Okay, I think in the interest of time, we're gonna keep moving along, try to keep this thing on time and on track today. It's my pleasure to have the team from IAC, InterActiveCorp, here next. Christopher Halpin, CFO. Chris, thanks so much for being part of the conference this year.
Thanks for having us.
I think it's your second year in a row. I think we were here last year as well.
Absolutely.
Thanks. So, Chris, you joined the company two and a half years ago, beginning of twenty twenty-two. Maybe talk a little bit about your background, what led to the decision to join IAC, and your key priorities in your role as CFO of the organization.
Certainly. So my background before IAC had two main components. One was private equity. I was in private equity for fifteen years, thirteen years of it at a firm called Providence Equity Partners, where we often competed with IAC on deals. And then I spent nine years at the NFL in a variety of roles, media deals and strategy, oversaw consumer products and gaming. And then, four years, probably most germane to this role, running strategy and growth, which was about half the CFO's job. And so, financial planning, forecasting, FP&A budgets, and long-term plans. I was approached by Joey in, I guess, fall of 2021.
I'd always greatly respected IAC, and I was intrigued by the opportunity to be deeper in digital and then also get back in my career to capital allocation, complicated transaction structures, financing, et cetera, and so I decided to join. You know, when I came in, the stated goal was to really rebuild IAC after the Vimeo and Match spins. When I got in, in early 2022, we obviously then had to deal with the major Dotdash Meredith integration, as well as the ad recession. We spent a lot of time with Neil Vogel and team, who are excellent, getting those assets integrated and driving strategic clarity in everything they've done to position the business to where it is now.
We also had Angi, which was in the midst of, of a, you know, really highly dilutive business plan at the time, figuring out margins, their economics, and turning it around. Joey went in as CEO, and now we'll talk about it. We have Jeff Kipp. And we've also cleaned up the portfolio in terms of some smaller businesses that weren't generating our cost to capital. So how I spend my time, obviously standard finance, working with Mark Schneider and others on FP&A, capital allocation, clearly with Joey and Barry, both, what we buy, what we wanna add to the portfolio, also what we dispose of to free up capital and, and, improve our returns on capital.
And then long-term strategies, we, in a lot of ways, serve the business units and the CEOs there, helping them with their strategy, margin analysis structure, and thinking through the best way for them to deploy capital as they go.
Great, okay. So as you alluded to, you have a large collection of businesses in the portfolio. One of the big picture questions I wanted to kick off with: when you think about your largest businesses, where do they sit today in terms of their maturity relative to the growth opportunity? So maybe we'll start with some of the bigger businesses, and I know we'll go into all of them in more detail, but just generally, the growth opportunity that sits in front of them.
Definitely, well, Dotdash Meredith is in a more mature area, but we view them as having a tremendous growth opportunity, and that they are in full credit to the industrial logic of the combination, but also other elements that Neil and team have done. They can be the winner of the open web, and they have moved past publishers, other large open web players, and are really in the conversation with the platforms. So we expect double-digit growth out of them for the foreseeable future in an industry that will not be doing those types of numbers. So we're excited about their positioning. Angi, it's rare you would say this about a business with declining revenue, but you know, the online conversion of home services, we estimate at only about 20%.
So Angi, along with its competitors, are in a growing market. Its revenue has been declining, really because of proactive decisions driven by Joey, as CEO, and now continued by Jeff to truly rebase it and improve the revenue quality, improve margins to set it up for the future. But as we get through that, we feel very good about the forward growth opportunities, and you know, we've seen this in a number of markets with better product, marketing, and experience, greater offline to online conversion. Care is an industry leader in a segment that we think is probably mid-single digits converted to digital. There's too much word-of-mouth and too much friction in the home services, the caregiver segment, so we view that as a lot of room to run.
And then you've got the companies that are disrupting with proprietary advantages, Turo, Vivian, those have tremendous opportunities to grow in front of them. And then I'd just conclude on MGM. You've got an industry leader in Vegas that Vegas keeps expanding and becoming the entertainment center of the world. We continue to see opportunities there, opportunities for them to deploy capital, and then you have the digital opportunity.
Got it. Okay. One last big picture one, you know, one of the biggest debates here at the conference over the last day plus has been the current state of consumer demand, enterprise demand. You always sit with you and position with your collection of businesses, what are you broadly seeing in the macro environment in terms of the demand dynamic out there?
Yeah, I think what we're seeing aligns with what you see in a lot of the earnings outcomes, which is, you know, certainly this is a sad situation, but real bifurcation or differentiation by income strata. So, the higher end consumer in what we see keep spending, you know, it's not the froth of the pandemic era, but post-pandemic era, but they continue to spend, those brands continue to do well. Mid is fine, and then the low-end consumer is really strained. They tend to finance their spending to a greater extent, so they've been squeezed by credit. Higher food costs and basics consume more of their budget. So when you see the lower-end retail in those areas get hit hard, it aligns to that.
