← Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
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This podcast is brought to you by audiohook, the leading independent audio dsp. Audiohook has direct publisher integrations into all major podcast and streaming radio platforms, providing 40% more inventory than what could be accessed in omnichannel DSPs. What's more, audiobook has full transcripts on more than 90% of all podcast inventory, enabling advanced contextual targeting and brand suitability. Audio Hook is so confident that in addition to CPM buys, they offer the industry's only pay for performance option where brands can scale audio and podcasting with peace of mind mind knowing they are only paying for outcomes. Visit audiohook.com to learn more. That's audiohook.com. Hi, this is Ari Paparo. I'm happy to have another recording from our Architecture live event on March 10th and 11th. This one is with Neil Vogel, the chief Executive Officer of People, Inc. It's called the Publisher's Guide to Thriving in the AI Era, and it's an interesting conversation where he talks about the future of AI, of content licensing, and generally how publishers are going to survive in this era. He is speaking with Mark Stenberg, the senior Media reporter for Adweek, and I hope you enjoy this
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foreign.
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Thank you so much for being here. I'm Mark Stemberg, senior Media Reporter at Adweek. I'm joined by Neil Vogel, CEO of People, Inc. Formerly known as Dot dash Meredith. And as Ari said, we're here to talk about the Publisher's Guide to not just Surviving but thriving in the AI era. So People is obviously a great company to start with when we're having this conversation. I was thinking about this beforehand. A few years ago I'd written a story that was about the idea of what was what was then called intent media companies. And these were companies that had really optimized their content strategies around Google and its algorithm. And at the time Buzzfeed and all these sort of social first publishers were tanking. And I spoke with companies like then Dot dash Meredith and Ziff Davis and Red Ventures and some others and they said thank God we chose the right algorithm to build around. Google is reliable, right? And then jump cut, you know, two or three years later. Of course, Neil probably never said that Google's reliable because I feel like that's probably too optimistic. But here we are in a completely different environment where search is evaporating traffic to publishers, as we've historically known it, is going the way of the dinosaur and we're seeing publishers big and small try to adapt and make in certain instances really big changes to how they go about their business. So you might think, given that setup, that people might have been at risk for falling into this Google algorithm trap. And yet in the Q4 results just reported a few weeks ago, I think you recorded a 14% increase in revenue. I think it was the fifth straight quarter, maybe of ninth straight quarter of revenue growth. So clearly you've sort of dodged the asteroid, at least temporarily. Can you walk us through a little bit? What is the People Inc. Strategy? How have you managed to sort of outlast this Google apocalypse?
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A lot of people here, so you have to turn back the clock and we'll go too far. Just go, go. About four years ago, plus dot dash which was us, the historical dot dash a bunch of online brands, the piece of about dot com that we turned into a successful media business. We went out and we spent a lot of money and we bought the combination of Meredith and Time Inc. So we ended up with all these great publishing brands, people, food and wine, travel, nature, all these things. And the bet was there's two big knocks on us. One was, these guys are buying a print company, which was absolutely accurate. But we didn't care because we wanted these brands. We knew we could make them digital in terms of the future. And the second was at the time we did the deal, I'll get these numbers slightly wrong. 75% of our audience was from Google. And we took a lot of shit for that, which was like, what? I would never invest in this thing. They're also dependent on one algorithm. Like, what's going on here? It's so, so exposed. And I was at this investor conference and I was talking to investors, and the, the one of the investors was like, you guys are 75% from Google. I would never invest in you. I was like, well, how much of the open web comes from Google? He was like, probably 85 or 90%. I'm like, right, we're not good enough at it. Like, we're only 75. You've got it backwards. And what that did for us was we just fish where the fish are. Like, let's get users where they are. And there's two truths in media. If you have amazing brands and you do amazing things, you can then build durable audiences. What happens in between, who cares? It doesn't matter if it's a Google or a magazine or a YouTube or an Instagram.
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C
You.
