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Bumble is in advanced talks to go private in a deal worth about $1 billion, Reuters reported on Monday, October 12, 2026. Ithaca Holdings is the prospective buyer. The talks come as Bumble tries to win back users with AI. Neither company has confirmed a deal. Both declined to comment. Still, Bumble shares surged roughly 50% to $3.80 that Monday, their biggest one-day percentage gain on record. A $1 billion price tag for a $14 billion debut Founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd in 2014, Bumble went public in 2021 at a valuation of about $14 billion. Five years later, the proposed price tells a very different story. Paolo Pescatore, an analyst for PP Foresight, said the potential agreement is proof of Bumble’s difficulties, adding that: Going private looks less like a strategic masterstroke and more like an admission that Bumble’s current strategy is failing. The numbers a buyer would inherit Bumble’s Q2 results indicate the reasons for the investors’ concerns. Its revenue declined by 15.2% year-over-year to $210.5 million. The number of paying users also dropped by 16.4% to 3.2 million. Bumble reported a net loss of $127.9 million of which $169.3 million were impairment charges, even though the adjusted EBITDA represented $72.9 million. The slide started earlier. In 2025, the company registered a near 10% drop in revenue that amounted to approximately $966 million, while its paying user base declined by more than 11% to approximately 3.7 million. Bumble Revenue and Paying Users Decline in 2025 and Q2 2026 Industry fatigue, or a Bumble problem Bumble’s competitor, Match Group, appears to be doing better as revenue fell only 1% to $853 million in the second quarter. Meanwhile, net income increased by 36% to $171 million. Tinder also showed signs of improvement. Daily active users dropped by only 4% year-on-year, which was the smallest decline in the last 10 quarters. Hinge’s revenue has increased by 22%. Match aims to bring Hinge’s annual revenue to $1 billion by 2027. Dating-app fatigue remains a challenge. But Match’s results suggest Bumble’s issues range beyond just the users getting bored with swiping. Bumble vs Match Group Q2 2026: Revenue, Profit and User Trends Can AI pull users back, or push them away Bumble hopes its AI-led Bumble 2.0 can change that. The redesign brings richer, chapter-style profiles and the possibility of swipe-free dating. Its March unveiling helped send shares up more than 40%. Wolfe Herd had earlier floated AI dating concierges, as Cryptopolitan reported. Whether users want that help is less clear. A peer-reviewed study suggests confidence in algorithms can encourage AI dating adoption. Yet an SSRN working paper reported 54% fewer usage minutes and 62% fewer app openings among the AI adopters studied. Those findings do not represent all daters. At the same time, less expensive AI will make companion chatbots more attractive than dating apps. However, the use of these chatbots raises privacy and security issues, as noted by the Congressional Research Service. The opportunity remains substantial: Grand View Research estimates a $10.7 billion global dating-app market in 2026, reaching $17.9 billion by 2033. The challenge is converting AI features into users who stay, pay, and trust the platform Micah Abiodun | usagoldmines.com
October 13, 2026

RedBox In The 80s: Meet The VHS Vending Behemoth Lewin Day | usagoldmines.com

Redbox was a company with a moderately interesting business model—it let you rent DVDs from automated kiosks. It’s an idea so simple it’s almost surprising it didn’t appear sooner. Only, it did—all the way back in the VHS age!

Meet the Video Vendor. YouTuber [SpaceTime Junction] was able to track down one of these rare machines, which apparently formerly served an Ohio rental outlet called Kohnen’s. It’s a monstrous thing that stands taller and about three times wider than traditional vending machines, and it could hold up to 320 tapes in its robotic magazine. It’s got lashings of woodgrain, a green-on-black CRT, and the beautiful kind of clicky keys that went away after the 1980s.

[SpaceTime Junction] has a bunch of videos up on the machine, and you even get to see it powered up.  It’s a little difficult to see what’s going on, because the machine is something like nine feet wide and it’s all shot in vertical video. There isn’t a whole lot of content on these obscurities out there, so this is a great place to start. Apparently, there were recently a hundred or more of these found living in a Texas warehouse according to Reddit, so we might see more of these popping up online soon. [SpaceTime Junction] has toured that facility, too.

You can read more about the fall of Redbox, or the cleanup afterwards, in our prior coverage.

 

This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak

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