How to Survive without Google: People Inc's Playbook

Summary

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Channels with Peter Kafka

Episode: "How to Survive without Google: People Inc's Playbook"
Date: March 18, 2026
Guest: Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc.
Host: Peter Kafka

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Episode Overview

This episode explores how Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc. (formerly about.com, then Dotdash, Dotdash Meredith), has restructured a major digital publishing business to adapt as Google’s dominance in web traffic declines and the new landscape is uncertain, now dominated by social, apps, events—and increasingly, by AI platforms. The discussion covers the demise of the Google-first model, tactics for brand strength, AI licensing strategies, structuring content creation for a multiplatform world, and what it takes to craft a resilient media company today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Death of the “Google Playbook” (04:54–12:11)

• Old Model: Previously, web traffic and revenue for digital publishers like People Inc. (then Dotdash/About.com) depended largely (75–90%) on Google referrals.
• Changing Tides: Vogel describes witnessing, ahead of peers, Google gradually deprioritizing publisher content in search in favor of its own properties (YouTube, Reddit, AI-generated answers).
• Adaptation Strategy: Sensing the Google well drying up, Vogel’s team built out other traffic sources—robust email lists, Instagram, TikTok, Apple News, direct syndication (Yahoo, MSN), and proprietary apps.
• "We are ruthlessly unsentimental": Vogel emphasizes that survival depends on not clinging to past models or formats.

Notable Quote:
"If you have great brands, you have what you need to build a media business. ...We are ruthlessly unsentimental about how we do it or how we used to do it. And if you can do that, media's a great business." — Neil Vogel (05:00)

2. Diversification Beyond Google (14:38–18:52)

• Multiple Revenue Streams: Each major People Inc. brand operates with a fundamentally different business model:
  • Better Homes & Gardens → Licensing ($ at Walmart)
  • Food & Wine → Events
  • InStyle → Social-only presence (mainly Instagram/TikTok, not web or print)
  • People Magazine → Web, print, apps
• No One-Size-Fits-All Approach: Vogel uses the phrase “inverting the model”—brands do what makes sense for their audience and the platform, not a universal approach.

Notable Quote:
"It's not up to us to decide how our audiences want to receive our information... What we need to do is decentralize ourselves in a way that we can be immediately responsive to them." — Neil Vogel (17:13)

3. Building for Platforms Beyond the Website (20:03–22:45)

• Younger Audiences & New Platforms: The People app has found a new, younger, diversified audience distinct from its traditional print readers.
• Editorial Transformation: The role of Editor-in-Chief shifted from central command to “brand direction”; separate teams (magazine, web, TikTok, Instagram, events) independently create content best suited for their platforms.

Notable Quote:
"We absolutely gave control of our most viable asset, our brand, to all these different groups of people... you let them do their thing and you end up with an ability to [do more]." — Neil Vogel (22:07)

4. The Value and Limits of Brand in the Era of Ubiquitous Content (23:24–26:44)

• People vs. Commodity Content: Despite celebrity gossip being everywhere, People’s reputation as the “place of record” (not rumors or salaciousness) holds unique authority and draws massive attention.
• Brand Trust Becomes a Lasting Moat: The enduring trust in legacy brands like People is highlighted as crucial in maintaining relevance and commanding attention, even as raw information is commoditized.

Notable Quote:
"The people brand ... is the New York Times or Wall Street Journal of entertainment. It is a place of record. We don’t do rumors, we don’t do salacious things ... that matters." — Neil Vogel (23:44)

5. Striking Deals with AI Platforms (30:23–38:02)

• New Platform Dependency: With Google and Meta less dependable, Vogel describes proactively negotiating licensing deals with OpenAI, Microsoft (Azure), and Meta for access to People Inc.’s content archive and ongoing production.
• Blocking the Scrapers: In summer 2025, People Inc. began blocking LLMs from scraping their content, prompting AI companies to recognize the value and necessity of licensing publisher content.
• Deal Structures:
  • OpenAI/Meta: “All-you-can-eat” licenses
  • Microsoft: Marketplace, a la carte usage for specific needs
• Acknowledgements and Reservations: Vogel admits deals are short-term, the long-term is uncertain, and "there is a chance we are 100% wrong on all of this." But for now, the brand has negotiating power and flexibility built in.

Notable Quote:
"The world is currently out of [AI] data. Everything that can be crawled has been crawled. Right? ...And who's making that is us." — Neil Vogel (31:18)

• On Google as a 'Bad Actor' in AI:
  • Google avoids paying by pairing its search crawler (which publishers must allow) with AI ingest. Vogel criticizes this as market abuse:
    "They know that they can't be turned off because we all need search." (35:31)

6. Brands: Building, Buying, and Longevity (43:27–47:58)

• Acquiring vs. Building Brands: Building powerful media brands from scratch is seen as "virtually impossible" today; buying trusted legacy brands (People, Food & Wine, BHG) shows far greater upside than creating new ones (“The Spruce” and “LifeWire” pale in comparison).
• Brand “Half-Life”: Constant creative investment is key to ensuring a brand doesn’t fade—Vogel admits not all old brands can be revived (“Parents” is a notable struggle).

Notable Quote:
"We could hack the Internet [for traffic], but they weren’t brands." — Neil Vogel (44:43)

• Creativity Remains Crucial: Even as AI automates, Vogel believes in continuous creative hiring:
  "If you are cutting creative expense, you are dead, you’re doomed." — Neil Vogel (47:44)

7. Managing Change and Barry Diller’s Role (48:18–50:38)

• Barry Diller’s Involvement: Diller is described as both supportive and “creatively conflictual”—invested, opinionated, and valuing "best idea wins," but not always an easy boss.
  "Every day working for Barry Diller, it’s not Christmas. But that's kind of the good part too. He calls it ‘creative conflict.’" — Neil Vogel (50:16)

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Memorable Quotes and Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Media’s Perennial Death:

  "The narrative that Media is failing ... is something we've never subscribed to." — Neil Vogel ([05:00])

• On Google’s Evolution:

  "They're not a search engine, they're an answer engine." — Neil Vogel ([13:08])

• On Platform Independence:

  "We have to be everywhere. The best thing is to be there directly, where they come to your apps, they come to the things you're building." — Neil Vogel ([13:40])

• On Audience-Centric Strategy:

