We try and avoid keeping clients in the bedroom. We feel like [chuckles] it's not a particularly modern way to do business. [chuckles] So we're not... It's not really a thing for us. Just coming back.
This is Humanistic Media.
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show, Riviera Edition.
I wanna thank my friends at Audigent, uh, in particular Dave Rosner, for making room for me at their suite here in Cannes since I basically have unusable Wi-Fi at my Airbnb.
This south of France stuff isn't all glamour, I promise you. This week I spoke to Neil Vogel, the CEO of Dotdash Meredith. Neil has led a remarkable turnaround at what used to be called about.com.
Dotdash broke about.com into vertical brands like Verywell, Lifewire, and The Spruce, while adding in smaller brands that it bought, you know, all around the idea of intent media.
W- which is basically service journalism, but more importantly, being there when people are trying to figure out something to do, whether that's cook dinner, remodel a room, or figure out how to replace a router.
In two thousand twenty-one, Dotdash made waves as the unlikely buyer of Meredith's stable of iconic magazine brands in a two point seven billion dollar deal.
So the company now has assets like People, Better Homes and Gardens, Food and Wine, and more.
Some of the takeaways that I had from my conversation with Neil is that having a good user experience doesn't have to come at the expense of the business.
You know, media business is hard, and I always mention how difficult it is to satisfy different constituencies between audience, advertisers, and nowadays algorithms too.
But Dotdash has proven that you can pull this off, and you, you can have fewer ads, faster sites, and better content, and still make a lot of money because they're very profitable.
The other thing I took away is that print still has an important role.
You know, everyone likes to call things dead, but print isn't going to be going away, but it's still not going to be the driver of many media businesses going forward.
If run efficiently, it can do an important job of being a statement of the brand. It's not gonna be as frequent, and it's probably gonna be more expensive too. It, it does play a role in the future publishing business.
Third takeaway is that driving transactions is critical, but maybe not building products as a publisher.
There's a lot of talk about commerce media here in Cannes, and publishers have seen their commerce businesses as bright spots.
Dotdash does a large chunk of its business in driving transactions, yet at the same time, Neil is very cautious in when the discussion turned to actually making products themselves versus passing on the customer to other companies that do that, and that's because these are pretty much different businesses.
So I hope you enjoy the talk. One warning, the last five minutes are strictly devoted to the Philadelphia Eagles and their prospects in the season to come. But otherwise, hope you enjoy it.
[upbeat music] Neil, thank you so much for joining me, uh, on the show. I'm bummed you're not in Cannes, though. I'm here in Cannes.
I wanna thank, uh, my, my partners at Audigent for allowing me, uh, to, to use one of their [chuckles] bedrooms in their suite to record this. But you're not here. Why not?
No, this is the first Cannes, first non-COVID Cannes I've missed, I think in like a decade.
Uh, we, uh, now own Food and Wine magazine, website, whole media business, and we had our big Food and Wine festival in Aspen last weekend, and it was just too much to do both. And, uh, but I'll be back. We'll be back.
We have a whole contingence that... Contingent. Contingent? Not contingency- Yeah... whole contingent there. [chuckles] Uh, they're having fun. I heard it's good. I heard it's... I heard there's some momentum.
You know, the, the, the, the Cannes in the, in the not huge years are always the best ones. Yeah. No, the actual like- It, it filters out. It filters out the fakes... the experience of it, like the...
I remember the, after the financial crisis, it was like, it was a nice Cannes. I mean, like, you know, it was a little less exuberant. I was a little... This is... I'm a little...
I, I mean, I can't exactly say I have FOMO. That is not what I have. Uh, but it is nice to see clients and do- Yeah... you know, do all those things.
No, in all seriousness, I'm like writing like a piece about this, but like, you know, the one like sort of it's easy to be cynical in Cannes and stuff like this, but it's also sort of bad luck to like sort of be like, "Ugh, this is so terrible."
It's like you're in the south of France. No, it's not. Um- First of all, if you think it's terrible, you're lying. Like, it's not terrible- No, I-... to be in one place, and like it's really fun.
It- I'm saying that it's not good to be like that 'cause it's easy to focus on the garishness- Oh, yeah, yeah, agree... and the over-the-topness. Agree. Agree. But I think the one thing that I've...
Like, it's like you think everything's gonna change in COVID and like, you know, God bless the metaverse and stuff like this. Come to Cannes. Like, humans like connect with other humans. No, you need humans.
And, you know, sure Rose- You need humans. Please don't expense, like, don't expense the helicopters, but come to Cannes. Yeah. Although Blade has like, I don't know, like two hundred and fifty euros, so think about it.
Yeah. There you go. I don't know. Mention MediaLink- [laughs]... and it's only two hundred euros. [laughs] Yes. All right. So Neil, I remember when we...
It was actually at another one of these type of events, although it's not as important anymore. It was South by Southwest. You had just, uh, joined, you know, the artist formerly known as about.com, right?
And like we had known each other for years. I had just really joined Digital- Here we go, way back.
And I remember going to like breakfast with you, and you told me, just like, "Wow, we cleaned up all these sites and stuff like this," and I, I nodded, and I probably said some nice things, but I was like, "Ugh, this is never gonna work."
You were like nice, but you were also- Well- You were a little dismissive. So- Most people were dismissive. It, it was the right reaction. It was the right thing to be. Yeah.
And the reason I'm dismissive, 'cause I hate when people call me cynical, is I'm not cynical, I'm skeptical. Uh, it's a professional feature, not a bug.
But like the reason is because the internet is not good with comeback stories. Like remember when they tried to bring back MySpace and the... Yahoo is here.
They're still trying to bring back My- There's a lot of- There are no, there are very few, if any, successful comeback stories. This is actually one, which is congrats. It's remarkable. Yeah, I mean, thank you.