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B
You have to get your amazing brands to these people. And what happened to Google? Because we were so focused on Google, which is where all the people were. We were the first people to see that Google was changing. Like I think everyone saw we're the first people to recognize and act and this is like three years ago. We, and I demand credit for this. In our office we invented the word Google zero. That was us. That was, we did it and it was like an internal thing we used to say which is like Google 70, 65% of our traffic and like this is going to zero. We need to have a business. And we spent all of our time how are we going to correct connect directly with advertisers and directly with our audiences. And we started to build things. We really invested in TikTok. We really invested in Instagram. We build this amazing app for people that goes directly. We build this amazing service called My Recipes. We go super deep into email. We create decipher this targeting tool that allows us to use our data to target ads off our network. We do all, all, all of these things and at the time everybody is just writing about like Vice and buzzfeed and we're like if the press was right, those guys would be the dominant media companies of the world right now. They're clearly didn't work out. And we just quietly did our thing and people said we're like contrarian. Like we're not contrarian. We're like non trarian. Like we're not. We have no opinion on what everyone else is doing. We're just going to look at the market and we're gonna figure out what the market wants. And remember, if you have amazing brands and you build durable audiences, you just have to, you gotta figure out how to get your offerings to people at one lowercase p people. At one point everybody came from Google and it was free and we were really good at one thing. Now we're good at literally like 20 things. This is way, way harder but way more durable. And it's working as you said and thank you for the plug. We're, you know, we're like nine straight quarters of positive growth. We grew 14% in the fourth quarter. We're a pretty big part of ISE which is a public company. All our results are out there for everyone to see. We did almost a billion 8 in revenue last year, 300 and change in EBITDA. Like we're, we're a growing, thriving, successful media business based on like brands and being ruthlessly unsentimental with how these brands interact with our audiences.
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I mean to the degree that we can like dive into this a little bit further. I am curious. There was obviously a massive audience that was coming your way as A result of Google. You and a lot of other publishers have seen that go down. Has the efforts that you all have put into growing audience on social and on newsletters and in events, et cetera, has that compensated for loss or is very.
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B
This is easy math. And we actually laid this out in our, our, our earnings. 60% of our business is not growing, is fairly flat. Google referrals to our properties over the last two years are down 50%. We could sit and complain about it and I could yell about Google stealing our content for AI and having one crawler that you can't separate their AI from their search and how awful they are, which I'm not supposed to say, but they kind of are to us. But um, but you know, I'm not lost. I got so mad at Google I lost my train of thought. But now so, so, but so 40% of our business is growing, which is the new stuff. 60% is flattish and 60% is flattish, which is basically the web based business of our digital revenue. Right. It's the old people come to websites and we sell ads. Roughly that. And we've done a very good job of keeping that flat in a declining traffic environment because we're pretty good at something near and dear to the heart of many people here. We're very good at monetization, we do it very respectfully, we're very good at it. But 40% of our business is growing at nearly 40%. It's all these other things. It's everything from events to social videos on TikTok and Instagram to AI licensing deals to Apple News to all of these other things. We do this basket of things and what our business is going to be right now is it's a race. It's a race. How quickly can we grow the 40 before the 60 declines? So far we're winning and it's really, really hard. I work for Barry Diller which is a whole nother experience which I actually enjoy very much. But he calls it, it's an inversion. It's an inversion moment where we have to realize we have one asset which is brands that people love. And we have some of the, again, some of the best brands in the world. Food and Wine, Travel and Leisure, Real Simple People, Entertainment Weekly in style. That is the only asset you need to succeed is if you have these brands and there were some of them were kind of like listing four or five years ago. We've done a good job of rejuvenating them. We have these incredible editors. But if you can make these Work, you have a chance. And all we're asking for is a chance. And again, the focus for us is, and it's a hard resource allocation thing, we gotta preserve the 60 and we gotta grow the 40.
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C
I feel like media on some level is always, you know, one element of our business is dying and we're moving to the growing part or whatever.
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Just that's like, that is every business in the universe. Like something is always dying. Don't complain about it, deal with it. Something is always going to be good. Find resources from over here and put them over here. And you have to make. The thing that media people historically have believed is that you have some divine right to exist because you have a brand that people at some point loved. You don't. What you have is the privilege of trying to exist. You don't get to exist. And I think a lot of people are proving that like you don't exist anymore. Well, okay.
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C
And so in terms of elements of the business that are growing, you touched on this a few times. I've reported on this a lot. I think it's maybe the media story of 2026 is content licensing agreements as it pertains to AI companies. People Inc. Has deals, I think with Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft. I've heard maybe Amazon is potentially in the works. They're inviting some publishers out to Seattle from time to time. The elephant in the room, as you sort of alluded to earlier, is obviously Google, which owns the lion's share of search and yet has been sort of the least willing to come to the table in terms of arranging any kind of content licensing agreement. There have been some murmurs that some discussions are in the works there. I'm curious, what can you share in terms of where are you in conversations with Google on that front and what do you think that looks like in six to 12 months?
