[on-hold music] Welcome back to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey.
This week I have a conversation I had at the Media Product Forum, the event Rebooting recently put on with our partners at WordPress VIP, with Neil Vogel, the CEO of Dotdash Meredith.
We spoke about how Dotdash Meredith is preparing for what Neil calls Google Zero, and that is something of a rhetto- a rhetorical stretch, but it's also a really important planning scenario that Dotdash Meredith and just about all publishers have to take because search is undergoing a fundamental change right now.
That's pretty obvious. That was very clear last week with what came out of Google I/O. Google's head of search is talking about search as a construct.
That's, uh, that's kind of a sign that things are about to change, and that's of course with AI. You can now go into AI mode when you're searching.
And this is, to me, a clear indication that Google is going to go fully into absolutely changing the search experience, and that is gonna have a lot of cascading impacts on publishers. There is just no way around it.
So, you know, Dotdash Meredith is in the crosshairs of this, right? And Neil is someone who I've always found to be very pragmatic.
He's always telling me the sky is not falling and that bad businesses are still bad businesses and good businesses are still good businesses. He's been through these cycles before.
He knows all about what happened with platform dependency during the Facebook traffic era.
And you know, he's always kind of had a consistent message, which is build a real business, cut out the middleman where you can, and never, of course, expect anyone to save you.
We recorded this conversation right after he led the IAC earnings call.
We talk about the shifting economics of AI-driven search, why Dotdash Meredith took the OpenAI deal, and how they're actually turning to become an ad tech player themselves with their first-party data solution called Decipher, and also what it takes to build that direct audience muscle, you know, when your company was built on a very different model.
Hope you enjoy this conversation. You know, we did it live, so in case there's any audio sort of patches here and there, that's why. Let's get on to the conversation. [on-hold music] Neil, welcome. Hi.
[clapping] So Neil, you had the first solo call, and I always- Yes. -like the calls because I'm like, "What are the questions that they're gonna ask?" The guy from, like, Oppenheim came right at us, like- Right at it.
"What are your pro-- What are your product prio-priorities for twenty twenty-five for growth?" And I'm, like, reading into it. So I feed it into ChatGPT, and I was like, "What is...
What's this guy from Oppenheim getting at?" And he's like, "The subtext to this is-" Jason. "He wants, he wants to make sure that Neil has a plan to actually grow this business, not just to maintain the business."
That is probably right. [laughing] I mean, that's kind of what his job is. Jason Hellstrom from Oppenheim. Right. Um- So you laid out basically a few product priorities, right? Yes.
One was, I believe, the People app that you- Yes. -came out with. Yep. And then I wanna talk about each of them. Okay. The other was for all recipes you did. Uh, for recipes at large. Recipes. Okay. Yes.
The Recipe Locker. You talked about the Recipe Locker. My Recipes. And then the other one was- She Made It. Was- That one right there. Okay. Wonderful. And, and the other one was about Decipher- Correct.
-the first-party data product. Yeah.
So let's go through those because I think it can really give, like, a good roadmap about how you're seeing your business evolve because I always bug you about why you guys are not gonna get overrun by AI because, uh- Right.
Be-- Yeah, because you're not. Exactly. Because you're not dependent on search, et cetera, and we'll get into that. But explain to me on the product side, why are those, like, three priorities?
So y-you have to, like, you have to, like, zoom out a little bit for context.
And one thing we've al-always known, and for those of you who don't know, we're, we're the old Dotdash, which was once About.com and The Spruce and a bunch of stuff, and then we bought Meredith and Time Inc.
So we're People and Travel and Leisure and Food and Wine and Real Simple, blah, blah, blah. We're forty brands. We're the biggest publisher in America.
We might be the biggest publisher in the world, but we can't say that 'cause I'm not, I don't know if I can prove that. We're, we're, we're very big. We're, we've six straight quarters of double-digit growth.