I mean, I think it's a comeback because w- we didn't really try and come back. We just started again.Which made it easier. I mean, you know the s- I can tell the story if you want. I'll do it in, like, 30 seconds. Yeah.
Like, 100 years ago, which feels like 100 years ago, but it was really, like, six or seven years ago, we were still About.com. And About.com, for those of you who don't know, was like a general interest website full of
random answers to things, like he-help you content. Like, in the old days, it would've been called service content, evergreen content, whatever you wanna call it.
And, uh, it had gotten old and long in the tooth, and it was horrible to use, but some of the content was still really great.
And we-- I came in, I was hired by IAC to run it in, like, 2013, and we spent a couple of years messing around with it and we just couldn't get any traction. We were-- frankly, we were quite bad at it.
But the one thing we did learn in being very bad at it was we learned that there was this core of content, like intent-driven content, that really helped people.
And we've talked about this before, but the one thing that kept happening at About.com that we never understood, because frankly, we were pretty bad, is a few really smart, really big clients kept giving us money.
And they kept giving us money very specifically in where they wanted it to go. And w-and we couldn't really figure it out.
But then we eventually figured out they wanted money because our content helped people and was very down the funnel.
So if you're trying to get somebody to go visit your resort, or you're trying to get somebody to, uh, use your pharmaceutical product, or you're trying to get somebody to buy a router, like it makes a lot of sense to be on the content that explains where you should go or why your router's too slow.
So using that kernel, we realized that there was no place for a general interest website anymore. We took About.com. We had two million pieces of content. We threw probably a million six in the trash.
With the four hundred thousand remaining, we started launching our own brands, and new brands that people have now heard of, like The Spruce, and Verywell, and LifeWire.
And we launched new sites in health, finance, home, food, tech, travel, and that was all a good idea.
Like, you know, let's make brands that resonate each of these verticals as opposed to About.com that resonated with nothing. But as Barry Diller said to us, he was like, "You guys have one problem.
You know, don't make six or seven problems. It doesn't seem like a good idea." And for those of you who don't know, we're, we were part of IAC, which is Barry Diller's media holding company.
And but what we did is we also took a look at media at the time, and we thought that media was wrong. And it helped... It's not- Oh. I act like we're outsiders. We're not anymore. We're kind of the ultimate insiders.
Okay. But at the time, we were outsiders. We looked at media and we're like, "This is dumb." Like, there's too many ads. These sites are unusable and too slow on mobile.
And you got all these problems with algorithms between you and your audience, is you gotta find ways to make good relationships with them because you gotta understand how to deal with algorithms.
So we did something simple. We said, when we make these new sites, we're gonna make sites that are super fast, so they work great on mobile, which was a big deal five or six years ago, and still a big deal now.
Like super, super fast. They're gonna be super clean and well designed. We're gonna have thirty to fifty percent fewer ads than any of our competitors, and we're gonna spend all of our money on content.
So we're gonna end up with the best content to help you with these problems in your life on the fastest sites with the fewest ads. And the bet was,
if this works, we're gonna have more traffic, our ads are gonna be more valuable, and our brands are really gonna start to grow, and we'll eventually be able to sell premium advertising. And that's exactly what happened.
And we got some traction out of the gate. I mean, the minute we launched our first site, Verywell, it just went up and to the right. Then The Spruce went up and to the right, and they all did.
And then we started to get some traction. We're like, "Well, well, what else can we do here?" Like, the one missing part of our formula is- Yeah... we're missing brands. Like, we're making up our own brands from scratch.
I mean, we had the arrogance to think, like, "Oh, we're gonna compete with WebMD," or, "Oh, we're gonna compete with Better Homes and Gardens."
And we did, frankly, 'cause we were better at the internet than these guys were. So we took share, took share, took share, but no one knew who we were.
And you'd argue that, like right now, 'cause we know a lot about Better Homes and Gardens 'cause we own it now, eight times as many people search- Yeah...
on Google for Better Homes and Gardens as The Spruce, yet The Spruce has twice as much traffic. So, like, we were good at this.
So then we went out and we started to make small acquisitions of brands like Birdy, and Brides, and Serious Eats, and Simply Recipes.
And we ran our plays in our playbook on brands that people kinda knew, or brands that had, like, really niche footholds, and those, like, all worked.
And we're like thirteen for thirteen with brands we launched and brands we bought. And then we've been working a lot with IAC, and you know, we took a business that was probably... A-again, these numbers are all public.
It was, we went from fifty million in revenue to trending towards three hundred million in revenue, and trending- Yeah... towards a hundred EBITDA.
I think our last, before we bought Meredith, we were doing like eighty-some in EBITDA from losing... We, you know, we were losing twenty EBITDA when we started, so we basically made a hundred million dollars a year.
You can... So you can make money in media, it turns out? Yeah. It's not that hard. But here's the thing. Anybody who thinks they're going to reinvent the rules of historical media, like, don't give them money.
You're not going to. Like, media is super simple. Collect and serve audiences that are valuable. Make yourselves valuable to them.
Deliver them to advertisers, partners, and marketers in a way that works for your audience and your marketer. That's it. Like, all the other nonsense- Yeah...
like any publisher that tells you they're a tech company, like run for the hills. Like, they're not. Like, you may be very good at technology, and we're very good at it.
We've got hundreds of engineer, and we're awesome at it, but it's all in service of being a media business and a publisher. And we get paid by selling ads, and we get paid by sourcing transactions for people.
We get into that. So any- Go back, going back to the story. This summer, we had the opportunity to... We'd really looked at Meredith for a very long time, and we originally broke up About.com into brands.
