[on-hold music] We need scale because we've built a bit of a better mousetrap that is a little future-proof. Like, we don't need cookies, and we can deliver incredible scale for marketers and outstanding performance
based on intent, and that's why we needed scale. You're asking the exact same question our board of directors asked. Like, I don't get it. Oh, good. I can join. I'm available. Yeah, there you go.
I gotta get out of this studio. [laughs] But until then...
[on-hold music] Welcome to the Rebooting show, where each week I talk about building sustainable media businesses with those doing just that. I'm Brian Morrissey.
This week, I have a conversation I had at an opulent villa in the south of France.
It's a discussion I had during Cannes with Dotdash Meredith CEO, Neil Vogel, someone I've spoken to several times in podcasts over the years. What Neil and his team have done at Dotdash has been really legendary.
I mean, they took what was a collection of Web 1.0 assets in About.com and transformed them into, depending on how you measure it, the biggest digital media publisher in the world, thanks in large part to the acquisition of Meredith, home to the former Time Inc.
assets like People, Better Homes and Garden, Food and Wine, and others.
You know, the idea behind the two point seven billion dollar acquisition was to marry the Dotdash formula of focusing on intent-based traffic, that's usually code for search, and monetizing it well with the marquee brands of the Meredith properties.
Now, the catch, Dotdash parent company IAC struck the Meredith deal in October twenty twenty-one, the absolute peak of the market.
So we discussed the deal, the challenges of integration, and as well as the elephant in the room. I mean, search is going through its biggest change since Google ushered in the ten blue links era.
Anyone who has seen the Google generative search experience rolled out in response to the popularity of ChatGPT can see how it will upend much of the dynamics of SEO.
When we discuss how Neil sees that shaking out, there's a lot you can control and a lot you can't, what the company is doing to prepare. Hope you enjoy this conversation.
And if you do enjoy this podcast, please leave it a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And send me your feedback. I'm Brian at therebooting.com. Enjoy this conversation with Neil.
[on-hold music] [audience clapping] Anyway, I hope everyone's had a good Cannes. And Neil, thanks so much for having us to your house. Oh, thanks for coming. This is amazing. I gotta get a place like this.
I mean, all week people have been coming here and congratulating me on my house. [laughs] Congrats on the house. You really came a long ways. Like, yeah, I've worked really hard. It's my house.
You know, before this, we were talking, and we were talking about Cannes first-timer, about the rules of Cannes. I had written a whole post on this. I remember that one. But I'd love to know what are your...
Give me like o-one or two rules of Cannes for you. Never get on a boat. Come on. And definitely never get on a boat that leaves the port. That is like- Absolutely. -hard stop no. Yeah.
Oh, and don't complain that you're tired or busy- Yeah. -because nobody cares. That's true. My two rules. I would only add... I mean, the boat thing is very true. I don't know if anyone heard about.
I will not name the organization because these things happen to everyone. They took a bunch of CMOs to Monaco. Monaco is actually close, but not that close, at least by boat. I'd be like, "That's a long trip."
It turned into, with the wind, it was a three-hour tour like Gilligan's Island, and- Sounds awesome. -some CMOs were like barfing on each other. [laughs] You gotta tell me. I think I know who that was.
You have to tell me afterwards. I'll tell you afterwards. I know who it is. But, you know, look, anyone who does events, you can have those things that happen. Or you can not take a boat and don't have to worry about it.
Yeah. I mean, needless to say, the CMOs took the overland route back. They were not into like [laughs] getting back on the boat.
Even if they were told, like, you know, the winds that are back now, it's like, no, you're not gonna get a second chance on that. So we could spend all day on that.
But back in a different era in twenty twenty-one, the fall of twenty twenty-one. I love twenty twenty-one, one of my favorite years. I know it was the pandemic, but I was living in Miami.
It was like the height of like zero interest rate policy. People would like send me DMs and be like, "Can I like buy a sponsorship from you or something like this?" I was like, "Wow, this is really easy."
There was a moment at the end of twenty twenty-one when a few of us were sitting around, and we were joking. We didn't think we were being serious, and we were like, "Have we hit peak Dotdash?
Like, today, there's like two million dollars of incremental comes in one day and like this." And then we're like, "This-- I don't know what's going on, but there's a lot of money flying around." Yeah.
So you chose this time to spend two point seven billion dollars on Meredith. Um, a lot of amazing assets.
And I remember at the time it was like, wow, I mean Dotdash, the artist formerly known as About.com, i-is taking over, you know, one of the storied magazine publishing brands.
If you had to do it over again, would you still make that purchase at two point seven billion dollars? Look, I'd like to make every purchase at like a dollar, but that's just not reality. [laughs] But I would...
We've talked about this before. I'm not kidding. I would do- Well, I knew that was preparation, Neil. You're not supposed to show the preparation. I know. I know. I know.
I would do it, I would do it in a heartbeat without hesitation, and I can tell you why. Like at, at Dotdash, formerly About.com, we've done a pretty good job in an era when everyone's like, "Oh, no, media is not working.
It's broken." It's totally working. We went from whatever, seventy to three hundred in revenue and losing a bunch of money to making nearly a hundred in EBITDA in like five years.
And we had a really great formula for being a publisher. We liked it. It was super simple. Make incredible content, make really good sites and experiences, and have fewer ads that work better. And it's amazing.
It works when you do that. And we grew this great business, but I think we were fairlySelf-aware.
Part of it is we're part of IAC and work for Barry Diller, and we went from a company they probably didn't have to pay too much attention to, to like, "Oh, that was a cute trick.
Now, like, turn it into something of scale." And w-we knew we had a real weakness. We had two real weaknesses.
