Thanks everybody for joining. My name is Ross Sandler. I head up the U.S. Internet Research Team. Very excited to have the team from IAC back again this year. Chris and Mark, thank you for attending. Maybe, Chris, to start things off, just a high-level question. We, you know, struggle with this admittedly ourselves, and we get this from investors quite a bit, but, like, I've covered IAC for a long time. We've had different eras of, you know, the IAC kind of equity ownership story from, you know, splitting the company up into five pieces in 2008. Then there was, like, a big capital return period, then there was the period of, like, the Match IPO and the spins and, you know, that led us into kind of the pandemic, and now we're in this new era.
I guess, how would you describe the era that we're in right now relative to those prior eras, where, you know, in one sense, we were returning lots of capital to shareholders, in the other sense, we were, you know, spinning and IPO-ing things? How would you compare this era?
Sure, and thanks for having us.
Yep.
I think the core themes of capital allocation, long-term commitment to creating value through digital, and flexibility in terms of transaction types, sectors, et cetera, are still in place. If you go back two years, when I joined, there was the base of the portfolio companies, and the question was really: Where are we going to allocate capital going forward and, as well as growing? Clearly, we've had a challenging year and a half with Angi and with Dotdash Meredith. We feel we will talk about both of those. You know, we feel good about where we are in their respective paths, and very different reasons that it's been a major endeavor operationally over the last, say two years. Coming out of it, you know, we've got a strong portfolio.
We are interested in allocating capital and taking advantage of trends. We think we trade at a value that doesn't reflect what the representative value of our assets. When you look at our two public holdings in Angi and MGM, plus our cash, we're really not trading for much more of that. And when you think about our private companies of Dotdash Meredith, Care, Vimeo, our stake in Turo, and our Search business, there's just tremendous value embedded. So for us, it's prove the value out and then allocate capital wisely.
On that last point, you guys have done a nice job allocating capital. MGM, in particular, you know, very well-timed and you know, your influence there is notable. I guess, given the situation with Entain, they've now got a few more of these activist investors around it. You know, you guys have limited control in that sense, but how do you see all this playing out, and how do you kind of maximize what you have with MGM?
Yeah. So the obviously, the BetMGM partnership has been fluid for years, since it was founded. There have been a number of different moments during that period where potential M&A or also different strategies with our partner at Entain. What we're focused on is working with the BetMGM team, who had their Investor Day this week, to maximize their opportunity in the United States. Clearly, big product opportunity. The product has lagged at different times. Some of the competitors great marketing opportunity and the omni-channel strategy is one we're big believers in, given the size of MGM's loyalty database and how strong that brand is. And, you know, it's hard for us to weigh in on the shareholder situation at Entain.
I know they're heads down, you know, focused on their business and working through it. But, we believe BetMGM is a singular asset in the U.S. market.
Another smart investment you guys have made, well-timed, was Turo, and we get this one from the investment community often. But with the kind of peer group of gig economy companies, DoorDash, Uber, we had Lyft here yesterday, all effectively kind of doubling in 2023. It seems like there is appetite for that kind of asset as a public company. So, you know, you're obviously kind of at an arm's length, but, you know, could you talk about prospects for an IPO and you know, the plan at Turo?
Sure. We are long-term holders of Turo. We've been very clear, and, you know, Joey has been clear that we want to own more, not less. So for us, an IPO would be a step in the progression of the company if they want to do it, and in their approach to raising capital, et cetera. You know, being a public company versus a private company, we're supportive if that's what the board and management want to do, and there's, you know, pros and cons to that. Relative to an IPO, obviously, there were the three or four, depending on how you define it, that got public post-Labor Day. Sort of mixed performance there, and was at breakfast hearing your colleagues at Barclays talk about when the IPO market might come back.
Sounds hard to predict and a bit choppy. So we're supporters. We think Turo has a tremendous market opportunity. But, you know, one of the things about going public is you wake up the next day, and you've gone from, you know, ex-investors do multiples of that, and you still have to execute yourself to put your head down. So hard to weigh in on timing, and the value in front of them of just taking share in their space and growing the brand is far more important.
Yep. Okay. Shifting gears to the operating companies, on Dotdash Meredith to start. So at the time of the earnings call, there was a fair amount of noise, not really from you guys, but from some of the digital advertising peers around trends in October, around, you know, the Middle East conflict. You know, here we are, six weeks on, with most of the kind of holiday visibility in sight. How have things progressed? And, you know, there was questions around whether we would get a budget flush in digital in 2023, given the October, you know, hiccup, but what are you guys seeing there?