We basically took Meredith and on a wall dissected it, all of their properties, all their templates, every single thing that they did, and we're like, "Well, we need to beat this."
We're like, "Oh, we think we can beat that." And we did the same thing to a bunch of other media companies too.
And then we ended up building a better web product, which is the only reason why our, we work, 'cause our brands aren't nearly as strong as theirs.
So this summer, a, a series of things happened to Meredith that made it available to buy, and we went back to IAC, to Joey Levin, and to Barry Diller. I mean, it was a fairly short conversation.
It was like, we need two point seven billion dollars to buy something that isThree times, four times our size, because it's the best brands in the world that have been cloaked as print brands, but they're really digital brands.
If you look at the revenue and how they make money, it's like a digital business.
And we think if we did this with Birdie and The Spruce, imagine what we can do with People and Better Homes and Gardens and Real Simple and Southern Living and all these brands.
And to make a long story short, we bought it. That was six months ago. We're now, like, the biggest publisher, maybe the big publisher in the world now, online and print.
The vast, vast, vast majority of our profitability is online, but the print is a huge key to branding and a really interesting part of the mix that we've actually really like. So now we're here.
Five years ago, six years ago, we were fifty million dollars, losing twenty million dollars. Yeah. We were about.com. We had no [laughs] no apparent future, and now we're the- That's why it was very sensible for me-...
probably the biggest publisher in the world... to leave that breakfast and be like, "Oof, man." I hope Neil can still go back to the Webbies. [laughs] I mean, [laughs] we-- I, look, I think...
Look, we, uh, this, the best part about this story is the same crew, like Tori Brangham, Alex Ellerson, Tim Quinn, these names some people in the industry know.
Like, we were the same guys that were here when this sucked.
And we worked it, we got it together, and a combination of we had a good idea that worked, and then we had IAC's press your bet mentality and balance sheet, and now we're here. Yeah. And it's been really fun.
But the point I wanna talk about a little bit is, like, creating that, like, virtuous cycle, because I think everyone wants to, right? Particularly modern digital publishing.
A lot of times you're working against yourself, right? Like, you have to choose which side you're gonna please. Like, are you gonna please the audience, right? You're gonna have a clean, fast-loading website.
Are you gonna please your customers, who are y- often the advertisers, right? Uh, like, are you gonna please the, the algorithms?
And you're trying to please all these different people, and I think what becomes very clear is if your business model isn't right, you're not gonna be able to please. You're gonna have to make- A, a hundred percent.
But, like, break that into two buckets. So audiences and algorithms are one bucket, and customers, advertisers are the second bucket. And
this is something we say internally all the time, and it's not true, but we say it for a fact. It's we do not care about money. It-- money doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters to us is that we build really big intent-driven audiences, right? You have this intent where they're cooking dinner for their family, they're dealing with diabetes.
Like, they're doing something very specific that you know their intent. You don't need cookies. You know exactly what they wanna do. We can do that at scale, and we can do it in a branded environment that's trusted.
If you can make really great content on a really fast site, that is gonna cause you to be unable to do a lot of things for advertisers they want you to do. You're not.
You're just not gonna be able to do a lot of stuff programmatically. Yeah.
You're not gonna be able to do some stuff premium, but that's totally fine because when you build really big responsive audiences and all, on all the Dotdash sites, every ad is seventy percent viewable or better, people need you.
And what you can do is you can then work with advertisers and sponsors and say, "Look, we're not gonna do that because it doesn't work our model, but we can do this instead." It's never no. It's always like, "No, but..."
So our focus is a hundred percent audiences, algorithms, and then secondarily customers. Now, it turns out that customers actually love this, and I think our numbers bear that out.
They-- We know what makes our sites tick. We know what makes them work. We know what people respond to.
So that's put us in this place where yeah, yeah, we're not gonna let you do, like, a pop-up and a takeover and a nine-minute long pre-roll, but we know exactly what works on our sites and it's, it really works. Yeah.
So but I- Also makes you way better programmatically. Yeah.
So, like, I think that's what's interesting is that, like, you know, there's always been this, you know, being here in Cannes, there's always been this, like, weird divide between, like, remember, like, like, like, above the line and below the line, right?
And, like, you know, for a while- Like, I, I, I mean, do people still say that? Because those feel like- I know. That, that was the, that was always the sort of- Oh.
But now, like, you know, now that direct marketing has been- I never even totally knew what that meant. I, I never heard that term. Well, it meant direct, it meant, like, direct- Below the line was direct...
direct marketing, right? It was like the, the- It also made no sense that somehow you, you let direct marketing people pay you less because they were direct marketers. But- But I don't, I never got any of that.
Yeah, I know. But, like, you know, whatever. It's like the TV people that are calling their commercials films like to be like- Right, exactly... "No, the direct mail guys, that's not, like, real."
But what I think is interesting in the internet, because, like, you know, direct marketing was... I used to write for DM News.
Like, I, you know, after the dot-com bubble, like, I, I learned the direct marketing industry.
I'm like, these people are very sensible, and, like, they apply data in smart ways, and if something's working, they do more of it. If something's not working, they don't do it, and it's, like, very logical.
I mean, it's the, like, direct mailers are the true first people- Yeah... that ever understood the internet. But, like, we, like, made it into, like, the industry made it into performance marketing.
What I think is interesting is the more, I think in some ways, like, the more performance driven that your business model is, the better your user experience has to be.
Like, it used to be if you were into big image advertising, Vogue and stuff like this, you would have, like, that's the best media experience.
But if you go to, like, for instance, Forbes, go to forbes.com and have that experience and then go to Forbes Advisor, which has a different business model that is based on performance, and guess what?
The site is cleaner. The site loads better. Like, it's just better. It's not a technology problem. Not a technology problem. [laughs] So here's the thing historically, and I think it's been our advantage.