We had this incredible ability to serve users 'cause we were really good at it, and this incredible ability to make advertisers happy because we have lots of intent, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
Like, we d- we don't do news, we don't do sports, we don't do politics. It's all like how to bake an apple pie, how to live with cancer, like all...
And, and that's really valuable s- content, and you know what somebody wants. It makes targeting easier, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what we were lacking was brands.
And we built all of our brands essentially from scratch. Like, we invented very well, and we invented The Spruce.
The Spruce turned out to be the biggest home site on the internet, three times the size of Better Homes and Gardens, but Better Homes and Gardens is a much better brand.
So we knew we needed brands, we knew we needed scale, and through, like, a weird sequence of events I don't need to get into, the Meredith assets came available in sort of like late summer twenty twenty-one.
And sort of like within forty-eight hours of finding out, my CFO, Tim, COO, Alex, me, we were in with IAC saying, "We have to find a way to buy this because this is a, this is..." It, it probably skips a step.
Like, we bought a bunch of stuff, but we'd spent twenty-five million dollars, not two point five billion dollars buying things.
And, but what it did is it got us all these brands in the categories we loved: home, food, travel. Like, this is- Mm-hmm... people.
Better Homes and Gardens, Real Simple, Food and Wine, Travel and Leisure, the best brands in the world, most of the old Time Inc. brands.
And if we can get them, run our internet playbook on something that wasn't very internet-ish because the backstory of Meredith, it was family-owned, it was very Wall Street concerned, very dividend concerned, sort of cash constrained because of that.
The bet was we could do something really special with these assets, and we could modernize them. We had a really good idea of what to do with brand, which we've proven actually to be right with that.
And we-- If we didn't do it, we would be a subscale media business right now that nobody would care about. There are no subscale media businesses that are gonna survive. There just aren't. It just, it doesn't work.
So now we have the scale, the brands, the aptitude. We can deliver for advertisers in a way we think others can't, and we have, like, a really bright future.
Now, the issue that you, you were, like, alluding to is like, "Oh my god, you guys top ticked and paid the most possible." I'm not sure w-we...
Again, who knows what we actually would have paid were we to wait six months? Who knows we could have done it if we would have waited six months. I mean, Joey Levin said that you bought at the top.
I mean, [chuckles] did- I mean, he literally said that. We... It is not a great [chuckles] mystery. Like we- Like in a legal filing, he said it. We did. We're-- Look, we bought at the frothiest point of the market. Okay.
Right? If-- Whether-- Joey and I argue about this all the time. [laughs] You can call it a top. If I was that good- Okay... at calling a top, I'd have, like, sold everything. I, I didn't do that either. Yeah.
So yeah, but we bought, we paid up. We paid a full value for this business, but it was brands, and- Yeah... we deserved it. Now, the market's gonna go up, the market's gonna go down.
If you look out with a longer horizon, it doesn't matter.
We- So the theory of the case remains as true now in twenty twenty-three, June twenty twenty-three as November- I just had a board meeting last week, and in the board, IAC board meeting, I said it was basically the opening was, "Here's all the things going on in the universe, but thesis holds."
And the thesis is the future of media, whatever direction it takes, you have to have brands, you have to have flawless execution, you have to have scale, or you just can't serve advertisers, and you have to have an offering that's differentiated, which we do for advertisers now.
And we're on the other side of this integration by and large, and so we're like ninety percent done. We're culturally, we've come together. This week for us is we look out, everyone's like, "Oh, we love your villa."
I mean, five years ago, we were in, like, a crappy two-bedroom whatever off the Croissette Airbnb. So- I have a studio. Exactly. Well, there you go. [laughs] You gotta keep it light. Fast and light.
[laughs] And now this for, this week for us has been in many ways like a big coming out party. Like we're, "Here's our capabilities, here's what we can do," and it's, it's fun.
I mean, we went from being someone nobody cared about at about.com to being the biggest publisher in America. Yeah, and you got this nice house. Six years.
That's why I take photos of my studio Airbnb 'cause when I got the villa- [laughs]... TRB villa, be like, "Two years ago, I was in a crappy studio."
We just play the Drake song, Started From The Bottom, where we all dance through the lobby here. Okay.
So I, I get that the thesis is correct, and integration is always a challenge, and I think it's always sort of like hand-waved away. C-break down what like...
'cause this is a massive integration challenge and just like what are the parts, okay? Because there are... I guess there's a technology integration that goes on.
There's company culture integration that takes place, which is even probably more difficult when it's- Let's do culture first 'cause that's the more, that's probably the more interesting to talk about.
We-- So we were eight hundred people. Dash, the Meredith was, I don't know, three thousand, thirty-five hundred people in total. We were young, not young in age, but young in outlook, young in media set.
In New York, very aggressive. You still make fun of me for this, but we fashioned ourselves as like outsiders. We're not outsiders anymore, obviously.
And we'd grown this thing, and we were very proud of it, and almost like a little bit culty. Meredith had just gone through this fairly traumatic acquisition of Time Inc.
probably three years before we bought it, and that left Meredith with a good culture, like a very financially aware culture. But, and I think they would admit this, most people, but a fairly fractured culture.
Like, you could meet somebody and know if they were Time Inc. or Meredith when we got there. So it was almost like merging three businesses, and we were much smaller.
So it's either minnow eating whale or shark eating whale. We'd like to think we're the shark. Some days we were the minnow.
And then, but then, like, the whale was like two totally different bites, [chuckles] and it was like the Meredith people and the Time Inc. people. But i- and the way that you do it is just we do what we think is right.
We, the bunch of people here, still from MeredithWe're very direct, we're very honest, we're very specific, and we're very clear from the outset with what we want to do, which was get print in a place of being sustainable, which was a big deal for this company whose roots were in print, and invest very heavily in digital, which means we're going to treat TikTok or Instagram or websites the same way you treat print mag.