In our portfolio, partly by strategy, partly by just sort of serendipity, we skew very much towards higher end consumers, so whether it's MGM, Turo, clearly the Dotdash Meredith brands, on down the portfolio, we don't have a lot of low-end consumer exposure, and it tends to be homeowners, travelers, food aficionados, et cetera. You go down the segment, high-end gamers, so we continue to watch it closely, and we'll talk about macro at Dotdash Meredith. You know, we watch it like a hawk, but things continue to move forward in a... you know. It's not gangbusters, but it's fine.
Understood. Okay, so let's turn to Angi. As you talked about, you know, been going through transitions over the years, can you talk about kind of the key strategic priorities at Angi today and how you're repositioning the company for growth? And I don't know if you do want to work in the second part of the question would really be, Jeff came back-
Mm-hmm
... after a number of years of being in different businesses around IAC, and now Jeff Kipp is the CEO of Angi. So new leader-
Yeah.
Priorities, transition in the business, where does that all sit today?
Yeah. So, the bunch in there, and I'll try to do it efficiently. At its simplest, it's a two-sided marketplace with consumers on one side and service professionals on the other, and then you have technology data matching in the middle, optimizing the connections. And from a metrics basis, you have service requests, you then have service providers, and then you have monetized transactions per service request, which is the simple way to think about whether we're winning or not. Joey went in as CEO in October of 2022 and aggressively drove the focus back on consumer and professional quality of experience, and we'd seen, you know, be it churn on service professionals or NPS on consumers, you'd seen the detriment to the business over some prior initiatives. We started with service professionals.
We improved lead quality. We also were much smarter about the service professionals we acquired, which frankly meant less, and the way we onboarded and segmented the pro experience basically by their own size and sophistication. All of that's manifested itself in much better retention rates, lower churn, lower bad debt. We feel very good about where our service professional foundation is right now, what our pro network looks like. We even you know, closed down a network called CraftJack. That was a mini professional network within Angi because it just wasn't high enough quality for us, and we were, in fact, losing money on it. So we feel good about where the professional side is. We can continue to improve that through product technology.
Consumer side, we've made strides, decluttered their inboxes, prioritized when or how are they reached. There was too much marketing going to them in a dilutive manner. We are making progress on the product and on how they submit a service request. The key step for us is we've gotten rid of a lot of wasted marketing. There was SEM being spent. There was digital acquisition. There was brand, where we were net losing money, and that's why, as you've seen, revenue come down. Profitability's actually improved. It's an unusual feature for a business, but it's not going to happen forever, but it's really a statement about the waste there. The next step forward is: How do we get demand growing?
And that's at the core, and this ties to Jeff's strategy, jobs done well, so by getting jobs done well, service professionals and consumers will have a great experience. NPS goes up, repeat rate goes up, organic traffic goes up, and you also have more efficiency in how you spend on SEM, how you acquire on SEO. Long story short, much of this was driven by Joey. Jeff has now come in, and for those who don't know, he has run Angi International for the last six, seven years. Did a tremendous job turning that around, integrating multiple disparate platforms, optimizing pro experience and consumer experience, and turned it into a 20% grower or 20% EBITDA margins. He's bringing that same energy and also deep understanding of what leads to a job done well from Europe to the US.
He understands that there are differences about the US business, major scale, established brand, much larger, pros in some circumstances, who you have a different relationship with than a, you know, a locksmith in Hamburg. So you have to service them and provide value to them in a different way. But the core of it, he has hit the ground running and very much aligns to his experience.
Okay. So you talked a little bit about their avenues for growth, longer-term energy. How do you think about allocating capital across that business against what your growth priorities are?
Yeah, I mean, from a capital allocation perspective, internal to the business, it's. There's very little required in the sense that leads, which is the biggest business, where we've had the largest revenue step down due to eliminating low-caliber or inefficient spend. It is a highly profitable business, highly cash generative, and you've seen the margin improvement there. Where we would allocate capital is as we get the product and the matching in the right place, greater marketing, where we see the ROI and drive from there. Ads, the sister product, highly profitable, has been doing very well, growing strongly, and meets certain pros' needs quite well, where they want people to reach out to them. They don't want a hot lead.
They don't wanna compete for it. They want more that one-to-one nature. Ads is doing well, and we got to continue to drive it and feed it and improve that product. And then services, which, when I came in, was a massive point of focus and, I, you know, was excessively emphasized and in many cases, you know, a negative margin. We've rebased it to a solid, profitable, complementary offering for higher velocity, lower volume, lower price point, AOV, things like, you know, fix a sink or, hang a TV or something like that. It's an add-on, it's useful. Certain pros like it, many consumers like it, and it just helps in terms of repeat rate and overall experience. So that's how I think about it.