They're trying to take these simple concepts and turn them into brain surgery. It's not. It's not. Like, clean messages, fast sites, good experiences, fewer options, and you do way better.
Like, and the thing for us is we've been doing this now for, like, five or six years, and it's been out there for everyone to see, and there's a lot of people that have, like, tried to knock us off and try to do this.
Oh. But, like, the thing is it, it doesn't work unless you do everything. You have to make the sites fast. You have to cut down the ad load. You have to increase the value of the content.
If you don't do all three of those, this whole... thing that we do is not going to work. But y- you said it.
The, the thing is there's this historical view that if you're like a brand advertiser or for like a direct, you know, performance-driven advertiser, that's a totally different experience. It's not.
It's actually the same thing. Yeah. It's totally... Now, you might use different tools or different units, but it's... And you just said it. It's the same thing and the same discipline.
And when, you know, when you have a company of four thousand people or forty-five hundred people, whatever we are now, I forget the exact number, you have to have like simple messages, right?
And the simple message that we put forth is best, fastest, fewest. Best content, fastest sites, fewest ads.
And it doesn't specific- specify like what type of ads, and if you're helping someone find b- what credit card to use, that experience is gonna look a lot different than if you're like d- diagnosis, diagnosing like your tennis elbow.
It's gonna be a very different thing. But that concept weaves through everything, and it gives you like the discipline to know, like, how am I going to make decisions here? Yeah.
So talk about like then taking on like, you know, quote unquote, legacy brands, correct? And it's one thing to build a brand for that- Yeah, it's the right...
A- again, here's the thing, like if you look at Meredith sites, if you look at Dotdash sites, the percentages of traffic from sources are f- very similar. It's not...
We are a little bit more Google, I think, just 'cause we grew so quickly there. We haven't had a chance to like...
Our brands aren't as good, so like they have way more direct traffic and email traffic, but like the percentages aren't that far off. It's, it's pretty close.
The, the most amazing thing about the Meredith brands and what got us so excited is w- everything we've dealt with, first we created ourselves.
So then, and then we bought a bunch of brands that were, that are really interesting brands, but none of them are particularly big.
And the thing that you have to be on the internet, and this is what we learned, is you can't be just as good and win. You have to be better.
So if you're gonna win in health, you have to be better than Healthline, better than WebMD, better than Everyday Health, better than Mayo Clinic materially. That is very hard.
If you're gonna win in food, you have to be better than all the other food sites that aren't us. Now, we are a lot of the food sites now, so we're often competing with ourselves, which is fine.
But th- that's what we really learned because we had to overcome this brand hurdle. Like if someone is gonna go to Verywell for a legitimate health problem, we have to be so much better so someone trusts us.
The interesting thing with the Meredith brands that's so incredible is they've been doing this for so long, and they're so good, and the content is so good and so trusted. Mm-hmm.
Now, it may not be in the right format that the internet needs, but it's so good that we've been able to get consumers email lists,
Google, Pinterest, everyone is so much more responsive to improvements on these brands than they ever have been on our brands just 'cause they're so much more trusted. We get to grow these things.
I think it's gonna be way faster and way bigger. Like there is no logical reason The Spruce is twice the size of Better Homes and Gardens on the internet. Yeah. It makes no sense.
But is it- Like it shouldn't be that way. So I guess is that like a technology problem or is that, that they're not creating the right content that is satisfying needs out there?
So like d- will these brands- It's a- 'Cause we have seen brands that... or were legacy brands and that were taken over and were turned into basically glorified SEO farms, right?
Like the brand still has a lot of juice- No, that's not our jam... and stuff. Like I'm just trying to, you know, antagonize a little bit. Yeah. Uh. [laughs] Whatever. You know, we gotta keep it real. Right.
So, so I think that's fine. So what you w- I mean, the trick with these brands are buy in the brands that from Meredith all come from print, right?
And because of the history of Meredith and how long it's been around and everything, it was very much a print first place. Print drove the bus with everything, and
which is great, but I think since we bought it, we were very clear when we bought print that like we're not the guys that are gonna sell the secular decline in print.
However, print has a place in the media ecosystem that's really valuable. For us, it's branding. It's an expression of like a, what a brand feels like- Yeah... and can be very profitable if sized properly.
And we've done that. We cut a bunch of titles, and we're now down to like these seven titles we really love. The trick that you need to do is not like turn it into a content farm or shut the magazine. That's that.
The workflows and work product and use case of these different media things can all exist under the same brand and the same editorial view and be totally different.
So let's take, I don't know, let's take Better Homes and Gardens, whatever. The magazine is for inspiration. It's for stories. It's beautiful. It has pictures. You want it on your coffee table. It comes once a month.
It's got a surprise and delight. Four and a half million people get that every month. The website is for that- Mm-hmm... but the website is much more for utility. It's help. It's researching a project.
It's I want inspiration. It's I wonder how to cook this. I wonder how to paint this. It's much, much more. And then there's... A- and it's a very different workflow and a very different way you need to structure these.
Like, like we may do the spring planting issue in Better Homes and Gardens, like all the things you plant in the spring, and then on the internet you do a giant garden plant library that has thousands of plants in it and depending on where you live and your climate, te- we'll help you plant stuff.
And then on social, that's the entertaining stories that combine these two other things. And the trick is to get- Yeah...
everybody working on everything to agree on what the brand is and what the brand means and let them do their thing. And if you do that, it totally works.
If you try and say the digital people are in charge or the print people are in charge, the social people are in charge, that's where it gets messy.
The second thing you have to do is, and this is much, much less of a problem now and has been amazing how quickly the Meredith people have a- adopted this, is you all have to play ball together.