It's just all a media asset, and we are gonna be a brand-led business. We're gonna take these brands, and we're gonna put the right people in charge. We have food brands and home brands and take food and wine.
Food and wine, we had to get everybody to agree what food and wine was, like what the branding is for food and wine.
Then the print people have to do their print thing, the web people have to do their web thing, social people have to do the social thing, and it's gonna be different.
In print, food and wine is incredibly inspirational stories of chefs and food and this. On the internet, it's recipes. And on TikTok, it's like food, entertainment, all ki- you know, Guy Fieri doing crazy things.
When the people running each of those businesses all agree what the brand is, you can make a brand work in different media. And that was like the major change we had to do with the Meredith crew.
The Meredith team was very print-led everything. And we said, "We love print, it's amazing, but that's not how media works."
And we have these amazing brands, and if you just think of our brands behave differently on Instagram than they behaved on the internet, we didn't have print.
And that's what we've been most successful doing, and that's what's helped get the culture straightened out because it put everybody on even footing. It wasn't like, "The web's more important or print's more or this."
And that was very positive. The hard thing was integrations are hard, and the technical part of our integrations, which was we have this advantage at Dotdash that everything we built, our CMS, overall, any...
First of all, any publisher that tells you they're a technology company is lying. They're not. But, but we built all of our stuff purpose-built for us.
I thought your previous line was that you should run away if they said- We should run away. Whatever. Run away, lying.
It's just like, don't invest in them. Yeah. You-- They're not, but we had built like a, a, a really strong CMS. It was good for like our type of content, and we're doing all these things.
It turns out it's very complicated to get hundred-year-old brands migrated into our system, so they work. Like Better Homes and Gardens is a hundred years old. They were like the first commercial web.
There's like code in there- Yeah. -from God knows when. So it was, it was a little bit complicated. So that just slows you down, right? It just slows you down.
But- Like I get the sense that it just, it went slower than you expected? It- Or like what was different with the integration? 'Cause it's like any, it's, I don't know, maybe it's nothing like a war.
No matter what ha- It's not like a war- No matter what happens- -in the south of France. It just, [laughs] no matter what it trans- [laughs] It, by the way, there's like a Napoleon plaque down our street. It's awesome.
I know. Like I had no idea he was like hanging out on like D. I think he, he's from here, this part of the world. He's from Corsica. Really? 'Cause they have a sign like he came out of like Elba and like- Oh, okay.
-and he came to Cannes. I'm like, "Oh, what a strange decision." But whatever happens in integration, the point is whatever goes wrong, it just makes it go slower. Like that's the outcome.
The outcome of messing it up or not understanding it or like- Yeah. -misjudging it, it just goes slower, and it probably took us six months longer than it should have.
So market gets very tough, integration takes longer, and then you're like- Yeah. "Ugh, that wasn't that fun." But you've also seen, I mean, there's a lot less...
I mean, your ad business has been in kind of rough shape the last few quarters, right? So y-yes and no.
And I'm just wondering how much is, like at some point, like get me the yes or no, but like how much of that is dealing with the integration and how much of that is the market itself?
Because like I can remember for years looking at like, say, Yahoo or something like this as like the bellwether. I mean, you're now like the biggest, like- Yeah. -digital and print publisher.
So tell me, because is- We have said, and I think we're, hopefully we're gonna see it from this point forward, that given our assets and our scale and our brands, we should outperform the market, whatever the market's doing.
In the first, in our public numbers of the first quarter of this year, we are in the range of everyone else that sells ads. We were down, I think ten percent, eleven percent. I might have the number slightly wrong.
Something like that, which is in the range of what everyone else was down. Like Meta, if you read their numbers, Meta's ad rates were down like fifteen or sixteen percent. They just served twenty percent more ads.
So we didn't do things like that, but we were down in the range of everybody else.
It was a combination of the market's really hard, integration was really hard, and as part of the integration, some of the things we did is we stopped doing a lot of things that Meredith...
We killed a lot of the things they were doing. We killed a lot of content. So we dug ourselves a little bit of a hole, but it was an intentional hole we knew we'd come out of.
And I think as you see us go into the back half of the year, I mean, given the guidance and stuff we've given Wall Street, we expect, you know, return, return to growth basically now. Okay.
So there is, I know you can't say a lot of forward-looking statements and stuff like this, but I think one of the things that I've picked up in this week,
obviously the first half of the year was a little rough for the ad business. It's brutal. And, you know, it's come at a time when the economy hasn't fallen apart.
Now, advertising is always like sort of a canary in the coal mine with the economy 'cause it's easy to turn on and off.
And I just wonder like how much is the overall economy or if there's something else happening that is, is a longer term issue.
Because when you look at the advertising holding companies and their results, it doesn't sort of match up with the publishing companies.
And I'm just wondering what is-- if you have any insight into the market and whether, you know, the overall market for digital advertising has itself peaked.
I, again, I don't know if it's peaked or it's definitely growing at a slower point or flat or maybe even shrinking than it has in my whole career, and I've been doing this a long time in one form or another.
I think what's happening is uncertainty is really badFor advertising. Like a, a weak market that's kinda flat is okay. A good market is obviously good, but uncertainty is bad.
When there's uncertainty, people can't make decisions. If you can't make decisions, the decision's no.
And I think it's been very-- The thing that has happened is the CEO, the whatever has gone down in the CMO's office and been like, "You know what? I don't-- We don't need to spend money this quarter.
It's not gonna make a difference anyway." You can step out of the market for a while, and it's not gonna matter. I, I think there's two things going on. There's no real catalyst that is gonna force people to spend.