Yeah, it was a good November. It was an odd dynamic. October was an odd dynamic because it happened so quickly, and it clearly was correlated, probably precipitated by the Israeli-Gaza conflict. But it also really ended November first, and I don't know if that's a monthly construct at agencies or something, but we said in the earnings call, surprisingly large slowdown in October, and then really starting November first, it bounced back. I'm talking direct and programmatic on the advertising side. Direct is fine. I don't know if I'd call it a budget flush, as you said, more they're doing what we think brands would do and agencies would do. We hope that continues throughout December.
There's some, you know, still some key weeks to go, but direct is fine. Programmatic definitely firmed up in November, and on pricing, we think we're or we definitely feel like we're outperforming the market in terms of programmatic CPM increases. We should be, because we're executing and improving our platforms, et cetera. But it was a good month there. E-commerce, the cadence of when consumers are spending, we've talked about this a couple times, is definitely different year to year. This year, some things were pulled forward by Amazon and others, you know, with the Prime Deals Day, but it was a solid holiday period. We felt great about our performance and have heard that from our retail partners, and so we're, you know, optimistic.
Last year, this time, everyone got whipsawed by the market, so we're definitely gun-shy about, you know, mission accomplished, and there's some key months to go, but it was a good holiday period.
And then last quarter, you guys talked about there was some new disclosure around DDM core versus non-core. I guess, how do we, you know, think about this new disclosure? How do we think about monetization potential within those two? And is there some, you know, cleanup happening in non-core that might be weighing down growth rates that would otherwise be higher currently and in 2024?
Yes, definitely. So we put that disclosure out, which essentially a new traffic metric, which we call sessions, and we bifurcated it between core, which are our 19 major sites that we are investing behind, and then non-core total, which includes non-core. Talking to investors and analysts, there's a couple different pools in non-core. One are fine owned and operated sites that just don't get any benefit from investment. You know, they are kind of every day, working hard, doing their best, but if you put a dollar or $10 in them, you're not gonna get that much different. So those should be steady, continue to operate fine. The second are long tail sites that we are owned and operated, that we are winding down.
That was part of the original strategy in the merger with Meredith, and both properties had sites that, you know, complementary strengths, you don't really need these to go forward. And then the third bucket are third-party sites where Meredith handled the ad sales for. And those sites have gotten really hit hard. It's interesting for us because it probably highlights what's going on in the broader open web and publishing to sites that don't have the strength of the brands we have and the quality of the content we have, but that's been a major drag on sessions and a smaller drag on revenue. But that longer term, we expect that non-core to continue to diminish, and so core and non-core growth rates will be sort of, you know, over time, asymptotically will be the same.
Traffic growth, we feel great about. We feel very good about where our brands are, our core brands are, and the ability to keep growing them in terms of traffic engagement and market share.
You, you touched on this earlier, but performance marketing has had a huge, you know, re-acceleration this year, at DDM, brand lagging a little bit, but also picking up of late. So I guess it sounds like those trends continued in Q4. You know, what does the outlook look like for 2024 on, on those sides? And we were talking earlier about Chrome cookie deprecation potentially being a catalyst for the IAC properties or DDM properties. Could you just talk a little bit about that?
Sure. Taking the first part, we feel good about how our sites. I mean, at the end of the day, it's price times quantity on the advertising side. So, quantity is traffic, we talked about that. That should be a tailwind. On price, it's the combination of direct premium sales and programmatic sales. So direct premium is about two-thirds of our advertising revenue. If you look at our digital P&L, about two-thirds of that is advertising, about a quarter is a little less than a quarter is performance marketing, e-commerce, and then the rest is licensing. Within that two-thirds, that is advertising, two-thirds is premium, a third is programmatic. We get much higher CPMs on premium, although we feel like we, you know, do well in programmatic.
On the pricing side, both premium and programmatic should be solid in Q1, Q2 and be tailwinds. They were, they were tough last year. You know, I think we've you and I have talked about this a bunch. It was, it was just a tough ad market starting from, you know, mid-November last year through the spring. Barring some exogenous shock, the comp should be pretty, pretty attractive, and we hope to see some firming. That's on the advertising side. On the... And also on the programmatic side, we keep improving our ad tech stack, we keep improving our execution, and, longer term, we think D/Cipher can be an engine here.
On the performance marketing side, you know, we've had second derivative positive momentum throughout the year of, you know, 0%, 12%, 22%, and up 22%, and I expect to be a very strong quarter. We think it should continue. There's definitely always the question of how will the consumer spend and what will that look like? This holiday has been as good or better than expected, I'd say, in terms of consumer activity. But that would be the main overhang I'd think about for next year in performance marketing.
Okay. And then on the cookies?