We've made three hundred million dollars in EBITDA, which was profit last year. This is all public information.
And we're really good at this, and we're really good at this 'cause our product team is really good, and a number of reasons, but 'cause product is at the center. It has to be at the center of everything.
They don't feel like it because if you look at that chart of, like, who owns things, they don't feel like they own it, but they kinda do.
And the one thing that we've always known, and we've talked about this for ten years, is that you cannot rely on other people for your success, other people being algorithms or being middlemen. You can partner with them.
You can exist in, in... or like fish in the sea, where, like, you're totally symbiotic, but when they change their mind and they don't need you, it's not, it's not their fault, it's your fault.
Like, you have to know that. So what we've known for a really long time is, what we need to do is we ultimately need direct relationships with users, which we have all the tools to do.
We have these amazing brands, we have huge audiences, and you need direct relationships with advertisers. Otherwise, people are going to get between you and your people and you and your money.
That is because, contrary to any narrative, media is a great business. Like, building audiences by making cool things and selling ads or doing transactions, when done well, look at Google.
It is an unbelievably profitable, sustainable long-term business, so that's why there's so much fighting over it. Now, it changes all over the place, but what we've had to do is adjust and constantly adjust.
And the thing that w-we talk about all the time is, you can't be sentimental. You cannot care what worked yesterday because it doesn't matter.
The universe could not care less that your print magazine made two hundred million dollars ten years ago. It doesn't give a shit.
The, the, the universe does not care at allThat that oh and oh website that had incredible engagement that you made that worked really well three years ago engagement's declining and no one's using anymore.
The universe doesn't care. Your job is to make things people love and get them in front of people in ways they want them. And that's what we've been really focused on. So- And to extract value.
And obviously to extract value. But, but if you build... I've been saying this to you for long enough, if you build great products and you have great audiences, you can extract value in a way that nobody minds.
Like, it's not- it's- the- the- the money... This is gonna sound stupid, but the money part is easy if you get the audience part. It's hard. And then you can figure out the money part.
It's gonna be different all the time. We make a huge percentage of our money now from, like, transactions and commerce. We didn't make any from it seven or eight years ago. But you- you have to be very flexible.
So what we've been really focused on and done a, a fairly good job on is diversifying where people come from.
And the knock on us for a really long time is, "Oh, these guys are just content engineers and they're good at Google," and that was absolutely accurate. Well, yeah.
[laughs] And, and but at the time when Google was all the traffic on the internet, if you weren't good at Google, you were an idiot. That's, like, your only job. Like, be good at Google. So we were really good at Google.
When we put Dotdash and Meredith together, which is, like, three years ago 60% of our audience came from Google search. Right now, it's about 33%. Yeah. And we've grown audience- Oh, is it? Oh...
every quarter since then. And when you, when you took o- when before, when it was About.com, right? Mm. It was, like, 80 plus percent. Yeah, I don't... Again, I, I can't go back that far. But yes, it was a lot.
It was the v- uh, whether it's 70 or 80, it doesn't matter. It was the vast majority. Yeah. Yeah. And but so the world's changing, and we're changing along with it.
So what we got really focused on, and we can get specific, is people... When we bought Meredith, we, we, we had a lot of work to do to... W- we have a whole new team who's amazing.
Leah Weyer, Charlotte Riggs, a whole bunch of people. And we, we got it humming on the web. We got it humming on mobile. We grew an asset that everyone thought couldn't possibly grow anymore.
And we knew that we needed an app and we wanted an app, but we didn't want to do what everyone else does, which is just like why are we gonna drop our website into an app? Who cares? The mobile web's super profitable.
We don't wanna do that. It took us a while to figure out what to do, and our product team led an amazing effort that we called a moonshot effort that said, "Whole new team, segregate them."
I think there's, like, 50 to 75 people on it right now. All they do is this.
We're gonna make the definitive app for this space, and it's gonna function like people want to consume this kind of, like, entertainment content. It's gonna work like TikTok. It's gonna work like Instagram.
