almost at the end here. Thanks, everyone, for joining. And, last thing through to Friday, last day of Citi's Global TMT Conference. Ygal Arounian, on the Citi internet team, and really thrilled to have, you know, Neil Vogel, CEO of Dotdash Meredith, part of IAC.
Thanks for having me.
And.
Chair is oddly swallowing me, so-
Yeah.
I don't know if it looks good-
Yeah.
But it feels weird.
I've gotten used to it, but it ends up being comfortable. All right, great to have you here. A lot's happened with Dotdash Meredith over the last few years. You know, we've kind of worked our way through the integration, where it's been a little while now. There was a little bit of process. We're out the other end, and things are starting to get much better. So maybe just before we dig into it, just to kind of level set, where you are now.
Yeah.
Where you are post-integration.
We're around right now the three-year anniversary of the announcement of us buying Meredith, and when we bought it, we had a thesis, and the thesis was proved correct. The difficulty out of the gate was, I mean, we bought a late pandemic business, and like everybody else, we misjudged how that would impact markets coming out. But once we worked our way through that and worked through the integration, which had all the bumps that were fairly expected, we're in very good shape now, and the thesis has always been, for us, a different thesis than you'll hear from other people that do our sort of media.
And it was, we always believe that if you have iconic brands, which we now have in scope, and you have scale that is not duplicable scale, and you build incredibly high quality audiences, you have a chance at being successful. And we've done that, but we've done that really differently. It's important to note, like, what we don't do as an indicator of, like, what we do do. What we don't do, we don't do news, we don't do sports, we don't do politics. We only do content that has a real signal attached to it, content where we know what someone's doing. The old days, they called it service content. So home, food, tech, travel, beauty, health, finance, where when someone is visiting one of our sites or using us on social or whatever they're doing, we generally know exactly what they're doing.
They're trying to live with skin cancer, trying to roll over their 401(k), they're trying to make an apple pie, they're trying to decorate their bedroom. When you know that, you have down-funnel traffic, and when you have down-funnel traffic, you have very valuable traffic because people are very close to decisions, and it makes it perform for advertisers. You go back to the formula. We're in an environment where it's totally safe, where we make all of our own content, and the brands are premium brands. Scale, like we're way bigger than any publisher now. We have platform-level scale, plus really performing audiences, and we're math people, and we focus a lot on the different levers you pull and how to monetize people while not annoying them and keep them coming back. The formula works, and we've been doing this...
The seeds of this were planted a long time ago when we were breaking up About.com into brands, and we've been very consistent in what we've always said, like intent-driven traffic, intent-driven traffic, intent-driven traffic. We could build a really durable, nice media business. Now, unfortunately, in our part of media, or the publishing, or whatever you wanna call it, and people got very confused, and people confused what they thought was a bad market with what were actually horrible business models, and we've never done any of those things. We've always been very disciplined, and we've done nothing but grow fairly consistently, other than the little bump coming out of the pandemic, for basically the last decade, and we, you know, now we're last couple of quarters, double-digit growth. We think we can do double-digit growth going forward. Really nice EBITDA margins, and we feel really good about where we are, and we feel like very, very optimistic about the future.
Okay, great, so you are seeing a nice acceleration in revenue guidance to 15% on the digital side.
Yes.
In 3Q. It's up nicely from 2Q. Is that just the nature of these things finally starting to hit at the right time? I mean-
I mean.
Talk about the macro.
Yes.
But also outperforming other digital publishers.
Macro is. I said this at a prior meeting. If you're ranking things one to ten, you can't get out of seven. Macro is a six, maybe even like a strong six, but it's not great. It's good. It's not great. It's fine.
Yeah.
