Hims and Hers cut its marketing ratio without cutting marketing

$262.2M of marketing in three months. That is what Hims and Hers put behind acquisition and brand in Q2 2026, against $753.2M of revenue, which means marketing took 34.8 cents of every dollar that came through the door.

The same quarter a year earlier did $544.8M. Revenue grew roughly 38% year on year, and across the first half of 2026 it went from $1,130.8M to $1,361.3M. So the cheque got bigger and the percentage got smaller at the same time. That is a different kind of leverage from the one most boards mean when they ask for the CAC ratio to come down, and it is much harder to fake. Nobody here switched a channel off to make a slide work.

Where did the extra money go? My read is paid search and the affiliate programme, two of the least glamorous lines on any media plan, from a company that has bought Super Bowl inventory and can clearly afford to be flashier. When a business with a brand budget moves its incremental dollar into search terms and partner commissions, it is telling you where it thinks the next subscriber is actually sitting.

And the quarter still carried an $86.3M net loss. Nobody here is harvesting a mature funnel. They are buying growth at scale while the mix moves underneath them.

Half a million dollars a month on desktop Google search ads is a rounding error for a company that put $262.2M into marketing in Q2 2026, and that is exactly why it is worth looking at. Add the weekly social and video spend of more than $3M and you get somewhere near $40M a quarter from the two line items anyone can actually see. The figure that floats around for Hims & Hers paid search and social is roughly $182M a quarter, described as nearly half of revenue. Against $753.2M of quarterly revenue it is 24%. Against the marketing line it would be about 70%. I would treat $182M as an order of magnitude and nothing more.

The search half still earns its keep, though, and the reason is the nature of the transaction. Someone searching for hims is not comparison shopping a t-shirt. They are one consultation away from a subscription that starts at $20 and runs to $75, or $165 a month on the weight side, and that consultation converts once. Lose the click to a conquesting competitor bidding your brand term and you do not get a second attempt at the same intent.

What makes the defence affordable is the blog pulling over a million organic visits a month. That volume absorbs a chunk of the non-branded head terms that would otherwise be pure CPC, which is why the branded spend can stay small and constant while social and video carry the weight.

Monday morning, split branded from non-branded in your reporting and never let them share a ROAS target again. Price the brand defence as an insurance premium against conquesting, decide what you are willing to pay for it, and stop congratulating the search team for buying back traffic you already earned.

Start with the number that should make you nervous. When Him started looking more closely at the affiliate channel 85% of its revenue came from content partners. That is a programme with one leg. One Google core update, one publisher deciding your commission is worse than the competitor's, and 85% of a revenue line moves without anyone at Hims having done anything wrong.

The fix was slow and dull, which is why most brands never do it. Over five-plus years of management, productive publishers grew by an average of 41% year over year, and the mix spread out across content, email, coupon and loyalty partners. Revenue up 116% year over year. The programme then extended from Hims to Hers, which is the interesting operational tell, because a line extension inheriting an existing publisher base is far cheaper to launch than recruiting one cold for a new brand.

What I would take from this is the recruitment cadence, not the headline growth. Adding productive publishers at 41% a year is a full-time job for someone, every week, forever. It is outbound emails, commission negotiations, creative refreshes for partners who will not build their own, and killing the ones who never convert. That is the maintenance cost nobody writes up.

Now the caveat, and it is a real one. These are an agency's own case-study figures. There is no baseline revenue, no absolute publisher count, and no window on what the diversification cost in margin. Coupon and loyalty partners are cheap to add and expensive to keep, because a meaningful share of them intercept orders that were coming anyway. Whether Hims measured that incrementality, I genuinely do not know. If I were briefing this in, the first question would be what the coupon cohort's twelve-month retention looks like against organic sign-ups.

Most people read a Super Bowl buy from a subscription company as a vanity moment. The 2024 spot Hims & Hers ran on obesity reached over 125 million viewers and barely tried to sell a prescription. It argued that obesity is a condition worth treating and that the treatment is being withheld from ordinary people. That is category creation, paid for at the most expensive CPM in the world, and you only buy it when your performance channels already work and you need more people who know the category exists.

The affordability line is the part I find genuinely interesting, because it is backed by who actually signed up. Over 400,000 subscribers come from ZIP codes earning less than $50K a year. The price architecture carries the same message without saying it out loud. Plans running $20 to $75, weight management from $165 a month, all displayed as a monthly number rather than a course of treatment. Price is the creative here as much as the film is.

Underneath that, MedMatch puts 42% of subscribers on a customised protocol, which gives the brand something to say beyond cheapness. And the surface is not only digital. More than 20,000 retail locations across the US plus Walmart mean the brand gets seen by people who will never click an ad, across sexual health, hair, weight loss and mental health.

The brand layer is what makes the $500K a month of desktop search and the affiliate programme affordable, because brand demand lowers what everything downstream costs. What I cannot see from outside is the creative volume behind that positioning, or what the email and SMS sequence says to someone who watched the ad in February and still has not booked a consultation.

You cannot run this spend rate without the retention numbers sitting underneath it. 82% of subscribers still there at three months, only 13% of GLP-1 users cancelling after month one, and an estimated $350 lifetime value. Behind that sits 400-plus licensed providers across all 50 states and more than 10,000 medical visits a day, which is the unglamorous part nobody copies. A $350 LTV is worthless as a CAC ceiling if month two is a queue for an appointment.

Then there is the money. $1.0 billion of 0% convertible notes due 2030, another $402.5 million due 2032, $609.8 million of cash on hand at the end of June, and an $86.3 million net loss for the quarter. Hims & Hers is paying for growth well ahead of the return, with borrowing that costs no coupon. On top of that, $968.5 million for Eucalyptus with $683.9 million of it deferred, and $153 million for YourBio in January. That is a company buying distribution and capability with paper.

My honest read is that this only looks like leverage while the category keeps growing. The ratio falls because revenue is outrunning the cheque, and GLP-1 demand is doing a lot of the work on the denominator. Slow that and 35% of revenue on acquisition stops looking disciplined very quickly.

Two of these moves are buyable this quarter. Diversifying an affiliate programme off content partners into email, coupon and loyalty needs an agency, a commission-structure argument and about six months before the mix visibly moves. Splitting branded from non-branded search and budgeting the defence against a known LTV costs nothing but a reporting change and one uncomfortable conversation about what your search team is actually being paid for.

What you cannot buy is zero-coupon converts, a category tailwind, or a brand already sitting in 20,000 retail doors. I also do not know their gross margin here, and that is the number that decides whether any of this survives a flat quarter.