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B
Let's, let's take a step back and look at the ecosystem. The, the way the world's evolving is there's sort of two kinds of deals now happening. License one is sort of like the all you can eat deal where you're working with an end user. It's usually a consumer company and they pay you an amount of money and maybe some escalators and some stuff to use all of your content in training or display or some combination thereof. That's our OpenAI deal and that's our Metadill. The other kind of deal we have is our deal we have with Microsoft, which is they're creating a marketplace where if you're on Microsoft Azure and You need to use data for your AI project. You can come in and you can buy our data on a single use basis and then you have a license to use it out in the universe. We're very optimistic about both of these types of deals. We don't really care what works as long as we're fairly compensated. I tend to believe the all you can eat deals seem to be for consumer facing things. And the B2B things seems to be the more marketplace deals. I would argue there's probably more scale in the marketplace B2B stuff, but I don't know. And our whole stance on how we're going to work with AI is we want to be paid fairly compensated fairly, and we want to be in the room with the people making the decisions. And AI needs three things. It needs power, it needs a model, and it needs information. And AI right now is out of information. It is. The universe has been crawled. It's finished. So the fact that we make more content than any publisher, probably by far between all of our brands and what we do, it's interesting. In the old search days, our most valuable content was these really researched health articles. And the least valuable was probably the. What did Kim Kardashian do yesterday on People? It's kind of flipped. The, the AI models need all the new stuff for search and the old stuff is like they just get it from the CDC and just take it. So that's all happening. But, but the, the licensing and getting us paid is critical to the survival of AI. It's like garbage in, garbage out. If you're out of things to put in your LLM, it's just not going to be very good. And I think a lot of people are realizing that now. Nobody is benevolent and nobody's going to realize it on their own. We, we did a deal with OpenAI first and then we partnered with Cloudflare and we blocked everybody else. And by blocking everybody else, everyone else saying, oh, we're going to figure out what the value of your content is and we'll get back to you. The minute you block them, all of a sudden they call you on the phone because they need your content. And we've been super, super aggressive. The problem with Google is you cannot block them, so we cannot manufacture leverage. Because Google uses one crawler for search and for AI. Let me repeat that. They use one crawler for search and AI and it's got to get split. Like European regulators are looking like we have to be able to block them for AI search. They're a utility so you can't, like. But right now, there's still a big enough part of our business, even having declined 50% in referrals because of all the stuff they're doing on the page, and favoring YouTube and favoring Reddit and favoring all the other things, like, that's fine. But not being able to block them is a major leverage problem for us and every other publisher in dealing with them.
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C
Yeah, I think in the, in the uk, the CMA just ruled, which is effectively their markets regulator, that Google does need to decouple those two functions. And the day that that ruling came out, Google published a blog like, three hours later. And we're like, we're working on it. We knew that the whole time, you know, kind of thing.
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B
Um, so they totally know it. Yeah, they might be working on it.
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C
I mean, I feel like this strategy on their end is, you know, drag feet until forced to take action.
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B
I can't speak for Google and their strategy. I don't work there. I don't know. I just know from watching what Google does, and you can draw your own conclusion.
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C
What do you, I mean, do you think that there's a tipping point for that? Or, I mean, do you, I mean, putting you on the spot here a little bit. But do you think it's a sort of legislative remedy or is it an economic motivation that eventually gets them to sort of like, you know, face the music and say, okay, we do need to split these things up?
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B
I, I don't know. I both care deeply and don't care at all, because we have to run our business given the rules of the road. And like, if you play football, football has rules. You can't not play by certain rules of football because you don't like them. Unfortunately, one of the rules of the road is this right now. So we have to deal in this world and in this, it's like this, this great line in the Wire. One of the characters, Marlowe, just looks at other, says, you want the world to be one way, but it's the other way. Like, we're dealing in a world that's the other way. And you're dealing in that with search referrals, you're dealing in that with AI. You're dealing with that with how you monetize, we're dealing with that with retail media networks. You just have to be very realistic. And, and I, I, I'm, I'm really boring. I just say the same things over and over again. If, if you have real brands, incredible brands that have real meaning to people that you keep vibrant and alive, you got a puncher's chance at all this stuff. Like we learned when we bought the Time Inc. Meredith combo, we had some brands that we loved internally. We created this brand called the Spruce at the Old Dash. We were the biggest home site on the Internet for a while. Then we got our hands on Southern Living, Better Homes and Gardens and Real Simple. And it turns out that the things they're permissioned to do in terms of events and emails, other things is so much broader than this Internet thing we made. Spruce is shrinking like materially, but these three things are growing materially because they can do more things. So like you need to have real, real, real brands or you don't have a chance. If you have that, then we can talk about everything else.