But it's good enough that if you have good assets and a good plan, you should be fine, and that's where we are. And our growth is a combination of really understanding the brands and assets we have and understanding the right mix of monetization for each asset, whether it's premium advertising, programmatic advertising, or some form of commerce or other business. So if you look at People, which is one of our biggest properties, probably our biggest property, that is primarily like... That is programmatic advertising, a little premium advertising. If you look at our health brands, that is all premium advertising. If you look at some of our home brands, that's really heavily weighted towards commerce, and if you get that mix right, it's really helpful. But the whole key to any of that working is aggregating a very, very responsive, loyal, down-funnel audience that will come, surrounding them with the right amount of monetization so it will still perform, and then putting that monetization out in the universe in a way that it works, that premium guys are happy, that it performs programmatically, or that those people will buy things from you because they trust your recommendation on a blender.
Right.
And there's some nuance to what we're doing, and we can talk about D/Cipher and some of the other stuff, why we have real advantages, we think, in the world. But it's basically that. And it's also like, look, we were eight hundred people that bought thirty-six hundred people, so it was getting our arms around and our culture around this. But now we feel really, really good and, like, you know, we're People, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, InStyle, Entertainment Weekly. Like we're, we're 40 brands. We're 20 major, major brands, and we just feel really good about where we are.
Great. We'll get to D/Cipher. I wanna talk about traffic and pricing first a little bit. Joey publishes. You guys publish in the, in IAC's investor letter
I did.
Traffic trends, and traffic's been really positive growth factor. What's happened there? What are the factors that are kind of driving to that outperformance traffic?
What I would say again is there's no trick, there's no secret formula. We make really good content, importantly, on brands that really resonate with people. And one thing we learned when we bought Meredith is we had brands at Dotdash, small brands that we bought and brands that we created out of the old About.com, if you remember that part of the story. And then we bought these Meredith brands with Better Homes & Gardens, been around a hundred years. When you do what we did on our brands to help them grow, they grew. When you do that same thing on real brands, it grows with an accelerator mag. I don't know what the right math term is, but.
Right.
Way better.
Right.
Because they're brands, so stronger brands, a playbook that we really understand, the ability to really invest in content, and I give this example. This kind of makes people understand what the investment. Investment in content doesn't mean making new things. It also means updating old things, and we probably spend more than half our money updating old things. Take a recipe. In the old days, a blueberry pie recipe on the internet, you needed a picture of blueberry pie, and you needed a recipe, and you could win. You could get distribution on Google. You get distribution on Apple News. Now, for that recipe to win, you need a video. You need the full recipe. You need to be able to scale it up, scale it down. You need a vegan option. You need health information. You need a cultural history.
You need someone to have cooked it. You need a series of ratings and comments. You need all of these things that makes it increasingly difficult for other people to do what we do. We have 52 test kitchens in Birmingham, Alabama. We test every single recipe that we publish on any of our food sites. Other people can't do that, and in many ways, we joke that the content business is turning into, like, the banking business. Whenever there is new banking regulation or new financial regulation, that only accrues to the benefit of the incumbents who can deal with it. It never helps an upstart, almost always. That's what's happening in our businesses, right? The competition is so intense that if you can't do all of the things, you just can't win continuously.
And by win, I mean win on the distribution points you need to get traffic. They'll come direct, they'll come through our emails, but you need to win on Google, you need to win on Apple News, you need to win on social, you need to win on YouTube, you need to win on lots of secondary sources. And the only way to do that is to do the best stuff on the best brands, and that's what we're doing. And, like, there's no like, "Oh, we did this one thing, and it worked." It's just like tackling and tackling and just work. It's working. Long answer.
Your answers make me kind of want to jump into the Gen AI discussion, but-
Great. Let's do that.
I'm gonna be patient, and we're gonna get to it. Your pricing's also been improving on ad rates. Is it a similar answer and what's happening there?
