price increased to $22.99 per month in the U.S. (from $19.99) and Unlimited to $44.99 (from $39.99). These changes began in August 2025 and are rolling out globally. As premium tier revenue rises, the company's ability to reinvest in improving the free experience - and by extension the advertising inventory within it - grows. Free users generated 135 billion chats in 2025, a volume that creates substantial advertising inventory across banner, interstitial, and rewarded video formats.

Grindr's free cash flow reached $132.9 million in 2025, up from $89.6 million in 2024. The company ended the year with $87 million in cash and approximately $396 million in gross debt. A new share repurchase program of $400 million was announced today, extending to March 2029. In 2025, the company repurchased 25.1 million shares for approximately $450 million against the original $500 million authorization.

Why this matters for the marketing industry

Grindr occupies a specific and not easily replicated position in the digital advertising landscape: a platform with 15 million engaged monthly active users, a median session of 67 minutes per day, and a demographic that mainstream social platforms cannot target with the same precision or authenticity. That combination - audience depth, engagement intensity, first-party data richness, and cultural specificity - is what the company is now monetising more aggressively through both programmatic and direct channels.

For brands in healthcare, lifestyle, travel, and entertainment that want to reach LGBTQ+ consumers in a contextually appropriate environment, the platform's improving advertising infrastructure matters. The sustained multi-year trajectory of advertising growth above 37% annually, even as subscription revenue also grows strongly, suggests the ad business is no longer a secondary consideration in Grindr's commercial model.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Grindr Inc. (NYSE: GRND), the LGBTQ+ social and dating platform with 15 million average monthly active users, led by CEO George Arison and CFO John North.

What: Grindr today reported full year 2025 advertising revenue of $74 million, up 37% year-over-year, alongside total revenue of $440 million, a 28% increase. Q4 2025 indirect revenue reached $23 million, up 28%. The company expanded Rewarded Video, grew programmatic performance internationally, and set 2026 priorities that include direct advertising and brand partnerships. A new $400 million share repurchase program was also announced, extending to March 2029.

When: Results and announcements published on February 26, 2026. The advertising growth spans full year 2025, with notable Q4 results ending December 31, 2025.

Where: Grindr operates across 190 countries and territories with U.S. offices in West Hollywood, the Bay Area, Chicago, and New York. The advertising business has shown particular international strength in programmatic markets.

Why: Grindr is diversifying revenue beyond subscriptions by building advertising into a more substantial second growth engine. With 92% of users not paying for subscriptions, the platform's large free user base represents significant advertising inventory. Strong engagement metrics - 67 minutes daily average time on app, 135 billion chats sent in 2025 - make the platform attractive to advertisers seeking high-intent, demographically specific audiences. AI-driven personalisation enhances targeting capabilities, while format innovation including Rewarded Video and direct brand deals improves advertising quality and margin.

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