We're gonna make content specifically for this. This isn't repurposed other content. It's got its own room. And it's doing unbelievably well.
Like, engagement on this thing is, like, 3 or 4, 5X what engagement on the web is. And it's, like, we just started. We've barely started marketing it yet. And it's...
I think it might be the best thing I've ever built, and it's gonna be a huge success. And I know that people who've looked at it, their response has always been like, "Oh, my God. I can't believe you guys made this."
And but that's the wrong response. We've been making amazing things for a long time. We just finally made an amazing thing in a context that lent itself to, like, making something really interactive and beautiful.
But you've been making web, web pages for a long time. For a long time. Yeah. Yes. Tell me about the future of making web pages. That's- Are you gonna be making web pages in five years? Yes, 100%.
We're making magazines still, so of course we're gonna be making web pages.
[laughs] But like everything, you have to be completely non-sentimental, and the way that the article page looks now with whatever you would put on it, you know, like headline, share tools- Yeah...
title, words, picture, maybe video, end, like, shitty research thing at the bottom. Like, uh, like, like footer, like that's not- Tasteful content recommendation- Whatever... network.
[laughs] That, th- that was for a really long time, for us in particular, like, a desktop or, or, or visit to that for us was gold. Like, that is the single most valuable visitor you can get.
Unfortunately, it's still a great asset, but it's a declining asset, so you're, like, full innovator's dilemma here, right? Yeah. We need to manage this because it makes a lot of money. We have multiple declining assets.
We have tons of declining assets, but we have tons of growing assets too. Okay. But that's the thing.
If you're a media business and you don't have growing and declining assets at the same time, you're not doing it right. Like, it's just how the world works. I, I wish- Yeah... we could lock media in place.
We'd do so well, but I don't know. So, so anyway, so- Always realistic... so what we're doing and what you're gonna see from us is, so we've got these...
Our, our fourth project has to do with absolutely rethinking what that page looks like, a fundamental rethink. And literally, the five or six people sitting right there are doing it.
Rethinking what that looks- The article page? The article page and what the article page will look like, and is it more feed-like? Is it more swipey? Is it more what... We're gonna see.
Like, how do you take advantage of the medium in which people look at article pages, which is by and large the same medium they look at- Yeah... TikTok, but make it work?
'Cause again, the article reading experience is not the same as the social reading experience. Right. People want informa- So it's...
You have to get it all right, and I'm very confident that the way pages look on the internet is not how our pages are gonna look a year from now. I just have no idea what that's gonna look like.
Do you have any hints, like, about what it will be? 'Cause, I mean, I guess- Yeah...
when we see where people are gravitating to, I just think about, like, also expectations- I'll, I'll, I'll give you two things that are both sports...
like, 'cause I always ask people like you- I'll give you two things that are both sports to look at. Okay. Yeah. They're both... Is... Sports is the... I read people and I read sports. Yes.
ESPN, when you get to an article, basically functions almost like an infinite scroll. They do a really, really good job of it. It's super simple. It's clean. You don't even know you're doing that.
That's a really good data point. The other data point is if you're a baseball fan, and I'm a Phillies fan, like- Yeah... they do these game wrap-ups that are essentially...
It's, it's almost like a, it's like an Instagram story of a whole baseball game. Clip, clip, video, da, da, da, da, and, and you get to scroll through it, and it's right on the web, and it's amazing. That's cool.
I want content that way. I don't mind that there's ads in the middle. Like, this is cool. I want content this way. I don't mind that there's ads in the middle.
We're like, "Oh, those are two really interesting things that we should look at for-"I'm not sure recipes or food content are any different. I'm not sure home design content's any different.
I'm not sure health content's any different, but we've gotta figure it out. And- Yeah... we have to know that, like, being married to what we're doing, we're, will die, we're dead. Yeah.
