Long before running for Congress, Marty O'Donnell was an award-winning music composer for the popular "Halo" video game franchise.

His work drew legions of fans to an online forum, which the Nevada Republican has tried to turn into a galvanizing force as he tries to unseat a Democrat in a Las Vegas area district that could help decide House control. O'Donnell has served as the group's de facto leader, referring to himself as its "benevolent dictator" while tapping its members for campaign cash and harnessing their enthusiasm in his bid. The campaign held a two-day event for forum members this month at a casino that included a video game tournament

Clad in black and their faces masked, dozens of militant Israeli settlers burned olive trees and threw rocks at Palestinians in a coordinated attack on Friday on a village's harvest in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that injured at least two people, including a journalist.

Some 80 settlers, ‌some of them carrying gas canisters, descended from a hill above a terraced olive grove where villagers from Abu Falah had gathered to pick ripe fruit, a cherished annual tradition in Palestinian life, Reuters witnesses said.

Israeli ad firm Discover-Tech used online ad auctions to target at least 45 devices with Candiru spyware, no click needed.

The University of Toronto researchers say it is the first public technical proof of so-called zero-click spyware arriving through ads, in which victims did not have to tap or click anything.

The report ties at least 45 Al Jazeera devices, targeted in 2024 and 2025, to Candiru. Citizen Lab first exposed the Israeli spyware maker, now known as Integrity Labs, in 2021, the same year the US blacklisted it.

The ads themselves came from Discover-Tech, an Israeli company that presents itself as an advertising firm. In practice, Citizen Lab says, it acts as a go-between for several spyware vendors, Candiru among them.

The method relies on real-time bidding, the split-second auctions that decide which ad a person sees when a page or app loads.

Each time a Discover-Tech ad appeared, a script checked the device’s ad ID and IP address. A device on the target list received code that started the attack, while every other device got back nothing at all.

That meant nobody had to click, and also meant the ad companies serving the ads never saw the harmful code.

The operation was large, too, and after reviewing nearly four billion ad-bidding records, the researchers found Discover-Tech ads in more than 70,000 apps and 120,000 websites between March and June 2026.

Some of those ads landed on government and defence networks, including NATO’s. Confiant, an ad security firm that ran its own investigation, also spotted them at the US Department of Defense and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Match Group's total paying users fell 5% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, to 13.5 million — even as revenue per payer rose 10%, to $20.90. Bumble's contraction was sharper still: total paying users down 21.1% year-over-year, to 3.2 million, with the company explicitly describing the drop as a deliberate "reset" of its member base toward higher-intent users. Revenue at Bumble fell 14.1% — a smaller decline than the user drop, because average revenue per paying user rose nearly 9% over the same period.

Combine the two companies and the shape of the problem sharpens. Match Group and Bumble together shed roughly 1.55 million paying subscribers over twelve months — on the order of 4,000 departures a day — while their combined revenue moved by less than a tenth of a percentage point. In almost any other consumer category, a business losing customers at that rate while holding revenue flat through price increases on the customers who remain would be described, accurately, as a shrinking market propped up by pricing power.

Bumble has recently been bought out btw - https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/13/bumble-agrees-to-a-1-3b-acquisition-deal-as-online-dating-faces-a-reset/

Online dating's public companies don't report a metric that maps neatly onto GDP, but the closest analog — paying subscribers, the actual unit being transacted — has now contracted for multiple consecutive years running, not quarters. Tinder's paying user base has been in year-over-year decline for more than two years. Bumble's has fallen for several consecutive quarters and shows no near-term guidance for a rebound; the company's own Q2 2026 forecast anticipates continued softness while a full platform rebuild plays out.

Average session length on dating apps fell from just over 13 minutes in 2024 to under 11.5 minutes in 2025. Roughly three in four users report experiencing swipe fatigue. The typical paying user produces fewer than two in-person dates a year from the product they're subscribing to — a conversion rate that would be considered a crisis in almost any other subscription category measured by outcome rather than engagement.

Match Group has committed roughly $60 million toward AI and product development at Tinder specifically. Bumble is not iterating on its existing platform at all — it is building an entirely new, AI-first, cloud-native product from the ground up, with a full relaunch pushed to the fourth quarter of 2026.

The pullback has been mostly felt in the North American and European markets, where customers are, on average, less likely to buy a subscription or are paying for shorter periods than in previous years. Even so, North America still commands over 50 percent of revenue in the dating app market.

Alongside Tinder and Bumble slipping, many of the older, ‘evergreen’ platforms such as Plenty of Fish, Match.com and Badoo also reported declines in revenue. Not only are fewer people using these apps, but there is also a smaller pool inclined to pay for premium services.

https://www.businessofapps.com/news/dating-app-market-first-annual-revenue-decline/