If the digital people and the print people and social people and these people cannot get along, they cannot work here.
And it's been really amazing to watch them all like work together and thrive, and the Better Homes and Gardens is the best example. Like two months ago it's our, it's...
We got-Harry Styles to do the cover of Better Homes and Gardens, which for us was a huge deal, and for the internet and for the world was a huge deal.
It was part of showing the world that we are taking Better Homes and Gardens, and we're taking it from, like, the best homemaking magazine to the best home magazine. That's the transition we're trying to make with it.
We put Harry Styles on the cover. It got like, I'm gonna get these numbers wrong, billions and billions of media impressions. It broke the internet. There's galleries, there's pictures.
If we would've done that online, nothing would've happened, but because we did it in print, it was a huge signal.
We had, like, Drew Barrymore on The Drew Barrymore Show saying, like, "Look out, Better Homes and Gardens is coming for you now." Like, so- Yeah. What print can do is unique and special. But what did that do?
What business results did that drive? I mean, you're used to, like, you know, you create content and you grind through the RPMs and stuff like this, but is that... Like, how do you put a value on that?
There's branding buyers, there's performance buyers, there's everything buyers. The brands have to feel fresh and new and always do new things. That's the beauty of a brand.
The implied trust of a brand and what a brand means, you have to clearly communicate to the market.
Also, brands, and we see this with Meredith brands and our brands, real brands perform better with users in terms of all the metrics of engagement and how they interact with advertising.
Brands that you know perform better than brands you don't know because people trust them. Yeah. Right? Like, and we've seen in our brands, performance has increased over time.
Like, when we first launched Spruce, it was okay, and now it's outstanding. And you see a lot of that.
So just, uh, really understanding how media works and knowing that the vast majority of the money you are going to make and profit you're going to have is going to be digitally centric, right?
It's gonna be, you're gonna be selling ads, you're gonna be sourcing transactions, you're gonna be doing stuff on social.
But print as part of the ecosystem for a People, a Real Simple, a Better Homes and Gardens, a Southern Living, a Travel + Leisure, a Food & Wine, is, uh, an incredible part of the mix.
And something that, like, we're straight digital guys. We like print more than print guys because, like, we can't believe we have real assets now. Mm-hmm. We're like, "I can't believe we like print stuff-" [laughs] "...
that people really love." And I think we have a very different view of it. It doesn't have to be... There's no illusion or expectation that print is, like, this huge profitable, has to grow part of the business.
It's not. It has to promote brand, it has to be beautiful, it has to be aspirational. People have to want to have it. Yeah. And it's really freaking fun.
But with digital, like, do these brands need to create different ki-kinds of content? Like, what I'm guessing is, like, how do you- 100%...
but how do you keep the DNA of the brand and not just have Better Homes and Garden with a lot of stuff that looks like Spruce? I mean, Spruce is great, but, like, it's different. Totally. Like, it...
They should have different types of content. It has to have its own POV. Okay. So let's take People as an example, right? 'Cause we're going very deep on People right now. Yeah.
And what People does in print, what they've done digitally i-in the past is they do two things. It's the, uh, it's like ordinary people doing extraordinary things and extraordinary people doing ordinary things. Yeah.
So it's celebrity and human interest. And w-what we've learned about how this works is we have an editor-in-chief who's amazing, named Liz Macaro, and the entire People team now agrees what People is.
And it's those things, right? However, the change we've made to People that has been a really big deal and is really helping us, and we have a lot of momentum from it, is
we have to understand what works in People magazine is probably content about George Clooney, the Queen, and Julia Roberts, right, on the cover. Totally works, right? That, and human interest stories.
You know, the, like- Yeah... rescue cat from tree. I'm not belittling it. They're really amazing stories, but, like, I just can't think of a good example now. Then digitally, what works is, you know what?
They're not that interested in Clooney. It's, like, younger, it's a little... They're-- Clooney still works, but it's a little bit more Kardashian in the content.
And the content we make is less, like, long form featurey and much more quick hit entertainment news, celebrity news, and longer human TikTok and Instagram. And they're like, "Who's Julia Roberts?"
[laughs] So that ends up being like kinks in the Domillion sisters. But what we've-- The change that we've made has said that the definition of celebrity for People used to be driven by the magazine.
Like, digital reported into print until we bought this.
Once we said, okay, let's all agree on what the brand is, and people that know how the internet works and know how social works can use this brand for the celebrities and audiences that they're serving, all of a sudden, like, the lights came on.
Last month, we had our highest traffic month of People we'd ever had. Yeah. Now, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard helped that a little bit, but it-- we probably would've had it anyway. So it's really just, like,
freeing, understanding what a brand means. And here's the thing. You need to have healthy debate for that. Yeah. Right? You can't-- We're not-- We don't compensate anybody on traffic. We don't trace, chase traffic.
We don't even generally look at individual URLs for traffic. Mm.
We look at groups and concepts and things like what is working, what do people want, what are algorithms like, what are humans like, and it's been, like, a fascinating transition for us. Yeah.
But People is interesting because, like, never in a million years would I imagine Dotdash to, to have started a People, like, like...
I understand it was part of the Meredith, like, portfolio, but, like, that was, like, it's a strange fit to me. Like, just because, like, a lot of your business- It, uh-... is very intent driven. I do not think...
I mean, you can stretch the word intent driven however you want it to, for it to fit. [laughs] But I don't think of People as that. There's so... It's not. It is absolutely not intent.
About, uh, call forty percent of their traffic is intent driven when you break it down- Okay... as to what people are reading and doing. So sixty percent's not, and it's seventy million uniques a month.