But it seems like two dominant modes right now are the chat interface, like, w- because that is becoming normalized.
I think the more people use these tools, like your partners at OpenAI with ChatGPT, the more they get used to a chat interface, and then the TikTok interface, you know?
And, and I think the feed is, like, yesterday's- Well, again, I think a feed, a feed and a TikTok interface are the same thing. And, and they're different... They're cousins. Yeah.
Look, I, all, all I know is the form factor of a magazine for us is still really profitable and really successful.
So you just, you have to get the right form factor for the right audience and the right type of content you have. Yeah. Like Verywell, which is a very serious health site where people read about cancer diagnoses- Yeah...
is gonna look different than Better Homes & Gardens, is gonna look different than People. Right.
And, but you have to, like, you have to set up Verywell to be a different consumption experience than if you're trying to, like, find ideas for a new bedroom. Yeah. Fair enough. So when you...
Like, talk to me about the recipe, what you're doing there with recipes, because, you know, I, I used to joke that, like, one of your great achievements was making a recipe page that wasn't, like, awful. Thank you.
It didn't need a jump to recipe button. I think the biggest failure of the last generation of the open web was the fact that the jump to recipes button existed. To be clear, you know why that happened.
That is- Because of Google. It's Google doing it. They set up the incentives- You don't want it either. Nobody does... and they respond, you respond to the incentives. Yeah. I get it. Nobody wants it.
I hate the game, the player. Very defensive. I'm very defensive. I know. It's okay. I'm very defensive about the jump to recipe button. This is a safe space. This is a very safe space, Evan.
Um, so the, the, one of the things we, we did when we put this company together is we've for a really long time believed food and branded cooking, branded food on the internet is an incredibly overlooked, unbelievably valuable area.
And from the time we were buying up little sites to the time we bought Meredith, we bought Save the Recipes, we bought Serious Eats, we bought Food & Wine, we bought Allrecipes, we bought all these things.
We're now, if you believe Comscore, between 40% and 50% of the recipe traffic on the open web goes to one of our sites.
And we have everything from the highest end recipes at Food & Wine, to mac and cheese on Allrecipes, to, like, total Brooklyn food on Serious Eats, and it's amazing.
And one of the things that we've, that people have been trying to do for a long time is the old school recipe locker, right? The, your grandma's little box with all your recipes in it. Yeah.
We're just gonna do it online. We now have all the scale across all these properties and all these brands to do it.
So we launched something called My Recipes, which is an old domain we had, and we pivoted it to be that is your recipe locker, where you're gonna be able to save what you want, sort it, recommend things.
It is the most 1.0 idea ever, and it is crushing because no one's doing it, because no one's been able to do it, because all the recipes have been in a million different places.
And there's some cool apps that do some very clever things, but they're a little more for, like, like really ad- advanced users. Well, the New York Times has that. Yeah. But that's just in the New York Times. Yeah.
Like, we're, we're... Literally, the New York Times, whose food is... stuff is incredible. Like, I use it, I love it. It's, like, the tiniest sliver of the market.
Like, New York Times food appeals to 30 zip codes in America use New York Times food. The rest of America uses all of our stuff, and they use New York Times food too in those zip codes. So it's been amazing.
We, we have a really big head start on this 'cause Allrecipes had a very big recipe locker, and Allrecipes is by far the- Yeah... largest food site in the world.
And you, you can see how this would, like, evolve and roll into, like- Yeah... app form and into other things.
But it's another way that we can connect directly with users, give you a reason to come back, and there's all kinds of privileges and services you get for being a member. But, like, some...
Like, your recipe content must be very heavily SEO. Like, more than your 33%. I would think that that would index far higher. Again, de- depends on the site. Some sites, yes. Some sites- Okay.
Less Serious, but Allrecipes, I would think is, like, 75%. Any site that is the scale of Allrecipes is impossible to be that big without an amount of Google traffic. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
So it's, it's big, but it's not as... We don't like giving out, unless we give out percentages site by site. It's not as much as you'd think, though. Okay.
