Neil I. Vogel
Analyst · TD Cowen
Thanks, guys. One of the things we just did, which was change our name to People Inc. from Dotdash Meredith. I think this is a very good time for us to reset and reflect on where we sit in the market, reflect on the media markets and give you guys some context as to our strategies and what we're doing. And I think the thing we're most excited about the People Inc. name is Dotdash Meredith was a name of convenience for us. We put together the names of 2 companies. We didn't want to offend anybody. And we wanted to live with it, and I'll be a bit more generous than our Chairman, Mr. Diller, who did not like the name at all. I was happy to live with it until we could really find something better, and we did. And it turns out, the name we wanted with emotion and aspiration and ambition and simplicity baked in was People Inc. It's the name of our hero brand. It's sort of been with us the whole time. Much like great businesses like Coca-Cola, we feel like the flagship brand should be the name of the business. And rather than having to say we're Dotdash Meredith and then the first thing you say is we're People, we can now just say that we are People. But I think the thing that got us most excited and it sort of kicks us off into the rest of the story is what People also means. And it means that we are content made by people for people. We are very aware and embracing of AI and things -- other things in the marketplace. But it's really important that experiences of our experts, our writers, our product testers are paramount to our brands, and many of these brands have a 100-year history relating to people. And People Inc. felt like a fitting name. And there's a little bit of Easter egg in there for those of you who like watch the media inside baseball. It is a little bit of a play on the old Time Inc. name, which again suggests some of the best brands in media. So that was Slide 4. Let's go to Slide 5. And we're going to zoom out for a second. And there are 2 things that we have that we think are going to propel us into the future. One is an incredible series of iconic brands. And two, we have scaled audiences. And it's helpful to zoom out and look at media and the type of media that we do. So food, home, tech, travel, beauty, style, entertainment. 30 years ago, these brands were exclusively communicated in some form of print. Then that changed. And they -- the content and the relationships all moved online. And when they moved online, that's when we got in this business, and we took great advantage of that transition from off-line to online. And by making smart investments and by being very disciplined in how we did things and by recognizing the power and permission of these brands, we built a really strong O&O business, owned-and-operated websites that really grew and put us at sort of like the top end of the brands in each of the categories in which we compete. Now that business was a Google-driven business, right? And if we don't go back too far, Google was -- 70%, 80%, 90% of the track on the open web came through Google, and we got very, very good at Google. And we're very successful, and we ended up buying Meredith and doing these things. But we also noticed around 3 -- coming out of the pandemic, 3, 4, 5 years ago, Google started to send out less and less traffic to people like us, to publishers and to others who created content. And that is Google's prerogative, right? So we're like, okay, we need to figure out how we're going to live in a world where Google traffic might not be the driver of our growth. And then add to that, 2 years ago, ChatGPT launched commercially, and we saw that. And we had a very faithful meeting where we sat and met with Sam Altman and we saw ChatGPT right before it launched. And we said, you know what, this is going to be a catalyst for change for us. We need to connect directly to our audiences, and we need to connect directly to our advertisers, and we need to have leverage here. So knowing that Google is favoring Google results, doing things with Reddit, knowing that ChatGPT is coming around, there's going to be a search answer replacement, what can we do? And if you look at Slide 5, Slide 5 is the outcome of a process that we really started 2 and 3 years ago. And if we can go left to right, we have 3 large buckets of owned audiences, off-platform audiences and audiences we can address. The owned and operated audiences, the far left, is what is still a very robust open web business. And we talked a lot about sessions. We grew sessions again this quarter, and that is a business that is going to be the underpinning of our growth going forward. But what we have really done over the past 2 years is build other assets. We've built a tremendous e-mail business. Our Print business is strong. We built a big events business, a very big syndication business. And our owned and operated sites and our owned and operated assets are very vibrant. To that, we've really added incredible off-platform audiences across Apple News and YouTube, at Instagram and TikTok. And this is the process of lots and lots of investment and lots and lots of time from us. And the way we run the business now is we look at our business and say, okay, we need to aggregate audience from as many sources as possible, an incredible diversity of audience sources. We have a term used internally called Google Zero. What happens if Google goes to 0? What happens if Google no longer sends us traffic? Well, I think we're going to be very healthy. And then the third thing we've done is taken our most valuable asset, which is our data and the first-party data that we know about our audiences, and we can extend that data across the open web. And we've talked a lot before about our D/Cipher ad targeting that allows us to contextually target based on visits to our own sites. And by allowing us to take that data and spread it across the open web, so we now can target advertisements off of Dotdash Meredith. And what that does and a lot of you guys have asked is that really expands our addressable market. We are 4 to 5x in addressable market if we can use our data to target other People sites than our sites so you can get our quality of performance and do it around the Internet. So if you look at this slide, and you say, okay, we've got a healthy open web business, we've got all these incredible new assets underpinned by our world-class brands, we have these rapidly growing off-platform audiences, and we have these addressable audiences well beyond our owned and operated assets. I like our pool of assets. And I feel like we have what we need, the audiences, the brands, the technical skills and the products to hit the revenue goals that we've laid out for everybody. So if you go to the next slide, this is some factual background to what we just talked about. And if you look at the left, you can see core sessions. These are sessions to our core sites. And you can see over the last 3 years, from '23 to '25, core sessions have grown, while the percentage of traffic from Google has shrunk. Now there are 2 reasons for that. One, Google is changing their search page rapidly to favor things Google chooses to favor. And two, that is the impact of AI. When people talk about the impact of AI on our business, they're really talking about search for us because as AI competes with Google and Google puts AI on their page or someone chooses to go somewhere else for search, there's no guarantee we get a link like the old days like we used to get a link. So you're seeing our traffic from Google go down while you're seeing our overall sessions go up. And that is everything we talked about on the prior page. The second thing, the middle chart is off-platform views, and we've done an outstanding job across our brands, whether it's People or Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine or Real Simple, of building off-platform views. And this really started actively investing in this in 2023, 2024, and you can see the results so far in 2025. Now about 1/3 of our Digital revenue comes from sources that are not sessions related, that are not sessions based. And then you can go to the far right, and you can see we've grown Digital revenue all the while. And we are very proud that as we've made this transition from what was a print-based business to a digital owner-owned Google-based business to a we have to be everywhere with these assets business, we've grown revenue the entire way.