Like, it's one of the biggest- Yeah... single, like, ish topic sites in the world. It's amazing. I, I think what we loved about it is we've always said, "We're never gonna do news, we're never gonna do sports." Yeah.
That's what I'm asking. We can't sell that. We don't wanna be any part of that. But we never said we were never gonna do entertainment. The problem with entertainment was the economics are different, right?
The traffic is less valuable. It's a little less predictable. It's gonna be a little bit more programmatic, although we have tremendous, like, entertainment advertising and brands in advertising there. Ooh.
If we did to People what we did to our other brands, and again, People had been in the shadow of print for this really long timeThat we knew that entertainment could work if you had scale.
There's only really like one or two things, mainly people, that has enough scale to make entertainment work. So when we had a chance to look at Meredith, we were initially very skeptical of people. Like, what?
We don't know how to do this. And it turns out we actually do know how to do this. It's the same thing we've done for our other sites. Yeah. Right? Just a different kind of content, and you're doing it scale.
It's like unit economics are less, but the units are so much more that it totally works. And from a brand sale perspective- Yeah...
being able to include people into deals that are, like, super performance driven, intent driven, down funnel is something that lots and lots of marketers want, right?
Like, we are first step of the Academy Awards and the Grammys. We do all kinds of stuff. We have a whole new management team there led by, like, Leah Wire and Lynn Zaccarello, like the, this all-female management team.
It's all female management. They haven't had female leadership in God knows how long, and it's gonna be... We're really... It's been a actually pleasant whole thing.
But like widening- Frankly, it made me realize- You're widening the lane, and I wonder because, like, we've talked over the years and I... about like- Yeah...
you know, people I will not mention, but you're like, "Ah, I don't know why they're doing news. Like, they're not... Like, that's like crazy."
When everyone was, like, pivoting into news, like- But again, we're not- Uh, and but I wonder, like, because this is like you're getting out of service- We're not doing... We're not... It...
Well, so we're news in that it's entertainment news, but it... what it is and what works for us is not so much service, although we definitely do like service. And again, forty percent of this is service.
It's defined audience. News has no defined audience, and the defined audience for sports is, like, dudes. So the defined entertainment- Still forty-nine percent of the population...
driven audience, whatever your audience. I mean- Yeah, I know. But it's too broad. You can't... Unless you have a gi... It, it... You could do sports if you have a humongous site, and you can make money doing it.
Like, that's what people is. Yeah. It's so big and so scaled.
And look, the other thing which is not, which is the other thing working in our favor, and like I'll just say it directly, people, for whatever it's worth, and it has been run by print people since its inception.
So it has gotten to seventy million uniques a month, always playing second fiddle to a print magazine that frankly is a way smaller part- Yeah... of the mix.
So by putting real digital people in charge and letting the digital have, you know, equal time, if not the lead slot, has changed everything. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the business model.
How important has commerce been? Because, like, I always think about, like, how you guys were always very performance driven to me. Like, and in that, I don't mean that as a knock. That's good- Yes...
because you wanna be on the [laughs] performance side really. You can add the brand stuff, like, you know, and that, I think that's wonderful.
But, like, performance gives you a ton of leverage, and I think of commerce as being, like, the perfect performance. Like, instead of like, you know, giving it over to someone- Uh, it is, it's very performance...
and it changes to me the mindset- So we've been-... of like, the pub- Everything... the organization to some degree probably. So we never d- It's like all things we've talked about. We never did like a pivot to commerce.
Like four or five years ago, when we started to understand what, like, intent was, we learned from studying our users that if you're on LifeWire because your router is too slow, there's two paths to take.
We're gonna help you fix your router, which never happens 'cause nobody can fix a router, or you need to buy a new router. And people wanted us to help them buy a new router, so we started to do this, right?
The, here's the best router, here's the best router for a big house, for a small house, for, you know, under a hundred bucks, over a hundred bucks, for your office, for your whatever. And that started to work.
And before, I'm not sure, and now I think last year between Dotdash and Meredith, I'll get these numbers slightly wrong, I think we set three billion dollars of transactions to partners last year, helping you buy the best blender, helping you source the best brokerage account, helping you do all these things that when you have super fast sites with incredible content and it's trusted, people then wanna take the next step.
And we do it all with impeccable editorial integrity, and we do it all where there's not a single person who writes any of these reviews that knows anything about how we get paid.
We have, after the Meredith acquisition, we probably have a hundred to a hundred and a hundred and twenty thousand square feet of product testing space.
We have forty-eight or forty-nine test kitchens where we test every recipe that we ha- that we write, every, like, tool and every pot and every pan because we're so big in the food space.
Like, it has become a huge business for us, and it's a material part of our revenue. You know, I, I'm not sure.
I now forget the combination how much it is, but it's probably close to, you know, twenty-five, thirty percent of our revenue is from- Yeah... helping people decide what transactions to do.
And again, it happened very organically. The beauty for us is w- it wasn't this thing. We're not like some random n- news publisher that said, "Okay, well now we're- Yeah...
gonna tell people what vacuum cleaners to buy." That's not what we do. We review vacuums on Spruce, and we review it on Better Homes and Gardens, and we review it on My Domain. And, you know, you're...
if we're reviewing, uh, products on Food Network- Yeah... it's on our recipes, right, because the audience is different.
So we probably have two hundred, two hundred and fifty people that are just product testing, review writing now, and it's really become a major part- Yeah... of what we do. But you're also selling products, right?
And I'm interested in that because, like, look, we've seen, like, with Food fifty-two and a few others, like, it... there are a lot of things that sound good on paper but are really difficult to execute. We don't...
So we don't really sell... Almost everything we do is, uh, is we send to someone else to sell. Right. We have tried to sell some things ourselves. We tried some stuff at liquor.com.