  "It's not up to us to decide how our audiences want to receive our information and our services... It's up to [the audience]." — Neil Vogel ([17:13])

• On Building New Brands Today:

  "I think it is virtually impossible to start a new [major media] brand now." — Neil Vogel ([44:26])

• On Managing Corporate Creativity:

  "If you are cutting creative expense, you are dead, you're doomed." — Neil Vogel ([47:44])

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Noteworthy Timestamps

• 02:05 – Brief history of the business (About.com → Dotdash → Dotdash Meredith → People Inc.)
• 04:54–07:49 – Google's dominance and the need to diversify
• 10:04–12:11 – Early signs Google search referrals were declining
• 14:38–17:59 – Need for multiple business models across brands
• 20:03–22:45 – Editorial reorganization and multiplatform content
• 23:44 – The unique value proposition of the People brand
• 31:05–38:02 – AI licensing strategy, blocking scrapers, deal models
• 43:27–47:58 – Lessons on building vs. buying brands and the longevity challenge
• 48:18–50:38 – Barry Diller’s management style and involvement

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Tone & Style

• Candid, practical, unsentimental: Both Kafka and Vogel speak plainly and acknowledge harsh industry realities.
• Adaptive and experimental: Vogel is forthright about risks, pivots, and potential to be wrong—and also about what is working.
• Witty and self-aware: The episode is peppered with humor, business adages, and cultural references (The Wire, South Park, “not always Christmas”).

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Summary

This episode is a masterclass in media company reinvention, as Neil Vogel details how People Inc. survived the collapse of Google-driven publishing and now experiments, with clear-eyed realism, on social, direct engagement, and AI licensing. Brand equity, creative risk-taking, and operational flexibility are his guiding themes. At each turn, the focus is on responding not to nostalgia or tradition, but to where audiences (and opportunities) actually are.

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Transcript

[Neil Vogel]

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[Peter Kafka]

From the Vox Media Podcast network. This is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider, and today we are talking about how you run a big Internet publisher at a time when the old Playbook for Internet publishing doesn't work. And the new Playbook seems. Well, I'm not sure there is a new Playbook. That is the challenge facing Neil Vogel who runs People Inc. That's the big publisher owned by Barry Diller's iac. Vogel has been on versions of this show in the past, and as we talk about, even though he's basically had the same job, the properties he manages what they're called and what his strategy is have all changed over time. This is going to be a very brief recap. Vogel first started working for Diller in 2013 when he was running what was then called about that was an important early Internet site that tried to anticipate what people would want to learn about and paid experts to write search friendly answers to those queries. When I first started talking to him in 2019, they had changed the name to dot dash and they were trying to create new brands that would mean more to Google and to advertisers. And a couple of years Later, Vogel and Dot Dash paid $2.7 billion for Meredith, the big magazine publisher made up of many brands that used to be part of Time Inc. Along with other titles like Better Homes and Gardens. And now that company is called People Inc. Because they own People magazine. Got it. I know. I tried to be quick here. I'll do the short version of this. Neil Vogel runs a big publishing company that has many brands you might know, especially if you remember when magazines were around. But his old business model, which was building properties with Google in mind, no longer works. And his new strategy, working with AI companies is a question mark. So here's me talking to Neil Vogel about all of that. I'm here with Neil Vogel. We were just debating whether he's been on this podcast three or four times. Maybe someone can tell us and it

[Neil Vogel]

is unknowable who we figured out.

[Peter Kafka]

I know you've had multiple titles over the years. I've talked.

[Neil Vogel]

We've had a lot of names. You've had a lot of names.

[Peter Kafka]

You were the CEO of something called dot dash yes. Which used to be about dot com.

[Neil Vogel]

Yes.

[Peter Kafka]

Then you were the CEO of dot dash Meredith. Now you are the CEO of People Inc.

[Neil Vogel]

Correct.

[Peter Kafka]

All the same organization.

[Neil Vogel]

I mean the same things have changed. Correct. We've added a lot to the organization.

[Peter Kafka]

You've had the same job.

[Neil Vogel]

The colonel is the same. I've had the same job for going on like 13 years. Well, tenure in media.

[Peter Kafka]

The longest tenure you've had in media.

[Neil Vogel]

I've had in media. It feels like the longest tenure you've had.

[Peter Kafka]

And you feel like you are a very long tenured media executive. So I guess this answers my question I was going to ask you which is media good business? Should you be in the media business these days?

[Neil Vogel]

So this, this is like you're throwing me red meat.

[Peter Kafka]

Did I just, did I just toss that up for you?

[Neil Vogel]

So the narrative that Media is failing can't be Successful, structurally broken is something we've never subscribed to. We believe. I believe if you have great brands, you have what you need to build a media business. If you have great brands, it gives you the opportunity to build strong, durable audiences. What people get confused is if you have great brands and can build great audiences, you have a great business. What happens between great brands and building audiences is where people get confused. Right. We don't care and have never cared whether we are reaching people on the web, on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube, on Apple, news in print magazines, like, you name it. Like, if we can figure out how to use each, any sum, all nine other things we do that I didn't mention to build great audiences, great. But we are ruthlessly unsentimental about how we do it or how we used to do it. And if you can do that, media's a great business. Like, we've proved it. We're, we're again, like, you were kind enough to have us on when we were about.com and you were tiny and we didn't make any money and no one cared about us. But, you know, we're a public company now. We're like a billion 7 billion 8 in revenue, 300 million and change, 330 in EBITDA. Like, we're a real business that grew 14% in the fourth quarter. Like, this can be a good business.

[Peter Kafka]

It would be a surprise if you were running a media company that was part of a publicly traded conglomerate and you work for Barry Doer and you said, actually, yeah, this is a bad business.

[Neil Vogel]

Well, it'd be bad business for me.

[Peter Kafka]

It would be bad for you to say that out loud. And I do want to talk to you about how the business has evolved, how your business has evolved. But the way I think about it a lot, not your business, but the way I think about media broadly right now is, you know, not alone here is that publishers, people who make media, are caught between the platforms that are abandoning them, that they used to rely on the Googles of the world and the meadows of the world. And on the other side, they're looking at the AI companies who aren't even really pretending to align with them, their work, doing some deals. But it doesn't look, we imagine a future where OpenAI or pick your chatbot is sort of your entry into all of media. And that is a real problem for the remaining media companies. So I want to talk to you about how you're navigating all of that. And if I think about it in Very big gross buckets. You are fighting, slash, done with Google, which used to be a big core part of your business.