Your audience quality is really good, which helps on ad rates, but this is relevant. None of us were publishers before we got here, and many of us weren't even media people. We were math people. I was a former investment banker. What we realized about rates and about ad rates is particularly programmatic rates, which is, I'm sure everyone knows it, like, when the machines buy the ads based on parameters set by the ad buyer. If your ads are more performant, they will simply price better, and what we're really good at is optimizing. You can't optimize to greatness, but if you have great stuff, you can definitely optimize it. And so we optimize each of our pages to understand that ads are in the right place, appear at the right time, serve in the right way, that we maximize our possible return from programmatic markets, which means they're more performant. And I think in the letter, it was like 35-36% better than market, which is, market's probably up 10 or 15%. We're up 30%. That's because we're really good at this.
Right.
It goes back to what we said, where we know what sites monetize programmatically, so we build them as such. We know how different things monetize, so we build them for that. That's, like, a key differentiator why our rate is going up and why I think we have some, like... There's some room in there to go, I think.
Okay. There's a lot, a lot of good things to talk about. And one, just before we move on, just talk about the margin profile as the growth is returning, the incremental margins that are 35%-40%.
Yeah, I think.
Pretty cute.
Thirties margin.
What do we think about that?
What we can do for the business. Incremental margins are obviously better.
Yep.
In many ways, we are a fixed cost business. The incremental margin doesn't come in at a hundred. It's gonna be dependent greatly upon how we invest and how we use incremental margin, incremental dollars to invest. Currently, we're investing, but incremental margins are definitely like, I forget marks. I forget what we said in the shareholder letter, but they're definitely better than our core margins, for sure.
Okay.
Yeah.
And we.
There's good leverage to the upside.
Okay, great. And as we think about the business, where it's at post-integration, and integration's complete, finally kind of starting to run on that. A lot of debate at the parent company level about M&A, and then there's discussion about, you know, new channels and then investing in the ones that IAC currently has. Most notably Dotdash Meredith. So, how do you think about where you are with the portfolio? What else might be needed? Just M&A in general for Dotdash.
In terms of M&A, I'm not so sure we're interested in buying any more, like, scaled publishing-type assets. I don't think we need them. I think we'll be very opportunistic. There's a couple things we'd like. I think you're more likely to see us explore things that connect us more directly to audiences and connect us more directly to advertisers, right? The risk in our business, which we've talked about, you've talked about, is being disintermediated somehow. Being disintermediated from the supply side or being disintermediated on the demand side, right? People between us and our advertisers with dollars, between us and our audiences, who want to keep the audience for some reason. Different businesses that allow us to connect more directly on both of those things are probably of greater interest than buying another publisher at this point. You know, the next thing is, "Well, are you guys gonna buy ad tech?" Like, we would never buy ad tech for ad tech's sake, to be in the ad tech business, but we're very interested in relationships and being able to serve our advertisers in a way that right now, if you're an advertiser, and you spend $1 in the programmatic markets, you get, like, $0.50 of buying power, maybe.
Right.
I think there's a big arbitrage to play there. There's a big arbitrage to play in, like, targeting without cookies, which we'll talk about.
Right.
Like, there are some interesting ways that people directly interact with audiences that isn't direct traffic or social traffic and doesn't require Google in between, that we're interested in. So it's a longer answer of saying, "That's more appealing to us, more likely than this." As for the rest of you, I'll talk to Joey.
Yeah, we'll save that. But that makes a lot of sense, and great segue into D/Cipher. So maybe just for people that aren't familiar, just talk about what D/Cipher is, and what it does for you, and why it's so important.
Sure. I'll do a very quick background on D/Cipher. So what D/Cipher is, is a way to extremely effectively target audiences without cookies. And we always knew when we were building this business, that we wanted intent-driven traffic, traffic of people that are doing something. Well, again, why no news? Why no sports? Why no politics? That's why, 'cause you don't know what people are really doing. When you're searching on, "How do I set the table for a dinner party?" Or, "What color do I paint my newborn's room?" We know a lot about you. So what we've been able to do is, we have 30 million user sessions a day, we have billions of interactions. This goes back a really long time.