There's nothing really happening right now. And the way it was described by someone that works for us is there's no FOMO in the market.
There's nobody in the market saying, "My competitor is doing this amazing marketing thing right now that I need to keep up with." It's very rare. Now, the other thing that's weird is it's really sector by sector.
Like, we're in the travel business. It's doing great. Yeah. Pharma's doing okay. Financial services. Terrible. It's ter-- Because- Yeah.
-interest rates are up and, you know, we own Investopedia, and a site called The Balance. We're one of the biggest financial publishers in the world, and it's just a tough market.
And we're probably doing marginally better than everybody else, but when you're down double digits, it doesn't feel particularly good. Yeah. And so is that, like, hit bottom, though? I mean, that you're...
Yeah, again, I know it's sector by sector. The word we've been using, we use-- This is boring to talk about Wall Street, but the word we've been using for Wall Street- Mm-hmm. -is we call it stable weakness. Okay.
Like, there's no sign that it's getting worse, but there's also no sign that it's getting better, and we'll see.
It-- Honestly, if stable weakness persists for a long enough time, that will probably lead to improvement because there will be some stability.
I think people are very concerned about the shock that's gonna change the fortunes of the economy, and companies and marketers get caught flat-footed. And there's a lot of... All data can be interpreted two ways, right?
You-- There's a... A-and everything is interpreted negatively now. Yeah. Well, go figure. There's a lot of negative stuff out there. There's a lot of negative stuff.
[chuckles] But we're in the south of France, so we're gonna be positive. Are you buyers or sellers of assets in the back half of the year? I mean, because, like, you've had these assets.
I know you're gonna say, like, "We love all of our assets." Some of them don't-- I don't understand how they totally make sense. Like, I don't...
Explain why People and Entertainment Weekly are, like, Dash Meredith properties. Like, I always thought the Dotdash playbook, what you talked about, obviously is very SEO.
We, we can talk about intent, but intent is very SEO-driven, right? And you say you stay away from news and stuff like this.
I don't understand the celebrity and entertainment stuff and why that- That was, like, nine questions. All right. There's so much to unpack there.
So first, I, I don't think there's not gonna be a lot of transactions in media. As of right now, we're probably neither buyers nor sellers. Who knows?
The question of People and EW is we've always said from the outset when we've been doing this talking for probably ten years since we started this experiment- Mm-hmm.
-we would never do news, we would never do sports, we'd never do politics. We never said we wouldn't do entertainment. And we like entertainment, and we do think it has lots of elements of intent.
It doesn't have the kind of intent a health site has or a home site has or a food site has, but it has enough that we can make a go of it, and we really like that space competitively.
But to compete in entertainment, that is a scale play because the traffic isn't as valuable as health traffic or finance traffic or travel traffic.
So we knew that if we were going to compete in entertainment, it was basically only going to be with People, and we bought People.
And People's been like a, you know, some of the public numbers you can dig up on People has been, like, a smashing success for us.
A, a lot of it was because in, in the old days before we bought it, People was a print-centric publication. And it's like we talked about earlier.
We got everybody on that team to agree what People is, and People is ordinary people doing extraordinary things, extraordinary people doing ordinary things, and how that translates across all kinds of media.
People is a juggernaut. I mean, it's like ten million user sessions a day. It's massive on social. We're still, whatever, two and a half million issues a week in print.
We're like three or four X the next size entertainment site. So we have a whole new team in charge, new editor-in-chief, all digital background people, and that thing is flying.
And EW is sort of like a sister publication almost to People. It's kinda like the same crew that run them both. Okay. And do any other categories interest you beyond or are you gonna- No.
Are you looking to go deeper within these- I think we, we might at some point. There are assets that are interesting to us that fill in holes that we don't have.
But right now we are on the internet in terms of just traffic, number one in entertainment, number one in food, number one in home, number one in health, like number three in finance, number three or four in travel.
W-we don't need more scale. We don't... We need to take the, you know, we probably have thirty-five or forty brands in total, but we have twenty real focused brands.
We need to get those brands singing, and they're s- it's starting to sing. Like, we're now, like, a year and a couple of months or almost eighteen months into this thing, and it's starting to go, whoa. It's back.
Starting to go like this awning on top of us. [laughs] And we're pretty happy with where we are and our momentum. Now you can't sort of...
You have to be a little market agnostic, and you have to say, "Well, where do we wanna be with audience growth?" We're like, "Oh, we're there." "Where do we wanna be with editorial talent?" "Oh, we're getting close."
Like, "Where do we wanna be with advertiser perception?" Uh, we just started. So we feel pretty good about...
Like, I'm not necessarily optimistic about the next quarter or the next four quarters, but I am generally very optimistic about our business and the brands we have. So why not news? Explain to me the...
I notice that you're like, "Uh, I don't like," like, but why not? Like, 'cause I mean, I think there is, like, a large question about the sort of viability of news that isn't The New York Times.
So what we do, so the kinda content we make- Why can't your playbook, I guess, work for a news hub? It might.
I mean, it's-- So the playbook that we do, which is real sort of like intent-driven, essentially what was service journalism before, it's like people think talking and singing are similar. They're not similar at all.
What we do and news are not similar at all. Different workflows, different, like, different everything. And we do a lot of news, like entertainment news, but that's a little bit different.
The economics of news, we don't like or understand how you sell ads. We don't like or understand it's a subscription business.
We're actually pretty good at subscriptions, but on the print side, it's just not something that interests us. It's too hard. It's too complicated. There's too many externalities that affect that business.
It is much easier for us to sellIntent-based audiences on content that we totally control where nothing puts you in a bad mood, where we wrote all the content and nothing...