[Neil Vogel]

Accurate.

[Peter Kafka]

When I first started talking to you, you were basically building websites built for Google. That was your job. Like, how can we make our stuff visible to Google? That was the business. Now you've moved on from that. You're doing a bunch of other stuff, but you are also aligning yourself with the AI companies. You've done a deal with OpenAI, did

[Neil Vogel]

one with Microsoft, other Microsoft Meta. Yep. Okay. Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

So you're cutting deals with companies that are doing AI.

[Neil Vogel]

We're doing all the things.

[Peter Kafka]

You're doing all the things. So let's, let's start with the first bucket. The. The.

[Neil Vogel]

Okay, so I'll go back and I'll answer your first question. So, again, I don't. I'm reluctant to become an industry pundit, but I can tell you our story. And, and, and it reflects exactly what you said. And by telling our story, I'm effectively an industry pundit. Right. So when we first. And I think you were the first podcast we went on after we bought Meredith, which is Meredith and Time, Inc. And the knock on us then was very common, was, was, this is interesting, but you put these two companies together and 75% of your audience comes from Google. This is not interesting. You guys have too much exposure to Google. It'll never work. Like, cut to today. We've lost 50% of our Google sessions over the last two years, and we're still growing 15%. So it can work. But here's what happened. I remember soon after we did that, I was at, like, some investor conference. I don't. Like a Citibank conference or something. And one of the analysts said the same thing that you would say, and it's the right thing to say at the time, which was too much. Your audience is from Google. I'm not interested in this story. And I was. Well. And I would say, well, how much of the open web is coming from Google at the time? And his answer would be like, well, you know, 85, 90% of the open web comes through Google. I was like, we're only 75%. Like, we're not good enough at it. Like, this is like, we're going to fish where the fish are. Like, we're not.

[Peter Kafka]

We should be more dependent on Google.

[Neil Vogel]

We should be more dependent on Google. Like, we're not that good. Like, why wouldn't we be 90 if the Internet's 90? So obviously that was an extreme stance, but that was truly how we felt, and you were right, it was easy. We were very good at the Internet, we were very good at making content people liked and we were very good at Google.

[Peter Kafka]

It was a strategy right about.com, which existed before you got there, but was

[Neil Vogel]

built specifically at the time. Like what were you doing?

[Peter Kafka]

But you were, you were taking it really to an extreme. I mean we weren't.

[Neil Vogel]

But what we never ever, ever gamed an algorithm, ever. That doesn't work and you can't predict what an algorithm wants. You can make great content, which is what Google wanted at the time, that algorithms knew how to read.

[Peter Kafka]

But you were specifically saying someone is going to go to Google and say, hey, what's up with this Soar I have. And then you're hoping they would get sent to very well your site. And was very unlikely. And was very unlikely that someone would go to very well if Google hadn't

[Neil Vogel]

sent them 100% accurate at the time. Yes. So. But what that did was we were so Google dependent that we were also the first people to see Google start to change. And three, four, two, three, four years ago we saw that search page changing. At first it was all their stuff. YouTube started to show up, then Reddit and then it ends with like AI showing up. And two or three years ago we're like, wait a minute, this is not sustainable. We've got these great brands, we have this great distribution channel, we need more. And we, we without a lot of fanfare because no one ever cared what we were doing because we were boring, but we were good at it. We built incredible email presence, we built TikTok, we built Instagram, we built Apple News, we built all of these things, we built our own assets like later we're doing all kinds of things to connect directly with advertisers and users. So when Google really fell off a cliff two years ago, we're prepared for it. You would think, given what everyone said about us four or five years ago, that we would be the guys that would be doing the worst now. We're kind of the guys doing the best now because maintain this view of like, we are not sentimental. If, if you look at our brands like people, people will look like a media business. You would understand, right? We lot of traffic on a website. We've launched an app which is doing great as part of like inverting that

[Peter Kafka]

model brand that still means something to

[Neil Vogel]

a lot of people. To a lot of people. But if you look at like InStyle, which I believe has the largest reach of any beauty, style, fashion, brand on the Internet that would look nothing like you'd expect. There is no web business, there is no print business. The entire thing exists in what an old media person would think is like the ether Instagram, TikTok, Google events and it's one of our fastest growing brands and it's doing great. So what we've had to do is say, you know what? We're going to have brands that people care about and we have 40 brands. 40 of our brands don't matter. About seven or eight of them matter. Brands that people love and care about, they're going to be permissioned to do different things. When we figure out what they're permissioned to do, we're going to do those things and that's how we're going to connect with audiences and that's how we're going to make money. And it actually works.

[Peter Kafka]

So you're saying that you got out earlier than everybody else from Google. You saw it earlier, but people had been complaining about Google as long as there's been Google and fighting about referral traffic, et cetera. What do you think? Just that you, just because you were working with Google day in, day out, you were able to see it more clearly.

[Neil Vogel]

And I think we knew, look, about any of these platforms, they don't owe us or any publisher anything. They're gonna operate in their self interests. What we realized a few years ago is there are platforms that our incentives are more aligned with. For instance, TikTok and Instagram need our content to attract users, to have a vibrant environment more so than Google. Our incentive in Google was Google. We wanted them to send people to us. That is not in their interest.

[Peter Kafka]

Right. And Google for a long time has been, hey, there's more of the answer to that query you just typed in. It's on our homepage, it's on the page. You just, you don't need to go to the next site. You could go to the site, but we've already told you when the super bowl is or something.

[Neil Vogel]

They're not a search engine, they're an answer engine. And when, when. And again, when one group is the source of the answer for everybody, there's some danger in that. There's no more picking your answer. They give you the answer now, so. But that's a whole nother conversation. But it's not just that. It's. It could be Facebook, it could be. We're very cognizant of how Instagram works and how Apple News works and how, how syndication when we syndicate content to. I don't know, Yahoo or MSN or whatever. You have to be everywhere. The best thing is to be there directly where they come to your apps, they come to the things you're building.