We're able to map every URL and kind of almost like segments of pages on all of our sites to each other and understand how they relate. So if you're using a cookie, a cookie is definitionally backward-looking. You are trying to extrapolate something about somebody based on what they just did. When you land on one of our websites, like you land on Better Homes & Gardens, what color to paint a newborn boy's bedroom that will be the most calming, right? We know everything about you we need to know at that moment of time. And because we have so much first-party data. And again, first-party data is about behaviors, not individuals, that we know that everybody who, in the past, has looked at this, we know what else they've looked at. So in terms of targeting advertising, we know that obviously, if you're looking at this, you very, very likely just had a baby. So it's gonna correlate with, like, a bunch of baby stuff, like you might need a stroller. But it also very highly correlates with needing a new car, needing a new credit card, needing a new house, needing a whole new class of, OTC and DTC pharmaceuticals. Like, all kinds of stuff.
Right.
So what this allows us to do is to go to a client and say, "Hey, we don't need cookies to target. We can target based on this." So when we have a home equity loan lender that wants the market, we can put them on this content, and it will perform extremely well, as opposed to trying to chase somebody who you think needs a home equity loan. This does better. The second thing it does is probably the most important thing is, like, how many of you guys have Android phones? One, two... Okay, two of 20, so call it 10%, right?
Right.
In real life, it's probably closer to 50%, right, has Android phones. If you were targeting based on cookies or individual identifiers, those are the only people you can reach. So everybody in this room who didn't raise their hand cannot be reached by cookie-based advertising on their iPhone, full stop, no exceptions. So what happens is, the value of these ads gets overbid. They're too expensive. They don't work for advertisers 'cause, and the entire iOS audience goes unaddressed. So there's an arbitrage there. Like, this is way too cheap, this is way too expensive. If you target with D/Cipher, it doesn't matter if there's no individual identifiers. You buy based on contextual targeting, not based on cookies. It opens up the whole world and really, really helps with efficiency.
So in a world where cookies are going away, one way or another, and they are. What Google just did when they said they're not deprecating cookies, actually, they said, "We're totally deprecating cookies. We're just no longer responsible for what happens on the other side. We'll let people opt out." If you, for those of you who followed, Google was trying to propose a post-cookie targeting world. They eventually threw up their hands and said, "We can't make everybody happy, so all we're gonna do is get people on opt out for cookies." So cookies are gonna go away with no responsibility on the other side of this. As cookies go away, that pool gets narrower and narrower. The cookie pool gets less and less effective, and there's no solution for the rest of it. We're the solution for the rest of it.
And the next step of this, which is the logical next question I'll ask for you, is, well, why can't you do this more broadly?
No, but I.
Right.
Yeah.
I read that question. Everyone's asking that question.
Yeah.
And the answer is: We think we can. So what we think we can do and what we're doing now, and I think we're gonna be able to do this in the next six months, is we can go out, and if we understand a domain is quality, like premium quality, like you're a really respected food blogger. We can go out, and we can crawl your site, and we can take all of your pages, and we can match them to our pages and know exactly where they would fit into our graph. So we can now go to Campbell Soup, who's giving us $15 CPMs to buy across our sites. Like, well, we have another $2 million to spend more on reach. We'd like to spend $7. We can say, "Okay, great. We'll take your $7 CPM stuff.
We're not gonna place it on our sites because we're too expensive, but let us use our D/Cipher targeting that you like, that's working, and let us do it around the internet for you." We'll hit your $7 target, and then we can go out based on our targeting, buy up and package this, and sell to them for $7, which is something that people do to us right now. Like, and this is only. And it's not, we're not capable of doing this yet. We have a roadmap to do it. It may work, it may not work, but intuitively, we have the relationship with Campbell Soup. They're already doing the reach advertising. Like, let's do that, too. And that opens up a whole post-cookie situation for us that is really, really interesting if we get it right.