But I would think, and I understand for certain instances, but, like, recipes to me are what, like, AI is coming for. Recipe is the one thing that AI can't do right now. Cannot. It can. You cannot- I have cooked with it.
I, I know you can, but, like, by and large- [laughs]... AI right now cannot... You cannot make a recipe by amalgamating and mushing together six other recipes. It doesn't work. It just doesn't work right.
And generally speaking, not you, and this is gonna get better, people don't trust AI for a recipe when they can go to name the brand they trust or the brand they love. So we're obviously trying to get in front of that.
We have not seen any AI creep into our recipe business at all. We actually... Entertainment around people and, like, beauty, style, and entertainment and food are our fastest growing categories right now. Yeah.
So that's the content and that's the distribution, and I wanna get into the monetization piece bec- on two levels. One is, is Decipher. So you're moving into becoming basically an ad tech player too.
I mean, you're opening up your- Past tense. Did. Moved. Yeah. So you've moved into becoming your own ad tech player. Now, you developed Decipher as a first party data targeting tool. Yes.
Normally, a publisher would use that just as a competitive advantage in the market, but you're also now going to be going out beyond... I mean, you're a massive publisher. Yes. But this is going to- The whole open web...
be the open web. Yeah. So very quickly, Decipher is, for us, almost all of our brands are some sort of, like, old school service publishing. So we, we really know what you're doing.
We know that if you're on an article that says, "I want to paint my kid's bedroom, my newborn's bedroom," we know you obviously just had a kid. That helps targeting. We know that you need to go to Home Depot or Lowe's.
We know you probably need a car, probably need a credit card, may need a new house. These are all really good things to know.
So when a credit card company targets us-We can then put their ad on this, why, what color do I paint my kid's room? And it performs way, way, way, way, way, way, way better than cookie targeting.
And we figured this out a long time ago, and we created this product called Decipher to commercialize this so you could target across our own sites.
Right now, Decipher is part of more than half of our premium sold deals.
Deals that have Decipher targeting in them are on average sixty percent bigger than our other deals, and those clients are growing much faster/renewing more than a normal client. It totally works, and we guarantee it.
We'll, we'll do full make goods if we don't beat whatever other targeting you're doing, and we don't need cookies, we don't need individual identifiers. What we then realized is, well, wait a minute.
Again, we gotta get closer to our advertisers, and there's a million people between us and our money. Why can't we help advertisers? We have more first-party data than anybody in... that I can think of.
But it's not first-party database. First-- Everything's first-party data is, like, I know what kind of glasses you have. It's not it. I just know what you're doing when you're on that kind of content.
I don't need to know who you are.
So we can go out and look at the other two hundred and fifty sites we think are premium, map every page, compare it back to our pages, find which one it's the most similar to, and then ads on that page are gonna perform just like they do on our page.
And they do. So we can now go out for advertisers and say, "Well, you're paying a fifteen dollar CPM to advertise your tomato soup across all of our tomato recipes." Mm-hmm.
"We wanna get tomato soup recipes across the rest of the internet. We'll charge you eight bucks for that."
We take their eight, we go out, we buy it for four, we package it, we give it to them for eight, and we're off to the races. So it's a managed service DSP, basically.
And we just hired a guy named Jim Lawson, who ran AdThrive, many of you know, a big DSP that was very much based not on cookies, to come in and run it for us. And it's early, early days, but so far so good.
I mean, you get to take the first-party data signals that are super real time from all these brands you love and trust, and use them to target the rest of the internet, and it does way better than cookies.
So it's, it's actually a fairly easy thing to explain to people. So that's, like, a big bet. It's a huge bet. Right. That's our biggest bet right now. Okay. Yeah.
And so the other thing that I was interested in, I've, I've bugged you about this before, is licensing. Because what I wonder, I was, I was bugging Dr. John about this last night [laughs] John Roberts.