[Peter Kafka]

This is what every publisher I talk to at least on the record says, right. Well the way we're going to survive and thrive is our brand means something. People are going to come to us directly. We're going to have a direct relationship. We have a direct relationship. I'm sure that will be true for a very small number of publishers. How do you, how do you make sure you're in that very small group?

[Neil Vogel]

I mean we're as of now again our math is everyone for everyone to see. We're in it. Like the group of people who are executing on this is sort of News Corp and all the Murdoch stuff, it's the New York Times and it's kind of us. And there's, there's others that are successful obviously like Axel and some of those guys. They're doing really interesting things. But we're on the other side of it. Google right now for us is I don't know, I'm gonna get the Number set around 25. Google's actions don't knock us around in the way they would have like five or six years ago. And the thing that like we don't think about that very much anymore. We think much more about making things that will resonate with humans and the different ways we can connect with them.

[Peter Kafka]

What happens when, when you trade a set of eyeballs that came to you from Google but they at least came to your page and you could show them something including an ad versus reaching someone some somewhere else if it's, you know, if you're talking about Instagram and TikTok, you don't own that platform. You may not be able to show them an ad in front of that content.

[Neil Vogel]

The thing have to figure out if you're going to run a media business now is and this is our business used to be like very easy to understand. Get traffic to website, sell it. It's math right? X, Y, Z. We are not that anymore. We are now call it 40 brands, 10 brands that matter. Our 10 brands all have dramatically different business models that do dramatically different things to make money. And each of those things to make money has a different model. For instance, the number one thing we do at Better Homes and Gardens the probably the biggest, most important part of business is a license. We sell products inside of Walmart, right. And that's a great business for us but that's A very different metric in a very different way.

[Peter Kafka]

It's a better homes and garden branded

[Neil Vogel]

whatever candles, towels, tabletop and it's a, it's an amazing.

[Peter Kafka]

You get a license.

[Neil Vogel]

We're one of the biggest license words inside of Walmart. They're a great partner. It's amazing. Food and wine, the biggest thing we do in his events business Food and wine classics, best new chefs. That is a different metric like Southern living events and old school publishing. And it looks like old school publishing people looks like something you'd be familiar with. InStyle looks like something totally brand new and, and the thing that we, we call it and this is like a, it's like a Barry Diller term and we've all adopted it. It's like our rallying cry. We call it inverting the model. And there is no longer. If you look at a media business and you want to have one model across everything, you need to do something else. So our business went from being super simple X times Y equals Z to now we need people who are able to manage at 10 plus different brands. Very complex numbers that again add up to $1.7 billion. That's a lot of different things we have to do.

[Peter Kafka]

Now you're describing a world where you have a bunch of different businesses and business leaders and business ideas and so you need different people to staff all that. All that sounds plausible. It also sounds like the opposite of what you're trying to do when you build up a scale publishing business, scale media business.

[Neil Vogel]

It is. We have again the one thing that we have to do all the time and we say it all the time is you've watched the Wire. Like the greatest line ever said is Marlowe like you want the world to be one way, but it's the other way. We realized three, four, five years ago

[Peter Kafka]

we thought we could have a one stop shop where you, you come to us with a, with an ad request and we serve it to our giant audience distributed to all our different sites 100%.

[Neil Vogel]

It's not that it is not up to us to decide how our audiences want to receive our information and our services. Like maybe they want to come to events, maybe they want to buy our products, maybe they want to read about us, see videos on TikTok. Maybe they want to read about us on the web. Not up to us. It's up to. And what we need to do is decentralize ourselves in a way that we can be immediately responsive to them. The amazing thing is we have an org that if somebody was reviewing the Performance of our management team. There's like two things. There's two types of people that it was either a God, these guys are great. They're so flexible. They change all the time. We're doing all these new things and the proves out in the numbers and they really know what they're doing and they've created a lot of value around this. And they're succeeding in an area where a lot of people aren't. The second take is, these guys are all over the place.

[Peter Kafka]

What a mess.

[Neil Vogel]

I don't know. My job is what a mess. I don't know what to work on. There's no direction. I hate this place. We need a company. We need 3,000, 3,500 of the first group. Not the second group.

[Peter Kafka]

The. We're gonna go find our audience where they are. We're gonna find them on other platforms. I think literally 10 years ago, I was at south by Southwest listening to Jonah Peretti talk about the buzzfeed strategy of going to find Aud. And this was the time when a hot digital publisher wouldn't just say how many page views or visitors they had. They would talk about this expanded universe of views they were getting from Facebook. And then we all moved on from that, right? Everyone said, oh, that was a terrible idea. It turns out that there was no business in trying to get eyeballs on Facebook. The only business that mattered was trying to get eyeballs on your own site. It sounds like you're kind of going back to that.

[Neil Vogel]

At the time all of these things were said, this was all like based on no data or based on nothing. The only thing that mattered then in that era for building doable audience was search. We've talked about this. I have a Wall street background, my CFO's Wall street background. So we're like, wait a minute, this is where the money is. I want to go where the money is. I want to maximize how we perform in the programmatic ad markets with great content that people love and intent driven audiences at scale. That's going to work. When that started to break down, we gotta do something else. We can break this down into like two phases. First, there was like print to digital phase of the web, right? Which. Which BuzzFeed, et cetera, was like an outgrowth of those pretty. We navigated that pretty well. And now there is. There is. Digital is like the open web is. I don't know what's gonna happen, like, flattish for us. It's fine. Now we're in digital to brands. And if you don't have brands. You're not gonna be able to do the nine different things to quote, invert your models to do this. Like we launched an app at People. It's doing incredibly well. It the average session in an app is three or four times longer than a session on the web. And if they play one of our games, it's like five times, six times.

[Peter Kafka]

Who's a People app user? Is it someone who remembers people in print? Is it someone who's coming to it?

[Neil Vogel]

So the people in print, we're still about 2 million copies a week. I think we're still the biggest magazine in America, but we are almost 10 million sessions a day just on the web.

[Peter Kafka]

Do you think these are people who did not grow up with people?