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C
Well, I'm curious. I mean that's a nice segue as well because we discussed this a little bit beforehand. But a few weeks ago, Roger lynch, the CEO of Conde Nast, basically told the Financial Times that AI was this massive disruption moment. You're like, that's not news. But I think that announcement was meant to sort of herald the fact that they're beginning to reassess the Conde Nast portfolio. They sold off them, they're folding in some other titles into some larger titles. It used to be the case, and maybe is still the case that having a massive portfolio of a lot of brands was a real asset in expanding open web. Now it feels like to your point, consumers are gravitating towards specific brands they trust. And these big portfolio media companies are starting to say, well maybe we would be better off if we focus more of our resources on a smaller number of our best performing assets. What are you all thinking in terms of reassessing the portfolio and how does that fit into content strategy going forward?
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So we have 40ish brands overall combination again of the old dot dash, the old time inc. The old Meredith. And we say this internally, this is not like news to anybody who says, well 10 of them matter, like 30 of them all do something, they have a purpose. Like they're, they're, they, they may do one thing really well or two things really well. But we have 10 that matter. And by matter I mean we call it permissions. They have the highest level of permission to do different things. And as a media company now we've talked about this a hundred times, like people looks a lot like what all the people, lowercase people in this room would expect a media company to look like, right? We're happen to be like the Third biggest news brand in America or something behind CNN and Fox. Like, we're massive. We're human. You know, 10 million sessions a day on the web. We're massive on TikTok and Instagram. We still have a magazine that goes out to 2 million people a week. Like, it's a. It is a media business. But if you start looking at our other brands, they don't look like that. Like, the single biggest thing we do at Better Homes and Gardens is we're the largest license or inside of Walmart stores with Better Homes and Gardens candles and towels and furniture. Like, if you look at food and wine, probably the biggest part of food and wine's business is an event business. The food and wine classics, all the best new chef stuff we do. And if you go brand by brand, our brands are going to live in very different ways. And each brand has to have its own place. The further you are to the top 10, those are the ones that can do the most stuff. The smaller ones, like Shape can't do much. Like parents. Like, we love parents. It's an incredible brand. It's great. There's not a single parent in this room who is going to do anything other than go to Google or ChatGPT and say, like, my kid's got a fever. How do I get it down? Like, it's not. There's no business there anymore. Where at Food and Wine, Travel and leisure, people, Better Homes and Gardens, these are incredible businesses that have, like, vibrant reasons to exist. Like, but some of our brands are just not the old true service publishing brands are the ones that you have to do the hardest work on. And that's like parents.
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C
Well, and I think that's so interesting because, I mean, on some level we're just talking about the merits of diversification. And obviously iac, owner of People Inc. Is a public company, so maybe you are a little bit handheld in what you're able to do and not to. But I immediately think of Hurst, which has this really interesting approach where they're basically like, diversification for us means holding on to things that are working right now and things that aren't working right now because they might work in the future. And if we start only going with what is performing at the moment, then when the tides change, then we could be left in a disadvantaged place. And it strikes me as being very similar to what's happened with. You used to say to me, you know, we don't do news. We do everything but news. And it was only people that did news. And you were just Saying, you know, earlier, it's a total inversion, like, people is now the primary sort of success story and the most valuable thing maybe to AI. And had you, not that you were ever going to divest people, but had you spun that off a few years ago when it wasn't core to your product, now you'd be up the creek a little bit. So it speaks, I think, to the difficulty of having to make decisions about if a brand is functioning right now, we keep it. But if it's not, what if it is in the future?
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B
Given how our biggest focus. And you said diversity, I know we're running out of time, so I'll be quick. Here is. We are focused on each of our brands now at getting audience from as many different durable places as possible and making money in as many different durable ways as possible. If we can connect directly with users and directly with advertisers and marketers and retail partners, like, we're probably the biggest sender of affiliate transactions to retailers in America. Like, every retailer you can think of, we're probably number one. Like, as long as we can have these great brands that do a diversity of things in a diversity of ways, we'll be fine. Like you said, events are hot now. Like, events at some point are not going to be hot. Like, Google was the best now. Google's not a thing. Like, we, we're. We've these incredible, like the, we made the show at InStyle called the Intern that's on like TikTok and Instagram that's getting like 25 million views a season and the season is 20 minutes long and sponsors are paying us a bunch of money to be part of it. Like, that's. It's all going to end at some point. But if you have real brands and you've got really. Our editorial people are incredible. You let them do their thing like you got a chance.
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C
Well, that's a good note to end on. Thank you, everybody and thank you so much, Neil, for being here.