We tried some other small things, and you're right. Like, we're not... It- There's a whole secondary thing when you sell something, that everyone thinks you just sell it and it's over. Mm-hmm.
Like, the customer service, sourcing- Ah, trust me... inventory. Like, we don't know how to do that, and m- maybe we'll learn, and we can definitely learn, and we've... we're playing around.
You know, we have these amazing cocktail kits at liquor.com that we sold a million, not a million, but like- Yeah... a whole bunch of last Christmas.
It's an immaterial amount of revenue, but we're learning how to do this. And right now for us in the value chain-It is, we're much better at let's get the six whatever, home sushi makers, the best ones.
Let's test them, let's have all these chefs do all these things to them, and let's tell you which one to buy, and then if you click through us, we get paid something.
That is better for us now than trying to merchandise sushi makers and sell them. Yeah. That's not gonna work. Yeah. I...
Because it's interesting 'cause a lot of people like wanna go down this direction of blurring the lines between media and product, right? And I get it.
Like, you know, it's, and it sounds good in presentations and stuff like this, and I'm like, "Oh, that sounds very exciting." Me being, I mean, uh, you know, like, uh, you...
Like, I, it is very hard to think of anyone who has successfully... There's no such thing as a Magalog. There, it has never worked, it is, there, it has never been.
There are publishers and people who have media assets who are excellent at selling. They, uh, but they're really two totally separate things. Yeah. So- Like, you don't, you're not, you know, it's not like...
It's a different audience. Yeah. So the final thing is just, is around like when you think about the, the business and how it's changed, right, over, over the last several years. Are we gonna talk about the Eagles here?
'Cause I was promised we could talk about- We're gonna talk... Okay, that's the final thing. Like am I doing it at the end? Fine. It's the press. Like I don't like- First time, long time, Brian. First time, long time.
[laughs] We talk about the Eagles every single time. I get shit every time I've had you on a podcast. People are like, "We don't wanna hear about the Eagles." But it is, is important.
But when you think about like how the business has changed, you know? Is there an area that like... 'Cause I know you said like, "We're not gonna go into news. We're not gonna go to sports."
I find it a little bit stranger because like now sports is, media is very transaction-focused.
I mean, maybe that window is closing with sports betting, but like- I think what I would also say is in think we saw the landscape in entertainment where we thought we would compete is significantly more open than the landscape in sports.
Okay. Yeah, there's a lot of like... But like are there- Meaning sports is way more competitive.
Like, 'cause I think what's interesting, and we'll see how it goes with people, but like, you know, running that playbook on people is totally different than running the playbook on better homes and garden, I think.
Like, maybe it's kinda like- Totally different. Okay. Yeah. Like, but do you think like that'll give you like even more confidence to like, [laughs] you know, to go into a lot- I mean-... broader areas?
'Cause I mean, you've been like very much just- I may that be our, may that be our worst problem. [laughs] Like, uh, uh, you know, uh, we generally haven't lacked for confidence. Sometimes it's misdirected.
Um, but, you know, maybe? I don't know. We'll see. I think that we obviously have our hands full. We're six months in. We, we- Yeah... haven't done anything yet. We haven't proven to anybody.
We've done a million things internally that make us believe our thesis, right? That we think we were totally right with this deal, and there's all these green shoots and things that prove we're done.
But like, we have to go do it now, and the... I think the one interesting thing for us is if we don't do it, like look, the market's tough now. It might get worse. It might get better.
All these other things are going on. But if we don't do it, it's our fault. Like, and we really believe that.
With the things that we know from Dotdash and having to do this ourselves to combine with these like incredible brands that we got from Meredith, and frankly, the incredible people at Meredith that know how to deal with brands, and we don't.
We have to learn from them. Like, if we don't do this, it's our fault. Like, it's not like you're not gonna hear us blaming Google or blaming Facebook. Like, it's not their fault. It's our fault if we don't do this.
Right.
And we have, I, I think we have as good a chance as anybody to make a, the traditional publishing media business that can stand on equal footing with the Facebook, whatever Metas and Googles of the world when you go into an advertiser.
And if we can do that because of this combination of scale and intent and brand, we can do that on our size, and we're almost as big as those guys in terms of uniques.
Like, we got a puncher's chance to do something really incredible here, and that's what we're trying to do.
Yeah, so like wh- on that journey, like I'm wondering like, 'cause like, you know, in Cannes now, it's like, it's all, everyone's talking about data like nonstop and stuff like this. And like, I think it...
Everyone's saying, "Well, now the publishers have more power because they have first party data, and it's all about first party data." You know, give, give me your sort of reaction to that [laughs] first of all.
Like, is that real or not? I mean, I mean, uh, it... Is it real? Is it not real? Like I... So here's what we have always thought and believed. Look, there's an entire ecosystem built around cookies that is
in, that is at some stage of falling apart. It's probably like two-thirds apart now.
What we've always wanted to do, and even people fits into this too, is if you're intent-driven traffic, like if you land on content for us that's like what color do I need to paint my kid's bedroom, my infant's bedroom, we know everything about you we need to know way better than a cookie could ever tell you.
We know that you likely just had a kid or are taking care of a kid. We know that correlates with needing a new car. We know it correlates with needing a new house. We know it correlates with needing a new credit card.
We know it correlates with paint and furniture. Like, we're good on targeting. And the story we have to tell is that beats cookies and beats any of this data and identifiers, and we don't need to know who you are.
We just need to know what you're doing. If we can tell that story, we're great. Now, what we've been able to do is, you know, I think we have thirty million user sessions a day.
Across thirty million plus user sessions a day, when you- Mm-hmm... aggregate the behavior of all these people, we know an incredible amount of things.
Now, that's first party data 'cause that's how they're performing on our sites. But I don't need to know that you're Brian Marcy. I just need to know that you went to this.