You don't wanna be against crime, you don't wanna be against politics, you don't wanna be- Yeah. There wasn't anything to produce.
So hard to have business, I guess, with-without all of that, without the brand safety stuff and with its expensive customer. We've talked about this. I'm on the board of our hometown newspaper- Yeah.
-the Philadelphia Inquirer, and it's an incredibly challenging business, and it has way fewer similarities with what we do than you'd expect. How so? Basically what I just said.
It's re-- the way a newsroom functions is totally different. The way content is created is totally different. The expectations of, like, how you inter... It's just totally different. It's a different interaction.
It's just like a different everything. It's nothing is the same. Yeah.
So explain to me why scale is still so important and why you're betting on scale, 'cause I think there's this, you know, sort of offhand comment that the scale era is over, right?
Just because, you know, BuzzFeed and Vice didn't work out and Vox has hit a wall, et cetera. I have no idea. I can't speak to any of those models. They all speak for themselves is what I would say for that. Okay.
But why is their, their failure not because of scale? So what I was saying, so, so what we're doing... So I can just-- Well, I'll be very specific. Yeah. So we just launched an ad product that we're very excited about.
It's called Decipher. It is our intent targeting tool. So what we've done is because we're all essentially service content, we have a million and a half pieces of content, we've mapped them all to each other.
So we now can target all of our audiences without cookies. We know exactly what people want, right?
So if you come in to a, what color do I paint my newborn's bedroom article on Better Homes and Gardens, we know that you obviously just had a baby. We know that you're in the market for paint and home improvement stuff.
We also know that highly correlates with, like, needing a new mortgage, needing a new car, and stain removal content just because you've got kids. You're laughing, but it's true. It is the line.
What, what that allows us to do is we can go to marketers and say, "Hey, we have this intent contextual targeting we can do without cookies," which means it works on Android, it works on iOS, it now opens up the whole market.
If you use cookies, you can't advertise on half the market, which is absurd. Cookies are in theory going away at some point, maybe if Google decides they are, but that's not up to us.
But they're not effective, and this works. And we'll guarantee that this beats any audience targeting if you let us do this.
Now, and this Decipher targeting tool, which is now I'm gonna drop in there like newborn moms, and it's gonna tell you everywhere to put it, and we'll tell an advertiser to the URL where we put their ad and how every single ad performed.
And it's great, and it works, and we launched it a month ago, and it's been really well received. We actually did the exact same thing at Dotdash, but we were too small. We weren't big enough.
So when you want to target like this and target contextually and target with intent, you really need scale.
No matter how many sort of like rings away from that kernel of intent you get, we needed the scale to make this work. Mm-hmm. And when we basically tripled our size, we do, call it thirty million user sessions a day.
We have the best first-party data in the world. It's just not on an individual person. It's on how you behave when you need help with something. And we needed scale to make that work.
And w-what we're doing now with our first clients who are now running through the system is this is working incredibly well.
And the one stat that we were most proud of in the old Dotdash days before we complicated our lives and bought Meredith- Mm.
-was every quarter, and this was in our public statements, twenty-three or twenty-four of our top twenty-five advertisers renewed. Always came back. Meredith was way more campaign-driven, wasn't like that.
That was because our stuff performed and worked because we basically did a more rudimentary version of intent targeting. The problem was we weren't big enough.
We couldn't get the scale we needed to really serve advertisers that made it worth their while. And second, people knew our brands. They liked them.
We were upstarty, but l-leading a sale with Food & Wine or Travel + Leisure or People or Real Simple or Southern Living is very different than The Spruce or Verywell, no matter how much I love them. Yeah.
I mean, building a brand in a search environment is d- seems d- it's different than when you're building a brand in a variety of different environments.
You have to have a plausibility in a ten blue link environment that is totally different. You know, you can invent- Yeah. -like The Spruce and stuff like this that had no history, no legacy. Correct.
But like in a- No, that's right. In a search results, th-there's trust just because it's called The Spruce.
Well, and l-listen, the only way that when you're a new brand you get in search results is you have to be so much better than what's already in there.
Now, there's always exceptions to that, but, like, you have to be so much better than any other home site for us to have beaten Good Housekeeping or Better Homes and Gardens, and we were.
So now we're taking that discipline, and we're doing it on Better Homes and Gardens.
And if you think we were responsive on a search page, Better Homes and Gardens is crazy responsive because everybody knows what that is, and that's the in-credible part of this.
And I think the other thing is everyone says, "Oh, you guys are search. You guys are search." We are the same percentage from search as every other publisher in the world. We are... We're all like sixty percent-ish.
Yeah. Fifty, sixty... So we're exactly in that range. Health sites more, duty sites less, but just in that range. So this makes you win on everything. It makes you win on Pinterest. It makes you win on Apple News.
Facebook's not really out of the game for publishers. It doesn't really matter anymore, but it makes us able to syndicate our content to people. Mm-hmm.
Makes us win on places like Newsbreak or all these secondary places. So going back to your original question, why do we need scale?
We need scale because we've built a bit of a better mousetrap that is a little future-proof, like we don't need cookies, and we can deliver incredible scale for marketers and outstanding performance based on intent, and that's why we needed scale.
You're asking the exact same question our board of directors asked, like- Oh, good. I don't get it. I can join. I'm available. Yeah, there you go. [laughs] I gotta get out of this studio.
[laughs] But until then, with search, I know you're saying you're more than search, but, like, you know, obviously the roots of the company are in search. I mean, I remember covering about dotcom.
I mean, the roots of the internet are in search. And search is the backbone of the internet.In January, uh, we did a little chat. I think it was at AdExchanger. I asked you the AI question. You were a little dismissive.
