George Arison : Well, we’re obviously always thinking about how to create shareholder value over the long term. So I don’t know if I can speak to the next specific quarter, but I can definitely speak to what we’re doing over the long term. And the way we think about that is by creating value for our users, and we would expect then users to pay for that value, which then leads to more monetization in the product, and that creates value for our shareholders as well. As you can see from our quarterly results, we’ve been laser-focused on that so far, and we’ll continue to do so given that we were fortunate to be able to increase guidance both on revenue and EBITDA for the year. When we think about the long term, there are really 4 key areas where we are focused, and those are our strategic priorities.
So number one, we’ve got to continue improving the user experience. We’ve done quite a bit on that already, and we’ll continue that in the future. In Q2, we released a new home screen. We also released a new profile page, which has gotten really good feedback from users, and we’ll continue to make similar investments for our users to make the app feel better. Number two, we continue to invest in monetization and drive conversions to be higher. We had 35,000 new paying subscribers in the quarter, which we are very happy about. The Weeklies product has done very well, and we expect it to be an important contributor to the year. Number three, and this is something that we’ve spent a significant amount of time on is we’ll be planning for the future.
Looking ahead to the things that the users want and have been asking for a long time that we’ve not had an opportunity to build and really going after those products. Through those products and those features, we believe that we’ll be able to drive monetization to be higher. We’ve spoken about this in our shareholder letter, but worth repeating, things like more a la carte offerings, we think users very much want and we have on the come. And then lastly, being very engaged with our user base and our community, continue to service the LGBTQ community is a focus for us as well. So those are the kind of 4 strategic priorities that we’ve spoken about at every call. And we think that by focusing on those, we are in a very good position to be able to create value for our users and through that, create value for our shareholders.
Patrick Lenihan : Next question from Manuel C. What are you doing to make your app more responsive and less battery intensive?
George Arison : So it’s a really good question because I personally have thought about that both now and in the past, the reality unfortunately for Grindr is that historically, there was a definite underinvestment in technology. That’s been corrected in a significant way over the last 3 years under the ownership that took over from Kunlun, and we spent a significant amount of time on the engineering team trying to rebuild the technology stack to make the app be in a position where we could then start building new features. And the fact that this year, we’re launching as many features as we are, speaks to the fact that a lot of that work was very valuable and has put us in a strong position to now build a better user experience and obviously, making the app be less battery intensive as part of that user expense.
