So getting some improved revenue growth on the Tinder side would be very margin beneficial. Same thing would be true on the new Hinge tiers. That would be upside to the extent they perform better. And right now, they’re performing as we expect, but it’s still a very small test. And so we’ll see how that continues to play out. And then a recovery in Japan would be very helpful for us as well, which you’d like to think is going to happen at some point this year but is not currently baked into our forecast. Just generally, any macro improvement, macro tailwinds, which is not what we’re expecting as the year goes on, but any of that would be very helpful. But because we can’t rely on those things, in this environment, we implemented this cost savings plan.
And it’s going to generate meaningful savings for us in terms of marketing spend, headcount, overhead, et cetera. When I look at kind of the trends for the year, which you asked about, we are expecting some margin degradation in the first half of the year, which we’re expecting to be lower growth for us. And we won’t have the effects yet of significant cost savings implemented. But as the year progresses and we deliver enhanced revenue growth, which is what we’re expecting and we’ve talked about throughout this call, and we also get the compounding benefits of the cost savings initiatives in the back half of the year, we’re expecting there to be year-over-year margin improvement. And so when you put that together, less strong margin in the first half of the year, improvement in the second half of the year, that’s how we get to flat or better margin target for the full year, and we have confidence that we can deliver that.
I’d also note that we’re including the severance and other costs. But if you were to exclude those, then the margin in the first half would actually be better than what we’re providing in terms of our outlook. The other thing I just want to highlight, you raised IAP fees. In the first quarter of ’23, we have about $5 million of incremental headwinds from IAP fees just as more Hinge revenue and continued mix shift towards app. And then we’ve got the $8 million of headwinds from having the Google litigation escrow this year, which we didn’t have last year. So that’s $13 million of incremental costs that are essentially out of our control, plus you layer on top of that the severance and other cost savings initiative costs. So you have pretty significant year-over-year headwinds from those kinds of items.
The other thing in terms of margins, I just would draw out for your awareness, is that we like many tech companies hired a lot of people late in 2021, early 2022, particularly in product development, engineering heads at Tinder and Hinge, which has created incremental product development costs for us, which have been visible for the last few quarters and continue to be. But that’s going to moderate because we really slowed hiring, and we’re reducing head in some places. We’re constricting our hiring really to Hinge and a couple of other strong growth business at this point. So you’re going to see moderating product development year-over-year cost increases as 2023 goes on. And we’re confident of that, given the hiring trends. So that’s a margin tailwind for us as well.
So those are some factors to think about as you model out kind of our margin trajectory and cadence for the year.
Operator: The next question comes from John Blackledge with Cowen.
John Blackledge: Just coming back to Tinder, could you discuss further the rationale for the upcoming global Tinder marketing campaign?