That sounds like a DSP business.
It is effectively a DSP business. Like, it, we would become effectively a DSP that uses D/Cipher targeting to target the rest of the internet.
Okay.
Now, whether we build our own DSP, whether we white label someone else's DSP, that's all in process. But it goes back to well, what... This helps us connect more, more with our advertisers, right?
Right.
Like, now, if the agency gives us their money, they get 100% buying power on our thing. We get 100% buying power D/Cipher on the internet. They don't have to use whatever DSP as... We cut layers and layers and layers out of this. So instead of going from a dollar buying power down to fifty, it's going a dollar down to eighty or a dollar down to ninety or a dollar down to seventy, which is way better, and it performs better. So that's the hook.
Okay.
It tells us a great story. But the world is very wedded to its cookies, and the challenge we've had is you can't walk in to name the ad tech vendor, name the agency, name the client, and say, "Your baby's terribly ugly." And, "Mr. CMO, you've been telling your CEO about this cookie pool you spent $20 million building, and how great with all this data it is." You don't wanna go back and tell them, "Ah, I was wrong." The way that we address this is we are doing a lot of, "You're spending $1 million with us. Spend $900,000 your way, give us $100,000 our way.
Let's see what happens," and we win every time, and that's really driving adoption of this and will lead us down the path to be able to do the second thing.
Okay. This was all tech that was built in-house. Can you talk about that for a little bit?
Here's the thing about ad tech in general. People don't like it when I say this, but the more complex it is, the less it works, right? Like, you just need the ability to use our signals to target.
Right.
That's it.
Got it.
Like, you could go for $1 million today and go build your own DSP. It wouldn't take much. Right? And you can be in DSP business. Like, the SSPs are harder because you gotta sign up. But like, if you're The Trade Desk, that's one thing 'cause they've got client relationships and they do all kinds of things, and they've done a remarkable job over there. But for someone like us, who we don't need to be The Trade Desk for this to work.
Yeah.
We need this capability. It is a capability we have to have, that we can just go get.
Okay. So just a two-part question on the-
You're the first person that's realized it's just like a DSP, and it is.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Great, thanks.
Yeah.
You explained it pretty well. Okay, so just talk about the current scale of D/Cipher. The off-platform stuff obviously isn't live yet. How big can that be as a portion, and how big is it now within the.
I mean, off-platform, we are experimenting with one deal, one client right now, so it is not big. D/Cipher, I think we said in our earnings letter in the last quarter, D/Cipher targeting was part of 50% of our premium sold deals, which is premium sold by IO and PMPs, had some amount of D/Cipher targeting in it. It's only a year old. We feel like that is remarkable progress. What it is showing people, and we're doing it for people in it, we have 27 case studies, and all 27 of them, we beat whatever the cookie targeting KPI was, and in most cases, materially. We've done this in a measurable way for about, like i n a meaningful way for more than a hundred people, and it's never lost. We basically give people either hard or soft guarantees. If it doesn't work, we'll do a make good. We've never had to do a single make good. It's really working. Now, again, we're dealing with a lot of it.
Never had a single make good?
Never had a single makegood.
Okay.
It's only been a year, but we're not going to.
On D/Cipher?
On D/Cipher.
Okay.
Like, just intuitively, if you think about it, it's just how media was sold for the last hundred years. Like, all we've done is aggregate lots and lots and lots of this service media, intent-driven media, and used all the AI data science, machine learning we can do to extend typical contextual to, like, the second, third, fourth, fifth ring of the target, and aggregate so much supply that you can find lots of places in the near rings, and we've just built a much better way to do what Better Homes & Gardens is doing to people who are looking to redecorate their bedrooms thirty years ago. We're just a much, much better way of doing that, and people really understand it. The thing we get a lot is, which is interesting, and you know, like, marketing people, agencies, ad tech intermediaries, the more opaque, the better, the smarter they can sound. The simplicity of this is like, "Wait, that's it? You don't even use identifier, you can just like..." I can tell you, I want people that are tailgating around football games with their family for the next three months. You can do that. Yeah, we can do that. Give us that. Let's go. That's all we need. We're good. We'll beat whatever other target you have. So it's been really interesting, productive, a lot of momentum behind it. We'll see. D/Cipher platform doesn't exist yet, so.