So it's, so we get around a lot of these issues, and it's a story we're trying to tell. Now, the question for us is there's a lot of people trying to make other identifiers. Like, do we play ball with them?
Do we not play ball with them? You have to do what advertisers want you to do, right? Because it's their- Yeah...
money, and all of them, you know, like CMOs and agencies and advertisers and this supplier and that supplier and the other, they're all built around something that is self-serving for...
If you're the CMO and you just spent all this money [laughs] doing all this like cookie-based stuff for the last five years, you don't wanna go back to your boss and be like, "Oh, dude, I was totally wrong."
So we gotta figure out how to work with that. Yeah. But at the end of the day, w- we like where this is all headed. Yeah. Okay, so now we're gonna do five minutes on, uh, Philadelphia sports.
For those of you who are uninterested, you can stop listening right now. We're not gonna talk about the Sixers for obvious reasons, so we'll just go... And I think-I don't want... No, I don't want PJ. No PJs.
It's too on the nose. Stop it. So- You can trade five below what you want, but no PJ.
[laughs] But like, so I think because, like, you know, with Philly sports ca- karma and just excitement, like, and it's gone from, you know, excitement about the Sixers to excitement about the Eagles.
I, personally, I think it's misplaced since they'll need a new quarterback, but I defer to you. I don't know. I... What my take on Hurts, I, I think we're good enough. We're good enough. We're good enough.
We're not gonna... I don't think we're not winning anything important, but we're good enough. We gotta see. Here's the thing that gives me encouragement. AJ Brown loves the guy, wants to play with the guy.
Now, he got a lot, paid a lot of money to do it. Yeah, yeah. And you're paying a lot of money. Could... You might wanna play with your friend who's not that good because like- [laughs] Absolutely...
I got paid a lot of money. You see the guy, like, what, what's- But the guy was good.
Uh, with Tyreek Hill is, like, in, in, uh, in Miami and, like, Tua can't hit, like, the side of a bar, and he's like he's more accurate than [laughs] Mahomes. No.
[laughs] And that's a fair, fair- And he's saying this from his, like- But yeah. [laughs]... his, like, South Beach, like, mansion or whatever, like, [laughs] just like whatever. Totally. [laughs] Totally.
I like the defense. I like the pick of Davis.
Also, my son's name is Davis, so I can buy a jersey that says Davis on the back, and it doesn't have to be one of those weird custom ones you make and put your own name on the back. Yeah.
So I can add it to, like, the Anthony Davis jersey collection, which is very positive for my house. Yeah. Um, but I don't know, I feel pretty good. Okay, what- We have a millennial coach.
What, what's the- He posts millennial things- I know... and wears millennial T-shirts. He is. I, I- [laughs] He's, you know, he's planting his seeds and whatever, it's growing and whatnot. But, like, so give me the...
You're over under what's the record this year. Now, there are now 17 games, and I was like- Sevent- I know, first saw that the first game. I always want to say 10 and six. [laughs] I think... What's the...
Is the over under nine and a half? I think so, yeah. What's the- Nine and a half. I gotta look it up. I look. I s- I take the over. I think they win 10 and seven. I think the NFC East is so horrible. Yeah.
Like, the Commander's karma is terrible. The Giants are terrible. The Cowboys are just the Cowboys. So that, that... You've got five wins there, and then I think they find five more. There's, like, the Jaguars at home.
There's a bunch of weird games. They should be fine. Okay, we're gonna end on that optimistic note.
I just gotta get this schedule to figure out to, yeah, to figure out, you know, which game I can hit someone up for tickets in Philadelphia. Oh, come on, you gotta have, like, you know, the Dash- Trust the process...
Dash, Meredith, Bot. No, but, hey, wait, on your travels, on your travels, have you seen Hustle yet? What? Hustle, the Adam Sandler movie- Yeah... on Netflix about- When did this come out?
Like, it's a Sixers Philadelphia basketball story. [laughs] A thousand great Philly basketball cameos. I've been... Neil, I've been in Europe for three weeks. Uh- I don't know. It came out a few weeks ago.
You gotta watch it. It's actually not... It's a pretty good movie. It's not like- [laughs] A little bit more sophisticated. [laughs] You would have been watching a lot of plates. So watch Hustle. You should watch Hustle.
It's very good. There's outstanding cameos from, like, from Julius Erving on down. T- like, Tyrese Maxey's in.
I watch it with my, again, my eight-year-old son, who on, like, a one to tens, no sevens, no tens, you gotta commit six or eight.
If you're from Philly and were a, like, a bad to mediocre high school basketball player like me- Right... it's a singular act of cinema that I love deeply.
The only person who liked it more than me was my son because, like, Tyrese Maxey was in it. He's eight, and he's like... My son can't separate the fact that, like, well, Tyrese Maxey- Yeah. [laughs]...
and Tobias Harris are playing themselves. How can this not be real? I'm like, "Well, it's not-" How did Tobias do in that? "... part of his job." Oh, that's a different story. Other than that, it was great.
But you should watch Hustle. Uh, we wanna end on, we wanna end on an optimistic note. Neil, thank you so much. Un- un- unclear. Oh, that's cute. That's staying in.
[laughs] Tobias doesn't look perfectly fine that people sh- Can you not do that? Can you keep that in, please?
If people wanna shit on me on the internet, like, all day long, and someone gives me a $276 million contract, yeah, deal. It's- Every day. It's fine. Catch and Shoot Tobias is new, and he's only got two years left.
He might be, like, a deadline chip. God is good to Tobias. Thank you, Neil. I appreciate it. [laughs] All right, thanks. That was fun. Thank you for listening this week. We will be back next week with a new episode.
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