Christopher Halpin
Analyst · Cowen. Please go ahead with your question
Thanks, John. It's Chris. So we and spent, real time in the letter trying to frame this out, which I'll refer to as we go through it. There are two dynamics to Dotdash Meredith digital revenue that are just key overhangs on our performance this year. And that ties both to third quarter trends, what we're seeing now and where we are on Dotdash EBITDA to your second question. The first is the integration and those specifically that migration of the Meredith digital properties to the Dotdash platform. And then the second is macro and overall ad market. I'll take those one at a time. On the migration, we said in the last quarter. We were we were overly aggressive on our expected timing of the migrations - as a reminder, to those who are newer to the story. This is the acquired properties. Meredith was about two-thirds of the size of Dotdash, in a serial fashion, moving those properties over to the Dotdash platform. And that means much faster site speeds, reduced ad inventory, and eliminating old content and producing better content. And we'll go - I'm sure into more depth on this call. Those delays, pushed us from an expected completion, say around the 4th of July of all the sites to - of all the major sites to where we are now, which was we completed the migrations, by the end of September, early October. Two things happen. One, because the sites were not migrated, we could not drive the traffic increases we expect from migrated sites as early and capture as much of that in this year as we expected. The second is we were not able to run as we call it the Dotdash playbook and integrate performance marketing and e-commerce into the Meredith sites. And all - the additional revenue sources that we expect to drive that was one overhang from migration challenges. The second is, our expectation was that the early migrations would be very comparable to the later migrations, in terms of complexity, ad serving et cetera. That's true with historical performance, unfortunately, and this has been - a challenging journey through the summer, thankfully, heavily behind us. But it was, we found that with some of the larger related sites, there were idiosyncrasies to ad serving to surfing activities that lead to underperformance and we had to make tweaks. In the case of our lifestyle sites, we saw, you know, we needed to constantly update the ad performance at the ad serving performance, which we're now on the other side of and for example, in food and recipes, we've continued to need to optimize our ad load relative to pricing uplift, those are just things that happen when you move a lot of properties. And Dotdash Meredith management is - feels very good that where we are in early November, with 90 plus percent of the sites and all of the big sites migrated. Those challenges are behind us. But those were definitely drags on q3 performance. Additionally, we just had some sort of break and fixes on ad serving on e-commerce integrations. And those were drags, as you'll see in the Q, on performance marketing in the quarter. The market overhang, we talked about this previously, May, June, July, we saw rapid decline in ad demand from retail CPG and home as well as some smaller subcategories. That continued through the summer, but we actually saw a couple categories, including retail come back and back-to-school. And while they're not back to last year levels, we've seen strength. Unfortunately, we've seen other categories beauty, tech, telco really soften year-over-year. So it's a choppy ad market. So what we'd say broadly as your question on brand versus performance, there's not a lot of brand in the Dotdash portfolio there was some in Meredith. But all - everything about the playbook is moving our pitch to advertisers and our reporting to performance. But the ad market is choppy we'd expect brands to be weak next year. And it will only - the current market will only accelerate per performance and ROI and clarity. But we don't have a significant brand portion in our portfolio. In terms of the EBITDA decline, it is all driven relative to the $300 million we were initially put out after the first quarter it's all driven by digital revenue declines. Print is solid, expenses are in good shape, and corporate expenses are in a good spot post combination. The margins, the incremental margins on digital revenue, we've always said are very high, as well as on e-commerce, et cetera. We expected to have the migrations go more smoothly than we did, especially over Q3. And we expected a more solid ad market, not a great ad market, but a more solid ad market in this quarter. And, we've now accepting a choppy one through the rest of the year. So that is - that is the dynamics, when we look forward to '23. We talked in the letter, October, traffic volumes are down about 5%. A big chunk of that is just going back to go forward on the big sites we've recently migrated. We expect to continue to improve that we also expect to take share on the ad sales side. We said we'd love to get back to flat in the first part of the first half of '23. And just more specific to our own opportunities grow for the entire year. In terms of numbers, we're in the midst of business planning, and we'll be coming back to you on the next earnings call with greater clarity on our plan for the '23 financial year. Thank you.