And I was saying, "Won't-- Don't you think a lot of publishers are gonna be wholesalers?" In that, like, instead of, like, in a retail business, you're wholesaling to, to, to basically aggregators.
In that, like, you're now licensing is a growing part of your business because you have a deal with OpenAI. I know nothing is new in media. You've had licensing revenue before in, in the magazine business.
But it seems pretty clear with a lot of these AI engines, and with the amount that they're pinging peop- sites, that the business models could possibly change to where a lot of content is just being fed on a licensing basis to these centralized nodes because that's where all the distribution is, and that you will then be feeding those engines.
You are feeding ChatGPT, correct? Correct. Okay. So, like, is that going to become, like, another, like, a big part of the business? Um, so we did a deal with OpenAI. Yeah.
Which either some people think it's the smartest deal, and some people think we're idiots. I think it's smart. We, you, you... We wanted a seat at the table with these guys. They helped us develop Decipher.
We're helping them really develop their search product. We're very close to their engineers. They've been a great partner.
We obviously are very active and, and very aggressive, and may or may not be more aggressive at, like, protecting our IP rights. Like, you can't take our stuff and compete with us unless you pay us for it.
Everybody else is doing that except OpenAI, but that's a whole nother- Yeah... panel to talk about. Whether or not we're like a... Here's the thing, like, they have our data anyway.
Like, all these guys in this current administration, current environment, every scraper, every... They lie. They put a different... Like, everybody has all of your content anyway. Mm-hmm. It's too late.
It's not like the Netflix argument where like, oh, well, studios licensed their content to Netflix, then Netflix ate their lunch. What a bet. We didn't choose, they just took it all.
So, like, we have to figure out how we're gonna exist in the future from here, and there's a lot of guys trying to figure out how we'll-- maybe we can protect from these crawlers, and so there's some clever things going on.
But it's how do we exist in the- Dr. John said pay per crawl. I don't know. The only, the only... Right. Could be.
The only thing that we, we have is we have brands, we have trust, and we have experiences, and if we're really good at those, we'll be fine. So far, we've been more than fine. We've been great.
And if you look at our financials, licensing for us is not that. It's a very small- Right... small piece of it. Licensing for us is Walmart and Dillard's and all these places that use our brands.
We make real products, and we sell them in their stores. That's the more traditional licensing we're talking about. Yeah. But content licensing's never been a huge thing for us.
Like, we're- I know it hasn't been, but that is what you're doing. It could be, yeah. Yeah. And, like, we like this one deal. It'd be great if we had eight of them, but we don't. We have one of them.
[laughs] So I don't know. We'll, we'll, we'll see. Okay. We got a couple minutes for questions. Any questions for Neil? Yeah, I think Mark has one.
Um, quick question on, you mentioned Allrecipes and, you know, ChatGPT can't replicate recipes. But then you said, like, they're crawling your data anyway.
So how do you kinda square that circle if Allrecipes' content is already sucked up by ChatGPT or OpenAI? Why isn't that a threat? Allrecipes' data is already sucked up by ChatGPT and OpenAI. Yes. Correct.
It's definitely a threat. If they start replicating our recipes wholesale, which they haven't done to date, but they could really do whatever they want, that wouldn't be great.
As of now, no one has really found a recipes thing that has any traction. But you could say that about any single part of our business that some LLM is taking. Again, it's up to us to...
Can we connect directly with users? Can we make things that are really appealing? Our brands matter. Does, does, like...
People love and trust Food & Wine, they love and trust Serious Eats, they love and trust our writers, they love and trust our creatorsIf they do, we're good.
If they don't, then they're gonna go use ChatGPT for it, and that's incumbent upon us to make sure they don't do that.
But yeah, it- we can't sit around all day, like, hand wringing and staring at our belly buttons like, "Oh my God. Oh, someone stole all of our content. Woe is us. What are we gonna do?"