Yeah, sorry. So we get asked about this a lot. You can see the experience with what Apple did on eliminating cookies and the performance, the winners, the losers, and what happens to price and performance therein. When Google does something similar on their properties, first-party platforms will benefit. Those with first-party data and direct ad relationships will benefit. Heavily reliant third-party retargeting, generic, et cetera, will all struggle. We feel it's actually a core thesis of the Dotdash Meredith combination, and also their DDM strategy is the power of intent, and that underpins D/Cipher, which is this. This is our campaign management platform that's essentially a productization of the strengths of Dotdash Meredith.
So if you are a brand or advertiser, or agency looking to reach certain segments or demos, because of the scale of our footprint in a number of categories: home, food, travel, investment, et cetera, entertainment, we can give you major reach targeting, and we have intent. We know if you're a paint company that, because we've mapped it and done all the data science behind most likely correlations behind what they're searching for, what they're reading, and where they can be monetized. So D/Cipher is been a... was a major step for us. We are confident in its outperformance against cookie-based solutions. And then in non-cookie platforms like iOS, it blows away any alternative.
So we view it as a tailwind, but it's gonna be choppy for the broader, you know, digital ad allocation market when cookies go away on, on Google, just 'cause, you know, you're gonna have to work harder to figure out performance, but we feel good about it for DDM.
Last one on DDM. The incremental margins are ticking up nicely in the fourth quarter. I guess just how do we think about that on a go-forward basis? It seems like we're through a lot of the heavy lifting at DDM. You know, what's the outlook for '2024 and beyond?
Sure. So, near term, we've said, you know, roughly 80% incremental EBITDA margin, adjusted EBITDA margins. That's a reflection of the actions that were taken to combine the businesses, optimize the cost structure, and then also further improve the cost structure in the context of the ad recession. Secondly, we're operating on a depressed digital ad level, so the team can bring on revenues with almost no incremental cost. I mean, basically, that 20% marginal expense is related to sales execution, maybe some small campaign costs, those types of things. But the cost structure, besides the sales elements, are really content, product, tech platform, and G&A. Near term, none of those need to scale while we add revenue.
Longer term, we've said, you know, 55%-60% incremental Adjusted EBITDA margins, and where the investment lies is content. So that's continued optimization of content, creation of new and engaging content in forms of consumer engagement related to e-commerce, expansions in sort of sub-brands that we see high ROI. There'd be small incremental step function investments in product and technology as revenue grows, but that's pretty controllable. So for us, it's about as we see ROI from content when we choose to invest in that.
Switching over to Angi's. A lot of change this year with Joey stepping back in with the recent divestiture and just a pretty awful macro backdrop for housing. So as we flip to 2024, with rates coming down, potentially housing picking up off of a depressed level, and you guys having worked through some of these challenges, how do you feel about the performance that Angi's gonna put up next year?
Yeah. So this year, you know, the themes have been reduced revenue, particularly in ads and leads as—I'm talking net revenue-
Yeah
... because obviously, we have the accounting change that brings down services, but no impact to bottom line. As Joey and team went in and broke down the portfolio and then optimized for pro experience and consumer experience, there's been a lot of discussion of this. We eliminated low ROI, low-margin revenues that we were getting from consumers. We also significantly reduced the acquisition of low-value pros and size of our pro sales force. And then we've continued to improve overall marketing ROI as well as cost structure. Net result of that is depressed revenues or declining revenues, but improved profitability. We feel good about a baseline level of adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow.
We've also significantly managed or reduced a majorly excessive capitalized software activity and overinvestment that was going on. But we feel good about where we are on an adjusted EBITDA basis and adjusted EBITDA minus CapEx. That's the baseline, and we can grow from there. You know, we obviously disappointed the market in the second quarter with the further reduction in low-calorie revenues. But we feel good about the way adjusted EBITDA is trending and where margins are coming in in Q4 and, you know, especially relative to our guidance of $100-$110. Next year is really gonna be about getting through that drop, you know, the bottom of the trough in revenue declines, tough comp in Q1.
You know, things will start to get easier in Q2, Q3. We are not saying when we're gonna get back to revenue growth, but we should be able to continue to push on profitability.
And more strategically for Angi’s, you know, the stock's about in the same place that it was when you guys were buying back shares. I guess, thoughts on that versus buying back shares at the IAC level. And then there's been some discussion about potentially combining Angi’s with other assets like Yelp, et cetera. Any comments on that?
With respect to buyback shares, we said we're putting a plan in place to use our existing authorization. The biggest challenge with Angi is just the low liquidity relative to buybacks, et cetera. But, we've said we're putting a plan in place subject to liquidity and pricing thresholds, et cetera. IAC, we continue to evaluate, you know, our trading levels and valuation and capital allocation to that, and we always will. So that's, you know, that's the story on share buybacks. What was the second one? Oh, M&A.
Just M&A, combination of Yelp.