[Neil Vogel]

It's people who did not grow up with the people print magazine in there. Maybe there's some, I mean you never know. But like the core of that, that is it. You found new Aud, Millennial, Gen Z audience. Yeah. And I think one thing worth talking about and because these changes don't happen themselves and we made a structural change at our organization that makes us look a lot different than other publishers that really set us up to be able to do all these things. Like, it was a little bit, when I talk about it, like we've talked about it, it's a little bit like that south park model, like the steel, like the underpants gnomes, like, like steel underpants profit. The middle part of steel underpants profit is we fundamentally changed how we do editorial. And I'll use people as an example and I'll tell you an idealized version of it to make it easy to understand. When we got our hands on people four or five years ago, we thought this was the most undervalued asset in media. It was still like print driven command and control. Like editor in chief sitting on top of a mountain commanding. What we're going to do now we have this amazing editor in chief named Charlotte Triggs, run by a woman named Leah Wire. And she's. Charlotte's amazing. And what Charlotte has done or been tasked to do that we've all kind of figured out together is Charlotte's job is setting the direction of the brand. And in people's case, it's like ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Extraordinary people doing ordinary things. Focus on celebrity, style, fashion, human interest. Right. So makes a lot of sense. But we. Her job is to no longer like, pick the stories and then propagate them out. What we have is a separate group content, creative, even product and tech in some cases. There's a team that does exclusively TikTok. A team does exclusively Instagram team that does the magazine, that's a big team team that does the web, that's a big team team that does the app team that does all their events. Events are a huge part of our business and what they do.

[Peter Kafka]

And the TikTok people are not tasked with taking the. What was in the print magazine and making absolutely not.

[Neil Vogel]

They can do whatever they want. And the TikTok people can work with Instagram people if they want or if they don't want. And this is a terrifying thing we did. We absolutely gave control of our most viable asset, our brand, to all these different groups of people. And none of them look like the person who used to be editor in chief. Like, the print people don't look like that. And I can tell you the TikTok Instagram people surely don't look like that. And you let them do their thing and you end up with inability to, oh, we want to do events. We can plug in events. Like, everybody knows what the brand is and it's how that we've gotten people younger and it's how we've brought the energy back. It's why the app is so amazing. Like, because we let people live natively in their environments.

[Peter Kafka]

I was going to ask you about this later, since we're talking about People. It's such an interesting brand, right? Comes out of the 70s when it was considered this really novel thing that's 50 years old, a magazine dedicated to celebrity gossip. How crazy this is. And magazines were very important then, right? And this was like how flippant. And then became the most powerful brand within Time Inc. Which was a really big deal publishing company. And then basically, I think around the 2000, there was just. Every time you looked into that business, someone wise was saying, this is the end of people. They are getting displaced first by Us magazine and Janice Min, and then later, obviously by the Internet. We're back, baby. We're back.

[Neil Vogel]

And.

[Peter Kafka]

And the idea of seeing a celebrity, you can't not see a celebrity if you boot up a screen, right? So how does people. And just saying where we're gonna, you know, we've got a. We've got a mission about, you know, elevating people or whatever it is. That's not enough. How do you command attention for something that is literally a commodity?

[Neil Vogel]

It may be less of a commodity than you think, because the. The people brand is. Whatever you want to call it, it is the New York Times or Wall Street Journal of entertainment it is a place of record. We don't do rumors. We don't do salacious things. Like, we're not outing people. We're not doing any of that stuff that matters.

[Peter Kafka]

Maybe for a journalist, for an audience,

[Neil Vogel]

you just want the stuff it actually matters. And we also. For the stuff, we make the highest volume of the highest quality of this content every day across all of these platforms in a way that people want to consume it. When we took over the brand in whatever 2021, we were here, that was not the case. But the brand was so strong that once we started to do this on other people's algorithms, on our own websites, on anything, it just starts to work. Because there's something about the people brand. Whether it was like your mom got it or it was in the doctor's office or you still see it and you buy it in the airport, There is some magic to that brand that permissioned us to do all of these things. And again, the proof is in the math and in the numbers. I think I might get this wrong. I think we're the third biggest news brand in America behind FOX and cnn. Like people alone, it's that big now and that well distributed because we have been super unsentimental about how we distribute it. Like, we still do the magazine. There's still 2 million copies a week, but I don't know what it used to be. It was probably 10. Like, it's just not anymore. But we produce so much content all made by people, all made by writer, all made by every. All human lowercase people across so many different places that we're. We're like back in the consciousness of things. And the math is the math. Just look at the numbers of the audiences and the reach and how well the business is doing. And we're. We're just. That's like truly our success story. I mean, the place we're struggling is not people. It's other places.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah. I mean, it's not exactly. Now I just sort of think of you guys as used to be in the business of printing box scores or. Or stock quotes. Right. And the Internet blows that up because you can literally get that anywhere. And it seems like I can. It's impossible for me to not know what Timothee Chalamet is up to at any given second.

[Neil Vogel]

Right.

[Peter Kafka]

There's just a constant. And picture whoever the person is. And it just seems in a world where that is just everywhere, you can't hold it back. That that is a very tough opera place to operate if you're people Magazine. I mean, our people brand, it's either

[Neil Vogel]

a tough place to operate or there's a great demand for this kind of content. And it's a two things can be true place to operate. Right? So just because it's tough doesn't mean, I mean, we dwarf everybody. We, we dwarf TMZ and we dwarf us and we do all this. It has a lot to do with the fact that people want the Timothee Chalamet information from us. All right? And if we can. Look, I'm not like, I'm not like making. It's not like a. Like all these things are sort of what I like about our business now. And what I do like about being public, essentially, is being public's a pain in the ass for many reasons. But the truth is spoken for us. Like, we're not making this up. Like, this is really working.

[Peter Kafka]

You can't say you can't see it, but trust me, there's real.

[Neil Vogel]

It's not like, well, we were profitable last year. If you add back these 19 things, like, if you don't include all of our expenses, we made a lot of money. Like, you can see what we're doing.

[Peter Kafka]

We'll be right back with Neil Vogel. But first, a word from a sponsor. Everyone's heard of a midlife crisis, but what about a mid career crisis? Turns out countless people are going through one right now. For some, they're starting to feel they've hit a wall, that there's no room for growth, no new opportunities. Promotions pass them by. Raises are few and far between. Others worry they're becoming replaceable, either by younger talent or by technology. And still others find themselves asking over and over, is this all there is? If any of this feels familiar, it's time to visit Strawberry Me, where a certified career coach will work with you to get you out of your rut and help you move forward, either at

[Neil Vogel]

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[Peter Kafka]

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[Peter Kafka]

And we're back. We've talked about you moving away from Google sort of earlier than other folks and away from that platform dependency. And then at the same time, you are cutting deals with AI companies that many sober, rational people believe are going to be like the other platforms, but even worse because they're going to give you less. And if you thought that being batted around by Meta or Google was rough, wait till you see what happens when Chat GPT's newest set up. Your daily news thing is available to everyone and no one ever goes to a website again. So walk me through your logic in doing these deals because you're aware of all this.