We're gonna actively try and do things that play to our strengths that give us, like, a real chance, and that's what we're doing, or trying to do at least. Okay. Other questions? It's a good question, though.
I mean, it's the obvious question. Yeah. What do you think about, like, sort of single site, like, AI tools?
Like, I mean, why wouldn't you just have, like, an Allrecipes, like, AI menu bot where I'm like, "Okay, I have, I have these ingredients. Give me an idea"? I mean, this is how I would use ChatGPT. We, we, we might.
We could, but that's... The, the current human behavior around recipes on the internet, it's not that. So we've played around. You can build some of these things.
Just because you build something doesn't mean anyone's gonna use it- Right... in some way. So I don't think the world's necessarily ready for that exact application, but they're getting there.
You gotta do the mom and dad test. You gotta talk to your mom and dad. You gotta talk to your normals back in Philadelphia- Yeah...
and see how they're using the internet and doing these things, and you're like, you need to be slightly ahead of them. When, when you operate at our scale, you need to be slightly ahead of them. There are people who...
There's 100 apps and a million things to do that right now. Yeah. Put all the ingredients in my cabinet in this thing and make a thing. You can definitely do that, but no one does.
Talk to me about that with the sort of product, w- when you're setting your product priorities, right? Because, like, you have to think about, like, where things are going, obviously, in, like, five years, right?
And it's, it's hard in this business. Maybe it's three years, right? But a lot of this stuff doesn't show up in the numbers, right? It's like tariffs, right? Tariffs have not shown up yet- Right...
necessarily in the numbers, but they're coming for sure. And I almost feel that way a l- a lot of times with user behavior when it comes to these AI tools because you have, like, the reality, which is, like...
I, I didn't listen to it, but I did, I did read the, the transcript of your call. There you go. That's... Well- I assume it was, it was similar- Yeah. That's it... experience listening. But- [laughs] The...
But like, you know, like, there's this disconnect where you're being like, "No, AI overviews, it's not...
It hasn't cratered, like, our traffic at all like this," but it's very clear that Google is going in a completely different direction than what its previous role was, which basically dictated how the open web operated.
100%. And what, what I would... My point I would make to that is if you're a publisher and I'm sitting here and I just realized that right now- [laughs]... I'm an idiot. Like, we've...
This crew over here, us, we've known this for the longest time, and it gets to... Again, we're...
This is gonna come back and, like, we're gonna have a bad quarter and everyone's gonna laugh at this, but, like, 60% of our traffic to 37% of our traffic, and Iria traffic grew the whole way through that.
W- we knew that was coming. We've been doing a million small things, whether it's direct traffic or email or all the things that our product team works on, like, to combat that. This is gonna be...
Like, for instance, now look at, look at AI, and you can do this math from the earnings call. We'll do math for a second. It's really boring. It's... Google's a third of our traffic, right?
We have AI overviews on a third of those searches right now, so that's, call it 10% of traffic. If those go down by 40%, I've just lost 4% of our Iria traffic. Like, great.
Like, we have to do what we have to do to build our brands and do our things and, like, not run around and blame AI for everything. Like, AI is not our problem.
Like, your problem is you're not building things that people love and wanna connect with. Like, do the math, everybody. And that's our math.
Like, our math that was laid out for Wall Street yesterday, because everyone on Wall Street's panicking too. You kinda have to let them know what's going on. Well, Wall Street hates these businesses.
I don't say they hate them. [laughs] I would say that we don't nec- And again, I, I can't comment on how they... But we don't, definitely don't trade at, like, the earnings multiple of NVIDIA. [laughs] But like...
[laughs] But we're... But it does- They don't hate us. Like, in a very good market, a media business like ours will trade at 12 to 15 times cash flow, and in a bad market you'll trade at 7 or 8.
And if you're bad at it, you'll trade at 4, and if you're really good at it, you'll trade at 20. And that's how it works. And the flip side of that is a few of these businesses are really good.