You were like- No... "We'll never use AI." So I wanna talk, but first forget about-- let's leave these tools aside. Have you used the Google generative search experience- Yep... thing?
How scared did that make you when you used it? So there's historically been sort of like an unofficial economic agreement between- Yeah...
everybody, publishers, Expedia, you name it, between-- with us and search engines, which means Google. Yeah. Which is, "You can use our content for your business, which is a pretty good business.
In exchange, we get links, we get traffic, we get whatever." And- Mm-hmm... you know, when we started this- People would complain about the taxes, but everyone always complains about any tax.
Ev-everyone complains about everything, and [chuckles] including me.
And what happened is over time, Google has actually-- that bargain has remained very similar, but it's somewhat changed because back in the day, almost all of Google searches were sent off somewhere. Yeah.
Now, half of them never leave Google. They're no-click searches. Google answers it. And they're doing that generally with our content, other people's content.
If something happens now that our content or the accumulated knowledge of the universe content is used on Google and nobody clicks off, that economic arrangement- Breaks... gets ruptured. Breaks.
We don't know what it's gonna look like. We don't know if it's going to be negative. We've played in their search sandbox. I mean, we have thirty-five hundred people. We have a lot of people focused on- Yeah...
where our audiences come from, us and everybody else, and we don't know anything yet. Uh, what we've seen, some of it is- Wait, they're not talking to you about this?
I mean, come on, you're like- No, but they're talking to us constantly about this, but we don't know what they're going to do. They need to understand how their decisions impact everyone on the open web.
Now, they say repeatedly, "Oh, the open web, the health of the open web- Yeah. Yeah... is our most important thing." Look, every for-profit business in the world is gonna operate in their own self-interest at all times.
They just will. It's just the nature of capitalism. If you don't like it, you have to do something else. And there's no reason to think that they won't. I'm neither hitting the panic button nor pulling the rip cord.
The one thing that makes us feel good or better is that w-we've been doing this now a fairly long time. In internet terms, it's a long time, like a decade. We have great brands. People love our brands.
They w- I was just at, like, my hat was just at the Food and Wine Classic in Aspen last weekend, which was amazing and, you know, it's four thousand people paying three thousand dollars to come and hang out with the best chefs in the world.
Like, these brands are really meaningful. We have managed to not just survive but thrive through every era that some writer has named of the last decade.
Now, I think the AI era has potential to be more impactful and a-almost existential, depending on what happens. But let's see.
From what I've seen from Google, some of it is this would be not good at all, and some of it's like, "Oh, that'd be all right." So we just don't know what's going to happen. We're obviously- Yeah...
watching it very closely, but there's so much hype, and there are people out there clamoring for... Uh, like, I wouldn't even know what to ask Google for now. Here's what can't happen.
They can't learn on our content, and there'd be no reciprocity. That just is not right, and there's a whole legal angle- Yeah... and everything that I'm- Yeah, yeah... not smart enough to think of. That can't happen.
The question is- Well, Barry Diller's been pretty vocal that- He's been very vocal... it's time to lawyer up, like, for a lot of these companies. He's the guy that gave us the two point seven billion dollars. Yeah.
He's very voc-- And he's very vocal on principle also, and he's actually, uh, uh, entirely correct, in my opinion. I say that, A, because he is, and B- Yeah... obviously 'cause he's my boss. Yeah. But he is right.
W-We'll have to see. It's this concept of that we call internally reciprocity.
We have to see how it shakes out before we can react otherwise- So your quote-unquote bargaining position would be like, "If you do this, we're not gonna allow your LLMs to, like, be trained on our recipe content."
'Cause I've gone to ChatGPT, and I'm sure as many people have and gotten a recipe, and I, I haven't had to hit the s- the Jump to Recipe button, and that was a nice experience.
Yeah, I mean, you-- Look, there-- If you-- Here's the thing. If you go to the Google... The other thing is AI is not new. If you go to the Google search page now- Yeah...
and you're looking to buy a blender for that thing you're cooking- But an AI interface, in movie, it's about interface because when the interface changes, like, the interface rules everything, right?
It's about the Google search page. Yeah. And the more real estate that goes ahead of you, the worse you're going to do. Yeah.
So right now, if you're trying to buy a blender, right, to make that new recipe that you just got from ChatGPT- Yeah... you're gonna be like, "I need"- Oh, yeah, I'm still going to Serious Eats. I love Kenji.
[chuckles] You gotta go to Serious Eats. I met Kenji last week. He's the best. You're gonna search for, you know, best blender for my high-end kitchen, your high-end kitchen.
And right now on the Google search results, before you get-- there's paid ads, there's a carousel of things you can buy directly off the Google page.
Before you get down to our Serious Eats review of the best blenders for these kitchens, we still do incredibly well in that environment. So it's very hard to know what's going to happen. It's very hard to know...
Like, there's-- this whole middle layer has emerged, and we're a very active participant in guides, ratings, and recommendations because consumers do not trust Amazon reviews. They don't trust reviews on retailers.
They don't trust anything, so they need third-party validation of whatever they're trying to buy.
And it's us and Wirecutter, and we are one of the biggest, if not the biggest, affiliate referrers to pretty much every retailer. Yeah.
[upbeat music] But, like, everyone is playing in this game at this point.
Everyone- Right? It's not everyone's playing. It's why they're playing is because nobody trusts retailers or reviews. We'll see what happens with AI if people trust the results. I think in the long term they will.
I think the AI results are gonna get really good. But an AI can't test a recipe, and it can't test a blender.
It's gotta use our stuff to do that or someone's stuff to do that, and that is an inherently unfair proposition to take that kind of contentGive it back and have no consideration to the people who did the work.