[Neil Vogel]

Yeah, we're very aware and we've been very much at the front end of doing these deals. So what I would say is if

[Peter Kafka]

you take a step back, I should do that. Disclosure. Both media companies I work for and with have OpenAI deals as well.

[Neil Vogel]

If you zoom out and you think about what an AI company right at LLM need. They need, they need three things. They need a model, they need a lot of power and they need data to put in that model. The world is currently out of data. Everything that can be crawled has been crawled. Right?

[Peter Kafka]

That, that's, there's a little new stuff created every day, but that's about it.

[Neil Vogel]

And, and who's making that is us. So we're, we're very important plus we're a source of truth for everything else. We did an OpenAI deal first and then we did soon thereafter deals with, with Meta and Microsoft and there, there's, we're talking to everybody. The, the real discussions got kicked off last summer, in July when we essentially took our content off the Internet for the purposes of LLM crawlers. We blocked everyone using a partnership with cloudflare. Cloudflare has been great. We helped to develop it. All of a sudden when our content wasn't around anymore, people seemed to be able to figure out the value of it where before that they just couldn't figure out what the value was. Right. No one is going to work on, on their own benevolence here, which, which

[Peter Kafka]

we know just to stop there for a second. So you said you could no longer get our stuff OpenAI or whoever just scraping it. If you want it, you've got to pay off. And again the pretty standard conventional wisdom was well maybe they're going to need you for this specific thing or that specific thing. And yes, they need new news, but there's so much of it. If they're not getting the latest Timothee Chalamet update from you, they can get it from somebody else. They can get it from someone who summarized your work very possible that your stuff is not worth nearly as much as you think it is. It's your entire business, but to these guys it's a fraction of a fraction and it's substitutable.

[Neil Vogel]

Maybe, maybe it's possible. I don't think that's true based on what's going on and what has happened, but it's possible. So, so this has evolved for us and there's two types of deals for us, right? And people, we produce a ton of new content every day, every month. They want that, they want our historical archives, they want our videos, they want our pictures like they, they, they need our things. And remember we, we're not news, we're not traditional news in that sense. We're, we're all these like called enthusiast categories, whatever the old service categories, deals are working two ways it seems. One is the all you can eat deal which is people can have all the access they want to our content for the purposes you give us a flat fee for the purposes of some consumer model that's essentially OpenAI and that's essentially what we did with Meta and

[Peter Kafka]

it's, it's one price no matter how much your stuff, how much of people's stuff, how much of people Inc stuff

[Neil Vogel]

gets used and all kinds of stuff. But it's essentially a, we have one deal with them and it's however they pay us, they, they get unlimited access to all of our things. The other thing is Microsoft's a marketplace. So for everyone who uses Azure or Azure, I'm not pronounce it Azure or whatever that needs to power an LLM model that is all their corporate clients that needs rights cleared things for their model, which is very important, will theoretically pay more of an a la carte as they build their models and do their things. And we help Microsoft create this thing and we're very optimistic about where this is going to go. This is going to end up being for smaller clients that and particularly for corporate clients, I think bank. And this is going to end up being much more.

[Peter Kafka]

What's the unit that they're paying for? Is it per crawl, per article, per thing?

[Neil Vogel]

Retreat. Everyone wants to solve that problem now. It's not totally solved yet because it's all. Everything is so new. Like to use like a shitty sports analogy, we're like first pitch, not even, not even like first inning. So that's the, that's the, the landscape and we're talking to other people about doing other things. Similarly falling into these two buckets. There is a chance we are 100% wrong on all of this. There's a chance that we're 100% right.

[Rhonda Miller Goodrich]

Right.

[Neil Vogel]

The truth is probably somewhere in between right now. I think it's leaning towards right. In case we're not right. None of our deals are more than a couple years long.

[Peter Kafka]

So if you're getting abused, it turns out you are getting abused by OpenAI.

[Neil Vogel]

We can del ens and we can, we can redo and we can figure it out. The, the interesting thing is the biggest player in the space is Google and Google is set up right now that they use essentially one crawler for search and for AI because they know that it is not blockable by us. They're still a big part of our business. We can't block them from search. So that's a major sticking point.

[Peter Kafka]

So Google searches Your website, which you want them to do if they're going to send you search traffic.

[Neil Vogel]

Correct.

[Peter Kafka]

They also, using that same crawl, go ingested for their model, which you don't want to happen without your permission.

[Neil Vogel]

Correct.

[Peter Kafka]

And that's why you call them a bad actor, not because they're screwing you on referral traffic. No, no, listen, you unhappy about that? But that's not.

[Neil Vogel]

No, that's business. So the number one thing we don't. I will never complain about an algorithm doing things in the industry of that algorithm. But what they're doing now is, again, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know what power they're abusing, but they're abusing market power because they know that they can't be turned off because we all need search.

[Peter Kafka]

And you are suing them over that. Or you attach yourself to.

[Neil Vogel]

We have a different. There's a, There's a different lawsuit going.

[Peter Kafka]

I'm not ad tech.

[Neil Vogel]

I'm not a lawyer about ad tech. And they've already been found. I don't know what the word.

[Peter Kafka]

Why do you think other folks aren't suing Google? I hear a lot of quiet complaints about Google from people like you and not many people who are actually going out and fighting with.

[Neil Vogel]

Again, I think we've been very public about our complaints about Google. We have not been quiet. And they're, you know, I have no idea what their opinion of our opinion is. I'm sure we disagree on things. My concerns are economic. We are not looking for, like, we're not going to get some like, legislative relief or whatever. And it's like, I just think it is unfair that we make content and if they choose to not pay for it, they can still take it. And that's not right. And there is no academic argument that makes it right to us where everyone else has said, you know what, you are right, we are going to pay for it. And if our content isn't valuable, then let us block it. So you can't have it. But so clearly our content is valuable because they won't let us separately block it, but they also refuse to pay us for it because somehow that's too complicated when everyone else seems to have figured it out. So. But I don't want this to be about Google and complaining because, like, here's the thing, we're still. We live in a world that has a current set of circumstances. We're just going to deal with these circumstances and we're actually doing great for the.