They're really high margin. They're really durable. Brands are really amazing. Like, we- we're very profitable. Our margins are very high.
Like, you have to take advantage of that, and that's the other side of that argument. Yeah. Do you, like, internally say that we should prepare for Google Zero? The... We've literally... What, what do we call it?
Google Zero. Ah. There you go. We, we, we've actu- Did, did I tell you that? I'm on the inside. No, I'm like getting the, uh, the ceiling.
Our, our plan for this year, our little internal plan, and our friends at Google got mad at us. We called it Google Zero. What does this look like if Google goes to zero for us? Google Zero. Zero everywhere.
Zero ad demand, zero traffic, zero everything. If we're Google Zero, what do we look like? I mean, at 30% of traffic, it still doesn't look great, believe me, but- [laughs] Better than when you were at 75%.
[laughs] Better than, better than when you're 60. Better than when you're 60, but we're really focused on... But remember, we're also at, for a lot of you guys, we're at Facebook Zero.
Facebook for the old Meredith was 20% of their traffic. We grew through that too. Like, that's zero. That's gone. Doesn't exist. Like, People, EW, they used to be like 20, 25% Facebook. Gone to zero. But we grew...
'Cause you gotta... But what no one talks about is, like, oh, we can do really well in syndication. Like, we can do really well on Apple News. We can do really well with our own emails. We can do really well with Direct.
We can do well with our own apps. We can... There's all these other places to find audience. We can do exceptionally well on social. We can do well on YouTube. You can do all this stuff.
Sometimes you just gotta cut bait on what's not working- Yeah... and move to... And that, that's hard.
So final question is, I think, and it came up on, on the call about the, the sort of cadence of shipping, 'cause I think we're gonna be doing a session next about product-centric organizations, which does not mean being a technology company, which we've discussed.
You're not pro publishers who-Tell, say that they're protecting- No, you have to be great at technology- Yes... not a creator thereof. Okay.
So product-centric, and like you know, product companies ship a lot quicker than like publishers. And you basically said, "We're gonna ship like every, every quarter or something." I mean, we ship a- Right?
We, again, we are a publisher. We do publisher things, right? And we make beautiful things, compelling things, and hopefully we can have audiences.
But the only way that we would get to our scale and get to our growth and do what we've done is if we're shipping constantly and constantly changing. And I think we're really good at it.
I, like i- in terms of like people in our peer set, like we're, we, I believe we are head and shoulders, this crew here is better than anybody.
And I think we compare really favorably to people that ship stuff all the time.
And if you look at what our business looked like five years ago and what it looks like now, or what it looked like at the time of the Meredith merger and the time of now, it's like it doesn't even resemble what we were doing then.
The way we make content, the way we're structured. We went from the Meredith guys, like each brand had like one editor in chief who was the commander of all the things.
Now we have an editor in chief who's in charge of an overall vision, an entirely separate team that does every platform.
There's guys that do TikTok, guys that do Instagram, guys that do print, guys that do the web, guys that do the app, and they're totally separate. They make different content.
They make whatever they want, as long as it's in the vision of this person. And you gotta redo your whole product and tech team to work with that. And the amount of content we make and the stuff, it just exploded. Mm.
And it's terrifying. Like the whole thing is absolute loss of control of, for senior people. Like you just gotta let people do that. You can't...
Like our, our team that runs like capital P People Magazine is so complex in how they get seemingly not complex content out. It's bonkers.
Like the, the Met Gala, it's on the app, it's on TikTok, it's on Instagram, it's on the website. It's entirely different content and photos and videos for each one. Like they're live, they're on the red carpet.
Some of them are with E- there's EW next to them, and they're in LA doing something in a studio. Like what is happening here? Like so yes, we're good at... We're, we, we, you have to be good.
That's like, that's what we do. Yeah, exactly. All right. Neil, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thanks. You got it. [upbeat music]