Okay.
But it's coming.
Yeah. It sounds very exciting. Speaking of case studies, there was one notable one that got a lot of attention, Adweek with Pandora.
Yes.
Which, they utilized this type. I'll let you talk about it, but it, it essentially drove 76% higher traffic to.
Yeah.
To in-store, right?
Yeah.
Can you talk about that?
So, Pandora, for those of you who know, it's a, it's a massive jewelry retailer. And again, whatever someone's KPI is, it could be store traffic, it could be purchase, it could be sample, it could be just like, click on this and go to this place. We will beat, and we had a great success with Pandora. It's very hard to get advertising clients to go on the record, just for those of you who ever tried to do it before. But we're really happy about it. They're a very well-respected marketer. They're very smart. So it's been a lot of... You have to create FOMO when you're selling ads, and I wish everything about selling ads was merit-based. We'd do great. It's not. And you don't wanna be, like, the hot flavor of the month thing. We've all seen what happens to that in media. But you have to facilitate a lot of that to get people to try what you're doing, and that's what this did for us.
Right.
And we got a lot of attention for it, mostly because in our weird space, advertisers don't go on the record. And when an advertiser went on the record and said, "This really works," and beats other people, which implies other people's stuff didn't work, that's a really big thing for us. It was really helpful.
Okay, great. We've exhausted D/Cipher. We can finally get to GenAI.
Okay.
So you entered into a relationship with OpenAI. There's two parts to that, and one is kind of like a straight fee, and then there's more of a performance side.
Good part, and attribution, and linking to us when they... when we're part of the results.
Yeah.
But it's a.
Okay.
Potentially a big deal.
So, can you talk about those pieces and.
Yeah, sure.
That linking piece, in particular, feels pretty important 'cause, maybe you're exchanging some straight fee for.
Maybe.
That side.
Maybe. I mean, we've been very clear that if people are gonna build businesses and train algorithms on our content, we should be paid for that. And I think OpenAI did a very fair deal with us, and they paid us for it. We believe that if we are a part of the output, we should be cited in some way, that we get credit. People can come find the source material, which we agreed to, and there's an accelerator in there, should it grow. It's, we're using it as the template to talk to everybody else in the space. Everyone else in the space, and there's probably seven or eight other people that matter, are on a continuum of we're having very productive conversations. They see us like OpenAI sees us. We see them like we see OpenAI, as like partners to the future.
We are a trusted source of information to other guys who are go fish. We're within our right to take your content and do whatever we want with it. We've been very vocal that we are going to do this or fight this, and we'll see what happens. It's very, very early. We will do everything we can to protect our rights. We have some very smart people that are like, "Oh yeah, we should all be partners. We can all be great together." And then, we have some other people who are like: "Nope, we're taking your stuff," and that's just fair use, which is not fair use, but that's gonna be decided not by me. With that being said, OpenAI has been a great partner. We're learning a lot from them. There's a lot of momentum behind it.
You hear a lot about like, "Oh, my God, OpenAI is gonna just..." It's not. Like we've seen even, you know, OpenAI is on a whole bunch of Google searches, you know. That sort of Google traffic is like less than half of our traffic. We've seen no impact on anything to us from that. I mean, maybe from other things Google's doing, but not from that in some way. It's a long way from really working and being effective. As a business accelerant internally, it's been really helpful for a lot of, like, rote task things. We will never, ever, ever, ever, ever create anything with AI. That's not our value. Our value is trusted source, human-created, expert-written, reviewed, you know, doctor, chef, whatever. Every recipe we publish, we test in our own test kitchens.