[Peter Kafka]

So we'll move off Google, go Back to the, the LLMs you are, you are working with, you get cash from them is part of the other premise that they're going to refer. I mean there's links in, in ChatGPT. I use them when I'm doing research, but I can't imagine anyone else a

[Neil Vogel]

de minimis amount of traffic. But none of these. I don't believe going forward that, that there is going to be material traffic sent to us from an element.

[Peter Kafka]

We're not replacing Google or Meta where we used to do that.

[Neil Vogel]

I mean if it happens to be great. But there is absolutely no part of our model that says that's going to happen.

[Peter Kafka]

So if you know that going in and you're purely just selling them data for money and there seems like there's a very good likelihood that not only will that right now they've got a product that really doesn't send you traffic that they'll. That will accelerate. Right. It'll just be stuff that has things people care about. Some of it will come from you. They'll pay you some money for the fact that they're getting that information from you. But not only will people not go to your site, they won't know that that came from people that will weaken your brand. Aren't you all possibilities creating, creating another hole for yourself?

[Neil Vogel]

Potentially we are, but I think the case that you're outlining is search. Like that's what. That's search. And we've already lost more than half of our referrals from Google and we're fine. If we lose even more, we're still going to be fine. The trick for us is our content has to be good enough and our offerings and our videos on Instagram and the episodic dramas we're doing on YouTube and our events and even our print magazines, which is a very, very small part of our business, they have to be good enough to stand on their own with brands that resonate and people care about now what has happened which has been like a benefit to us that has been unexpected as we've done all these like inversion things like more events in an app and this and that. It turns out that in this current environment with a lot of uncertainty both in media and like in the broader universe, people default to brands because they trust them. People don't know what's real. They know that they don't just want an LLM answer or an artificial experience. And I think part of the reason why we're doing really well is we have brands that mean something. I'm not A guy that's like, oh, a brand. Brand's not your friend, but it means something to you. Like people mean something. Real simple means something. Food and wine means something serious eats mean something. Like they mean something to people. That cuts through this clutter. Advertisers like it and consumers like it. The other thing that's happening on the advertiser side of this, which is really, really interesting, is 20 years ago when you and I were like, maybe not even that young in this business, but we're in this business, everything was premium. Whether it was TV or magazines or even the early web, everything was premium. Now nothing is premium. Everything's a platform. It's, it's met, it's Instagram, it's, whatever it is, it's all platforms and we're still premium. So all of a sudden we have this crazy reach. We have increasingly direct connections. We have more of an open field run in what is a premium branded place. All of a sudden, like, I like our chances. Like we have like a real differentiation from what is happening on Pinterest or what is happening on Instagram than we ever had before. We were competing with people that looked like us.

[Peter Kafka]

We'll be right back. But first, a word from a sponsor. When you use the trusted automated investing and savings app Betterment, you stop worrying about where your money is growing and you start to feel calm, cool, confident. That's when things fall into place, like a domino effect. Since you use Betterment's automated investing tools to invest for you, you now have more time to help your plants thrive. You decide to buy one more then seven. While your money is globally diversified, helping you stay calm during market chaos, you start to focus on other new niche hobbies like collecting miniatures. Now you have a thriving miniature town in your living room. Since their tax smart tools help you keep more of your after tax returns, you're no longer afraid of tax day. You start to sleep better and remember to put on your PM moisturizer every night.

[Neil Vogel]

Night.

[Peter Kafka]

People give you compliments on your glow. It gets kind of weird focusing on your life more than your money. That's the Betterment effect. Get started [e-mail] that's betterment.com to start investing. Investing involves risk performance not guaranteed. Betterment is not tax advisor nor should any information herein be considered tax advice. Please consult a qualified tax professional.

[Neil Vogel]

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[Peter Kafka]

It's not just something you made.

[Neil Vogel]

It's the privilege that you get to work with your hands. It's building something that serves a purpose, proof that you have the grit to keep going.

[Peter Kafka]

At Timberland, we understand you take your craft seriously, and we do too, which

[Neil Vogel]

is why our products are built to the highest quality. We put in the work so you

[Peter Kafka]

can perfect yours with purpose, in every detail, and crafted with intention. Timberland built on craft. Visit timberland.com to shop. And we're back. You said earlier we, we tried to build our own brands for About.com we turned the health vertical into very well, and we did a good job at that. And then we bought these real brands and realized what a real brand is. What has that taught you about building a brand and or maintaining a brand?

[Neil Vogel]

When we bought Meredith, the Meredith Time Inc. Combo, we knew that we needed brands that were stronger than ours. But we didn't understand what that meant met and how. We very quickly understood what that meant. When we. We had a playbook, we had a really good playbook. We built very well to be the second or third biggest health site on the Internet. We built the Spruce. It was the biggest home site on the Internet. We did these things in like five years from the carcass of About.com because we were really, really good at making content and really, really good at the Internet and early social and all this stuff, it turns out that when you do that playbook and you run that playbook on better Homes and Gardens and Southern Living and people, if the angle up was like 45 degrees for our brands, the ang like vertical for these brands, because humans, algorithms, platforms, everybody loves a brand. They trust the brand and they know what it means. Like with the Spruce, you had to teach someone what the Spruce was. You had to teach about the content.

[Peter Kafka]

So the answer, the way to have a brand is to have someone else build it.

[Neil Vogel]

50 years ago, in the context of our kind of brand, I think it is virtually impossible to start a new one now.

[Peter Kafka]

So if you guys today said, you know what, there really is a space in consumer electronics. There isn't. But let's say you wanted to go after that, you would say, well, let's Go buy a thing that does that, that already rather than try to build our own 100%.