So that's where we are, and that's where we have to see what happens. Who was the one who said, like, CTC? CTC. Cut the check. [laughs] Some athlete. I forget who it was. Like, wait, wait, cut the check.
It was-- Well, it was the Randy Moss, straight cash. Straight cash, homie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [laughs] I mean, it's, like, kind of a similar situation. Or it was actually Ricky Waters. He used it back for who, for what.
[laughs] If you're, you know- [laughs]... Ricky Waters was a Philadelphia Eagle back in, I don't even know, somewhere in the two thousands. The dark era. The dark era. The dark, dark era.
Before he became an amazing juggernaut. And he went over the middle, and some, like, linebacker was coming in his way, and, like, he got alligator arms.
And they asked him afterwards, like, "Ricky, why didn't you go for that ball and get, like, you know, like, murdered by this guy?" And he was like, "For who? For what?" [laughs] I feel like publishers will be that way.
[laughs] Like- I mean-... if there's no search traffic coming for their-- Like, I know everyone thinks, like, people get into publishing just do it for the passion. They will be.
I mean, the gloom and doom joke is we'll just go back to being a print publisher. That'll be fine. Yeah. There you go. That's fine.
But, like, uh, let's talk about the other side because you talked about not using AI to actually create the content.
I mean, AI's come up, like, a ton here in Cannes, and it's kind of like a fraught issue because this place is theoretically about creativity, and a lot of the early use cases of these AI technology is to be able to automate technology and/or automate creativity and eliminate a lot of the people involved in that because people are expensive.
They're a pain in the ass. They get sick. Sometimes they unionize and all sorts of different things, and people who operate spreadsheets don't like any of that.
So how do you think about using AI, first of all, as a new experience in order to have people come to you directly?
Like, I could imagine, say, a Serious Eats, you know, recipe bot, maybe a Kenji bot that I could go visit, you know, when I'm looking to my recipes.
I could also see you using these tools and train them on your existing content, and I could see you maybe even using AI to create some content. I would say all except the third. AI for us, there's two things.
There's, like, the on-page experience of what it can do. Mm-hmm. And then there's the analytics bit of what it does. And LLMs in their current form are sort of like the greatest analytic tools you can get.
Like, we can do things now, like we have very specific things we like when we make recipes, for instance. So we can teach the LLM, [lip smacks] "These are the twenty-five things that a great recipe has to have.
Here's what it needs to resonate on algorithms and do this and do that, and here's what we like to have as part of our content policies and all this stuff."
You can feed it into the LLM, and then you can have the LLM literally read all, whatever, three hundred thousand recipes we have across our sites and give you a report on every single one of them and where they may be deficient and what you need.
And then you can assign out the work to have someone go do that. The analytics stuff is just bonkers. The smartest publishers are learning that, and that is going to be the most useful. Explain that.
Like when- Like, let me, let me say, the commodity stuff, like breaking news and sports scores and all that, that-that's already been. Like that- Yeah. Yeah... ship has sailed on that stuff already.
Like- Earnings reports and- Earnings reports. Yeah. All that stuff's been done this way for... Like, who cares? But we can audit our own content in an incredible way.
We can go and say, "Well, there's a topic that's super interesting to the editorial team at Verywell," a new health topic. Mm-hmm. And it checks out that, like, there's a lot of demand for that topic.
We can go out and look at everything written on the internet on that topic and extrapolate, like, h-here are all the interesting things everyone else is doing, so we can give your writers a toolkit and be like, "Listen, this is what everyone else has done.
You do what you think is right. We know that our articles have to have these things in them, but just take a look at all this stuff." It's an incredible production tool. Will you need fewer content creators then?
So here's the thing. I don't- I'm a little, I'm a little biased on this. I don't think we will because there's just like... I don't know. Every time there's some innovation, it's like it's gonna cause- I know...
it doesn't ever seem to. I mean, I go back to, I think this might be different, but I do go back to programmatic a lot and, like, being told that it would replace all salespeople and buyers, and I don't know.
I see a lot of salespeople around, and they're just as expensive. [laughs] What have you been doing this week? Everyone's still here. I know. They're all here. [laughs] If the salespeople are gone, they're still here.
I don't-- I think all that's overblown. You need humans that understand how to use these systems. I mean, they're not... And they may kill us all soon, but, like, as of right now- That's true...
they're not, like, self-sustaining. You need people that know how to use them, and you need people how to think about them. You need people that understand publishing and how to make the best of them.
The stuff, the Kenji bot on the page and all those things are really fun and really interesting, and we're fiddling around with all those things now. I think you're gonna start to see some of them from us shortly.
The truth is, the discussions here are so far ahead of where a normal consumer is in- Oh, yeah... his or her normal life.
It-- So you gotta get out of this, and y-you have to realize that, like, the number one thing people need to do is at four o'clock, make dinner for their family by six o'clock, and they have this in their pantry.
That's what they have to do. Like, they're not- But that's like an opportunity but a threat too, right? Because, like, good enough is good enough for most people, and I think a lot of people...
Like, I come from the sort of content side, right? And, like, we like to think we're all like, you know, what we do is special and unique and all this stuff like this.
But, you know, the reality is most people, good enough content is good enough.
And when, you know, these-- This AI is creating stuff that I would say a lot of times is, like, not yet good enough, but soon it is absolutely gonna be good enough.
And you're gonna be competing with just, like, this, what Peter Kafka on a podcast called, like, a tsunami of crap out there. But some of this crap's gonna become good enough.
To be, to be clear, we are competing with a tsunami of crap right now. There are infinite number of advertising-driven sites that- MFJ. I like that...
that absolutely generate content in the exact same way that you're talking about in a million ways.