Every vacuum we write about, we're vacuuming literally one of twenty carpets in Des Moines, Iowa, in our huge testing facility. So, AI so far has been a boon to us. We'll see what happens. The interesting thing is, if anybody... And I was joking around, but I'm serious about it, in an earlier session we had, if anybody claims to know where AI is going or what's going to happen, stop listening to them. It's not... They don't. Like, we're very close with the OpenAI team, and they've been very helpful, like, these guys don't know what the world's gonna be doing in six months or three months or next week. All I know is, we believe this is going to be a sea change, like in, maybe in a way that the commercial internet was a sea change. But we believe that if you have brands, and you have trust, and you have audiences that love you, there is a place in that ecosystem moving forward, and it's why we did the OpenAI deal. It's. We need to understand these things. We need a seat at the table. We're going into everything eyes open. I mean, maybe that was the dumbest thing we ever did, but I don't think so, and sort of that's where we are.
Okay. I wanna connect the point on this is a sea change, and so far, we're not seeing an impact on traffic from AI overviews and gen AI. So if it's having a maybe more of a minimal impact than people feared, how do you connect those two things?
I think that people immediately tried ChatGPT and were like, "Oh, my God, that's the end of search," and everyone who relies on search is dead. Like, that is like the narrowest band of narrow band of narrow band, and these things are not great for search and search results yet. Maybe they will be, they're not. But in terms of, like, business process automation, like data processing, like trying to figure out an ad that's gonna perform better, right? Like, really analyzing your competitor sites to see, like, what's working and what's not working. The ability to write... I was in an early meeting, I explained, like, when there's a new treatment for diabetes, we'll write a new article about diabetes on a Verywell Health site.
That article will cost us thousands of dollars, written by a medical writer, proofread by a doctor, and ahead of time, a content brief is written by also a medical writer, who then gives it to the real writers. The process of making those content briefs using AI has gone down from, like, eight hours to, like, two hours. It's not because AI is creating anything, it's just because rather than a human going to all the medical databases and pulling all the research, this thing can do it. And, like, multiply that times across everything we do, and it's like a force multiplier into the amount of content we can create. Like, the simple, mentally lazy way to look at it is, "Oh, my God, everyone's gonna create shit content, and it's gonna kill search." Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but people are gonna figure that out. Like. And so many, many, many of the use cases are things that could not happen before, like your rehearsal dinner speech that it can write, that just couldn't happen before. That's an incredible use case, but it's not yet. Like, when Google uses it on top of the page, we're often cited in there just like it's an old answer box. Well, it's like we're cited because we're the source of. Like, so it's very up in the air what's going to happen, but it's really gonna change, and it's gonna change fast.
Right. Well, there's a view that your type of content becomes even more important in that environment 'cause you're the
S, Eh
The trusted source.
Without getting into how these things work, everything needs a source of truth, right? The engineers call it grounding, or there's many other words for it. We believe, and we are, and we are functioning as a source of truth. We just need to make sure that we are included and compensated as the source of truth.
Right.
Like, we can go in, our engineers have gone in, and we can prove that every... you name the AI engine, it has ingested all of our content, and we can make it spit it back out to us because it just has. Like, and part of the reason why we got such a nice deal from OpenAI is not 'cause of our scale, right? We're two million pieces of content. It's not. We're not teaching it new languages. It's 'cause of the accuracy, veracity, data, and everything else that comes with that. That's why they paid for it.
Okay. So on the flip side, on the content creation side, it's first, it sounds like there's some real operational efficiencies and cost savings. I don't think you've ever quantified it, but how did, how-
Well.
How did.