[Neil Vogel]

I'd either buy one, did it already or we would find one of our brands that was permissioned to do that. But in the case of tech, we, we'd have to buy one we, we like. For instance, we have this tech brand that you've probably never heard of called LifeWire. At one point LifeWire was like a top five tech site on the Internet because we were just so good at the Internet. Now it's not still a great site, but it's tiny because all the things that we can do with food and wine, like where we can do everything from events to talk about as part of our like immersion stuff. We're going to launch a wine club. We're going to launch this. Can't do any of it with LifeWire because it doesn't mean anything to anybody. We could hack the Internet and get traffic, but they weren't brands. The question is like, well, if, if you guys are been so incredible at rejuvenating these old Time Inc. Brands, these old merit brands, how come you're only growing 14%? And the answer is because those are up, ours are down, and the delta is 14% in many instances. And thankfully we did it right some of it. We cannibalized our own audience. But having these audiences associated with these brands is much more durable than the old days.

[Peter Kafka]

And how do you think about that? Like, try to measure the half life of these brands. Right. Like there was a time when everyone knew what Life magazine was and now no one does. Except I guess for Carlie Kloss because she bought it.

[Neil Vogel]

I guess they did. But like since it.

[Peter Kafka]

There you go. So.

[Rhonda Miller Goodrich]

Or.

[Peter Kafka]

Or people one day, what our job

[Neil Vogel]

is is to identify the brands we like and make sure there isn't a half life. Like we're on the other side of it. We're taking brands that at one point were on a half life and we have gotten them going. Now we've not been able to do that with all of our brands. Right. And I. But I'll be very like, we would love to have done this with parents. Can't. Can't get parents to go like.

[Peter Kafka]

And why do you think that is? Do you think it's about the brand or think it's about the space?

[Neil Vogel]

Well, the space is. I mean our whole audience is parents. That should be good. I think it's.

[Peter Kafka]

Is it because there's so much other parenting stuff?

[Neil Vogel]

Yeah, there's so much other parenting stuff and the servicey content stuff that parenting used to do has just been eaten up by AI and by search. And I think we miss the window. And there's all these, these incredible people on social, on YouTube that are answering these questions and doing these things and we've just been unable to get it going. We've been unable to. And there's a whole. I mean, we have 40 brands. There's again, seven or eight that matter. Most of the brands we have still have one or two things that really resonate and really work, but our whole focus is on these big seven, because to make sure they don't have a half life is an incredible amount of effort. On the, on, you know, we're 3,500 people. I'm going to guess I'm going to get these numbers wrong. 2000 of them are creative or creative adjacent in some way, or supporting creatives in some way, making stuff. Because the other thing we believe, and we've always believed, is if you are cutting creative expense, you are dead, you're doomed. And everyone's like, well, AI is going to make you not need. No, AI is just going to let us make more stuff. And if you can make more really great stuff, you have like a real chance. Because in this distributed world, you don't know what's going to work. So we get a lot of questions and our board is, you know, it's like David Rosenblatt from DoubleClick and Michael Eisner and Barry Diller and Bonnie Hammer and all these people, and they'll ask

[Peter Kafka]

you, like, all people who've seen their

[Neil Vogel]

businesses disrupted, all people who know what it looks like.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah, right.

[Neil Vogel]

And, and they'll be like, well, how do you, how do you know what content to make and what's. And we always, like, we make the joke all the time, like, half our content is not going to perform. We just have no idea which half. And like, you just got to make it all. And if you try and slice it too thin, you're just going to lose.

[Peter Kafka]

Cannot let you leave without talking about Barry Diller because it's entertaining.

[Neil Vogel]

Talking about Barry Diller, I always have

[Peter Kafka]

the same question for you, which is, does he care about this? I know he does because it's his business and it's a growing business, but it's not sexy. Whenever he's interviewed constantly, he's always being interviewed about Hollywood and what this studio ought to do and what a good streaming strategy is, and maybe he'll buy cnn, but he hasn't been in Hollywood for decades now. That's the thing he's still talking about when you're talking about improving yield on people.com page. Does he glaze over or is he into it?

[Neil Vogel]

I can't speak for Mr. Dealer. I spend a lot of time and I could show you the inbox of my phone and tell you that he really cares. What I would say is he has believed in us from the jump which from the time we were about.com and we went to him and said we need to change this and launch brands through today. I mean he's given us a couple of billion dollars to buy Time Inc. And Meredith. And I think, I would hope to think that he's very proud of where we've landed now as this like profitable, stable, growing media business that has brands that America cares about, that he cares about. Like Travel in Asia is the biggest publication in high end travel. Nobody knows more about travel than Barry Diller. Right between Expedia and MJM Grant. He's incredibly helpful with his ideas. Like we go through people, we go through food and wine and I don't want to speak for him again, but I think what is most interesting to him is what's most interesting to me and to a lot of the other people is that all of us are roughly the targets for the things we're making so it's easier to understand what's good and what's not. And when you say to people like don't throw an event you don't want to go to, don't write something you don't want to read, don't put out a recipe that you haven't made that isn't great. Like he really gets that. And look, every day working for Barry Diller, it's not Christmas. But that's kind of the good part too. Like the incur. He calls it creative conflict. Like the encouragement of the argument. And like best idea wins.

[Peter Kafka]

What's a particular non picnic day?

[Neil Vogel]

You can recall there's always non picnic days.

[Peter Kafka]

Is he, is he still a yeller?

[Neil Vogel]

What? No, I mean is he. I mean, I'm a yeller too.

[Peter Kafka]

You're not supposed to do that anymore.

[Neil Vogel]

That's.

[Peter Kafka]

That, that kind of management is supposed

[Neil Vogel]

to be gone again. Like what, what I, what I would say is like it, it is not always the easiest room, but it's a fun room.

[Peter Kafka]

Okay. I want you, I want you to keep your job. So I'm going to stop asking about you anyway.

[Neil Vogel]

I just keep talking like this.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah, exactly.

[Neil Vogel]

It's. Look, it's fun again if you just zoom out. Fact of the fact, she's been nothing but supportive of us. I mean, we were these knuckleheads with About.com, and then we bought the biggest print publisher in the world. And, like, you know, so he has the vision for this, which is pretty incredible.

[Peter Kafka]

Neil Vogel, CEO of People, Inc. Thank you for joining us. Maybe we'll continue to have that title next time I see you.

[Neil Vogel]

Well, maybe it'll be something else. Thanks, Neil. Thanks.

[Peter Kafka]

Thanks again to Neil Vogel. Nice to see him in person. Again, thanks to Charlotte Silver. Silver, who produces and edits this show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring this show to all of you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. See you soon.