Like, the way we've cut through the tsunami of crap is brandsThings like winning on Apple News and winning on Pinterest and winning on Google.
Like brands have been dealing with, I, I love saying tsunami of crap over and over again. I know. The tsunami of crap thing since the advent of the internet.
It's not-- It's why Google exists because the tsunami of crap overtook all the other search engines. So that's not... I, I'm not overly concerned with that.
The-- What I'm concerned with is some form of disintermediation that we don't foresee. That's where things can go wrong, but that's where things can always go wrong. Wait, what does that mean?
Meaning like the Google search page changes, and it, it's unrecognizable to the way it is now, and all of our content was used to teach people what blender to buy, and we are not part of that solution.
Google would never do that to you. That's unfair. [laughs] I think that's crazy of you to think. But look, it's, it, there's- This giant corporation that's worth like a trillion dollars would ever take such a step.
Exa-- But again, w-we've talked a lot about Google, but there are a lot of different ways we get traffic and a lot of different ways we connect with our audience. Yeah. But in the numbers, you're not seeing...
For instance, like I always like-- People go to like the lamest number I feel like with ChatGPT, with like a certain number. So many million people have tr-- have used ChatGPT. I'm like, "Yeah, okay."
When something new comes out, you use it, like, and stuff like this, but is it like... Have you seen...
Uh, I-- 'cause I mean, I've seen like the traffic is down, but like for-- to, to your properties, but a lot of that is the pandemic is all weird and stuff. Mm-hmm. People didn't have anywhere to go. Yeah.
But are you seeing at all that ChatGPT is having an impact at all marginally at anything on your business? Nothing noticeable. Not even a... Nothing. Okay. The sun is out. I'm starting to sweat a lot.
And I'm cooking up here. And so I just wanna like, I wanna, I wanna wrap it up. That's what I can tell. [laughs] I got the sign. I got the sign. We have- What is that called? Your schvitzing.
We have similar regional genetics. The schvitzing. [laughs] This is not, [laughs] this isn't good. This isn't good for me. And so I want you to just like stop and give me...
I'm gonna give three categories for you to give me a reason to be optimistic- Okay. 'cause it can, and the sun is out, right? Sure. Are you ready? Yeah. All right. Category number one is the Philadelphia Eagles.
I mean, the entire Georgia Bulldogs defense. I feel great about our quarterback's new deal. Who doesn't feel good about that? I think we have the best offensive line in the league.
I think we have the best wide receivers in the league. Our coach wears cool T-shirts. Yeah. He's a bit of a dork, but that's cool. He's a bit of a dork. He's a g- He's our dork, though. Yeah, exactly.
He's a total Philadelphian. I d-- I feel very good. Okay, this is a tough one. I'm practicing. These, these are gonna get progressively tougher, okay? So you can do the...
Wait, are you gonna do the, "I'm going down there to Delco, watch myself snicker"? Yeah, that was, whatever. That's- [laughs] The thing is it's gonna get progressively tougher- Okay. -for, to get optimistic about.
So the second one is the Sixers. [laughs] Next. Go on. It's crushing. Give me a reason to be optimistic about the Sixers. I have a nine-year-old-- I have a nine-year-old boy who loves the Si... I've ruined him.
[laughs] Oh, no. Like I've-- I- He loves Eagles, which is a winning proposition, obviously. The Sixers thing is gonna... It's just gonna kill me.
We could do a series of podcasts on the squandering of the outcome of the process which worked. Yeah. And then the squandering of the optionality from the process has been a disaster to watch.
Uh, yeah, that might be a summer newsletter for me, like what publishers can learn from how the Sixers screwed up. I've done that, and I just get an eye roll.
Okay, the final one, and this is hardest, give me reasons for optimism for the publishing industry. I'm trying to think of how to frame this. So publishing's been around a very long time, right? I know.
You've heard me say this a million times. Publishing's been around a very long time. Publishing is a simple business.
Serve an audience with something they really like that is important to them, that is super high quality.
Help marketers that have products and services that would appeal to these people connect with them in the most efficient way.
If you can do that, you'll be successful, your EBITDA margins will be good, and you'll be great. It is very simple. Make great things, deliver them to interested audiences, and you will be fine.
You gotta repeat it, though. You gotta do it every day. You gotta do it every day. [laughs] And look, it's hard, and it changes nonstop. And like the hardest thing, and frankly, we do feel a little bit of like...
I'm trying to think of like a, something that doesn't sound overly arrogant, only mildly arrogant.
Like we feel really good about where we are because for the last ten years, with all the noise around us, we've stuck to our knitting and done our thing, and we have ended up here, and I think we belong here.
I think we should be the biggest publisher in America. We should have the best brands in America, and we should be able to, like, take a shot at redefining this category.
And the thing that we're trying to do is something different than has been done before.
Publishing the way we do it makes really responsive audiences that are very close to decisions, and we can connect them to marketers as they're making a decision. We don't need cookies. We don't need data.
We don't need bullshit. We can just be really good at this, and we can make a bunch of money, and we can do really well, and that's why I'm optimistic. Okay. Excellent.
Well, I think for me, the big takeaway is we don't need cookies. We don't need data. We don't need bullshit. It's gonna be- We just need Jalen Hurts. [laughs] We just need Jalen Hurts. We just need Jalen Hurts.
Hopefully, he won't coast on this new contract. Thank you so much, Neil. Thank you all for coming, and then let's have a glass of rosé. I don't know- Thanks for the rosé. -if I can find it.
[upbeat music] Thanks so much for listening. Thank you to Jay Sparks for producing this podcast. If you have a podcast that you're considering making, you should check out Podhelp Us and what Jay can do for you.
Go to podhelp.us.
[upbeat music]