There was speculation with the activist at Yelp. We think Angi's a great business. We think the long-term value there is not reflected in its current share price, but we know we've got to execute. We know we've fatigued investors. So, we're always opportunistic about combinations, but right now it's very much Joey and team are heads down, executing.
On that point, the execution point, so if we just look at, like, the ads and leads segment within Angi's, like, how do you feel about both growth and margin there now that we're gonna start lapping the channel cleanup in 2Q?
You should see continued margin improvement just from the marketing efficiencies.
Yeah.
There was a lot of dead or poorly performing marketing dollars in that base. To be fair, a chunk of that derives from the rebranding. In March of 2021, the decision was made to consolidate fully on the Angi brand. HomeAdvisor, as you know, was the SEO beast at the time. The underperformance in HomeAdvisor exceeded the growth in Angi, and we've been buying traffic that we would have historically gotten for free through SEO since then, and we've been public in saying that's probably an $80 million plus just straight, you know, transfer to third parties. Some of that was poor spend, some of that was inefficient. We, you know, will have continued marketing efficiency and improvement there.
You know, it's now about driving SEO, driving repeat traffic, driving consumer experience, which Joey has been adamantly focused on, so that consumers come back to Angi naturally, and the virtuous circle continues.
Just wanna make sure if anybody has a question, you can either raise your hand or just fire it out. I'll keep going. So less discussed, other segments, but important ones. So you had leadership changes at Care and in Search over the last six months or so. Just update on progress there and what the outlook looks like for 2024 on those two.
Yeah, you know, we're going through strategic planning right now across the businesses, but very good about Care with Brad Wilson, who we brought in as CEO, and he's brought in a new CMO, new chief product officer, which were the two big gaps that we were focused on. Look, it's a very good business. It is a space that is early in the offline to online transition. It's a solid brand. Traffic performs well, margins are excellent. We just, you know, we were underperforming on marketing, and we knew we needed a CMO, we knew and it's blocking and tackling on the marketing side that we need to do.
And then on product, you know, sort of some real deficiencies in the product, I think, were masked in the late 2021-2022 period, by just how robust the demand was for those services coming out of the pandemic for home care services, childcare, senior care, et cetera. So, we are focused on getting the product back and have had a lot of discussion around that, but where it needs to be. We look at the comps and we're, you know, greatly impressed by the multiple paid for Rover by Blackstone. We look at the performance in enterprise backup care at Bright Horizons and, you know, who's the main competitor. We know the opportunity's there and really like that business, and now it's execute and take advantage of the opportunities.
We think we've got the best portfolio between consumer and enterprise of anybody, and scale for in that market. On the search side, you know, they, they just keep chugging. I think you've been around it for a long time. It's, it's a business that, you know, sort of has its baseline and then comes up with new strategies, reinvents itself, and, they're heads down executing.
On Search, you know, probably answer is no, but just curious, like, so Google's changing all this stuff with generative... Search Generative Experience and putting, like, more of their own content on the page and kind of jamming down the kind of the old school search results. Do you see that as, you know, risk, opportunity? Like, you know, seems like that team's pretty adept at or pretty quick to adapt to any change that Google makes, but just curious on that.
Yeah, I think the, well, you know, SGE is still-
Ambiguous
... kind of ambiguous of-
Yeah
... of what it will look like, and you know, what the prioritization will be. Search operates in a little bit of a different place, so I think they'll continue to have opportunities doing what they're doing, irrespective of how generative AI and the search page play out. But we are, as is everyone, very attuned to what does that page look like, and how are they gonna integrate generative AI into their consumer interface?
Okay. Last question. So just kind of a big picture one, but, where I started was, you know, trying to assess what era we're in for IAC. It sounds like we're in a heads down execute era. I guess part and parcel with that, you, you guys are constantly making decisions around, you know, buyback, capital return, and M&A opportunities. So as we look into 2024, like, which way is the scale kind of tipping as far as more buyback, potentially looking at M&A as things get, you know, more realistic in terms of valuations out there?
Yeah, it's hard to say. You know, Barry and Joey are always at their core, opportunistic. So, that is based on what opportunities come along. The M&A market has just been slow.
Yeah.
And you guys see it too, the volatility in price has been challenging for buyers and sellers to agree. And you need some period of stability relative to buyers think they're not overpaying and sellers thinking they're not selling cheap, and we haven't really had that. If we can get to that, you'll see more transactions. I do think higher interest rates will be a positive for people to ironically want to do transactions. You're not gonna sit on your non-core subsidiary in the same way, if you can redeploy that capital, and you're gonna see more assets trade. But we will always be opportunistic in terms of how we allocate our capital.
Great. Well, we're out of time. Chris, thanks a lot.
Thank you, Ross.
All right, take care.