It's not something that we're like. The response is we're gonna just do stuff. Like, we're always looking for ways to do things more creatively, more. You know, like, at the same time that comes out, we're now creating content. Five years ago, we were creating content for our websites and maybe YouTube. Now, it's full vertical creation teams for Instagram, for TikTok, we're very deep in Apple News, a whole bunch of other syndication sources. Our email program is different. Our O&O's, like, all the things that we do and the way we distribute is part of the reason why that earlier question, our audience is growing because we really fight and claw for every user, every view on every platform. Now, right now, an Apple News viewer is worth 10%, 15% of someone on one of our O&O websites. But that does not mean Apple News is still not a land grab, because it is, 'cause we're gonna find a way to get that to 20% or 30%, and it's gonna be meaningful, and it's a huge... we're the number one partner of Apple News. It's a huge audience for us.
Okay.
That's our job.
All right. And you mentioned that, you know, you're, you're not in the business of having Gen AI create all of your content.
No.
And those professionals or experts in those fields, that's the value. Are you seeing that from around the digital publishing ecosystem, and can it have some impact on the landscape?
What's happening is all the sources that refer content to you, be it Google, be it Pinterest, be it NewsBreak, be it any of these places, they are defaulting to brands they know, trust, and understand because they know you're not doing that. Nobody wants to guess if that was AI-created or not. It goes to the earlier thing I said about, like, banking regulation and publishing content are kind of the same thing now. It's the same thing. It would be extremely hard to create a new brand that got trust in the world, like, to compete. Like, we would never, like... People, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Verywell, Investopedia, like... like all of the intermediaries and all of our partners, all of our firms, they know what these things are. Users know what these things are. You said it, it's the source of truth, right? Like, Allrecipes, it's doing incredibly well. AI cannot make a recipe, 'cause you can't take five recipes, mash them together. It doesn't work that way. You have to have a recipe and test it and make it and get comments. Like, it doesn't. So it just, there's a lot, and that goes for a thousand different examples. Humans just aren't ready to... Brands are magic, and they're still magic.
Got it. In a few minutes, if there's any questions from the audience, happy to take them. If anyone thinks of one, just raise your hand. Maybe in the few minutes that's left, spend most of the time talking about the digital business. Do you have a print business? When you made the integration, you shut down a number of them, but you've maintained a good amount of presence on the brands that you think bring a lot of value. What's the future of the print business?
One of my favorite things. Our fastest growing digital properties, by and large, are those with print magazines, and it just goes back to brand and history and gravitas. Print, we've said from the jump, we run it for cash flow, right? We run it to make forty-ish, fifty-ish, as much as we can to cover overhead. It's never gonna be a grower. We'll probably print this year a third as many books as we printed the year before we bought the business, and we have it in a very, very good place. Consumer-focused, subscription-driven. The ad business continues to be, like, super-duper challenged, and we only have five or six books. But we look at it as we get to be in people's homes, and the subscription business is oddly doing great. It's not really declining. A couple rate cuts we'll probably do here and there. The ad business is really challenged, but we're just managing through it, and we knew when we bought the businesses that was.
The print ad business.
The print ad business.
Challenged.
And that's just challenged because it's... I mean, we get.
Right.
I mean, this is not to be funny, but we've had experiences where ad buyers want to buy print, and they don't have anybody at their agency that even knows how to do it. So, like, it's just not a growth business.
Right.
But we don't need advertising at a crazy level for this to be sustainable and to continue to hit our financial goals. And look, if I can put, if we can put out into the universe, two million Southern Livings a month, people love that thing, and we can do it like marginally profitably, that's great. Like, Better Homes & Gardens is the single biggest licensee we believe inside of Walmart. We sell billions of dollars worth of stuff inside of Walmart, and that print brand really supports that. So again, it's just, it's more, almost think of it as like self-liquidating marketing for us, that we manage to a cash flow as it shrinks.
Got it.
We're not investing in print.
All right, that takes us to our time. Thanks, Neil.
Cool. Thanks.
Appreciate it. Thanks, everyone, for joining.