In terms of capital allocation, we may think about M&A in that business. Right now, it's very much heads down execution. We've looked at different things, but, you know, and also, Angi's been buying back its own shares.
Yeah, understood. Okay. So probably one of the bigger questions we get from investors is looking at the Angi business and thinking about what long-term structural margins look like once the transition the business is going through is accomplished. What does that look like, and how does the company broadly think about balancing growth versus profitability over a longer duration period of time beyond the current period?
Yes, you can see in the numbers, again, as revenue's been declining, we've driven margins to the low teens. I think it is fair to then roll that forward and say, with revenue growth, this should be a 20% Adjusted EBITDA margin business. That's in a context where there are applications of marketing dollars that are high ROI, so we are spending, we are acquiring, we're building the brand. But the incremental margins on a additional ad or lead is such that we can still drive margin improvements and get to that 20%. We're not giving guidance on when we'll get there. Also, Jeff's got to get in and continue to flush out his business plan. But that's how I think about where the business should be.
Okay, understood. I want to turn to Dotdash Meredith, maybe start with digital. Can you talk about the growth opportunity that sits ahead of Dotdash digital, and how you would characterize the current ad environment coming back to your comments on broader macro?
Sure. You know, at the end of the day, at Dotdash Meredith, on the digital side, we have three main revenue line items: advertising, performance marketing, and licensing. On advertising, at the end of the... It's at its core price and quantity, monetization, and audience. Both of those are growing well. Last quarter, we talk about core sessions, which are over 80% of our total traffic and are the properties that we are investing behind, like People, Better Homes & Gardens, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, et cetera. We had 9% organic traffic growth in the second quarter, and we said it accelerated so far across this quarter. We know we are taking share in terms of audience.
We're taking it in our categories, especially versus other publishers and information sources who cannot invest at the level we are in content and experience, and we expect to continue to drive audience there. That traffic then falls into two buckets, as you guys know, premium/direct or programmatic. We are two-thirds premium, one-third programmatic. We love that ratio, and we think that highlights the value of our content and our audiences. Premium is solid. It's not, you know, Neil Vogel. I encourage anybody to listen to. He was on a competitor's conference last Friday, but his energy and the way they drive this business is a credit to them and a sign of the opportunity here, but he talks about that market, and the ad macro is fine.
It's, it's not great. Depending on the month, your comps are easier, et cetera. Also, when you get into categories, we can talk about those, there's a lot of idiosyncratic things going on that might make something look fine, but it's off a very low base. The market is okay. And in that, we've been able to drive premium. And then we talked about in the letter, our programmatic growth has been exceptional, and that's a credit to the way they've built the ad tech stack out, our integrations to programmatic, and how well our inventory performs. You know, we've been growing high teens on digital performance mar-- on advertising. Performance marketing been growing strongly the last couple of years. We've had a dip this year due to some headwinds in financial services, brokerage, insurance.
We'll get through that. Performance marketing for goods, going to your macro question of people buying e-commerce, has been solid, and we had a good Prime Day in July, and we think our product, our integrations, our differentiation there is pretty singular, and then licensing, and we'll talk about OpenAI. Apple News is doing very well for us. That has been a growth driver there, and then last quarter, we had our first revenues from our OpenAI partnership, and we'll look to add more to that.
Let's pivot there. We've gone over ten minutes at a technology conference, and haven't talked about AI, so let's pivot to that. I think I'd like to ask you from a two-sided dynamic. I think we get a lot of questions about the potential for AI to impact the publishing businesses inside Dotdash Meredith, but then you also have a partnership with OpenAI around your content and licensing. Talk a little bit about the nature of AI and how it might impact the businesses going forward.
Definitely. I mean, there's probably three elements to the AI, Generative AI conversations that we have. The first is, training of models and access to content. That, if you go through the arc of that, since OpenAI, you know, rolled out ChatGPT-3 at the end of 2022, we think it is getting to a much more reasonable place, and Joey said this two quarters ago, where we think anybody building a large language model is going to have to come and get licenses for content from differentiated providers of information, and entities that are respected as a source of truth, both for training and verification of those models.
And where a given LLM developer is in accepting that is sort of how are they going through the five stages of grief of the reality of fair use only gets you so far and doesn't get you to where I think people thought it did. That's one. Two is disruption of search, and we talked about the in the last shareholder letter, about 40% of our DDM digital traffic is from or is from SERP pages on Google, that we saw a penetration rate of you know about 15% of AI overview answers for relevant searches for our categories. And we saw a minor impact on click-through rates. We're gonna watch it like a hawk, but that's where it is so far. It'll probably grow.
I think everyone has seen how Google has adapted the AI Ooverviews they serve up as they're continuing to go and trying to, you know, I think, avoid over-cluttering the consumer experience. But to date, we've seen de minimis impact on our traffic from these broader generative AI offerings. And then finally, use of generative AI in our business, and I haven't talked about D/Cipher, which we think is truly one of the differentiators for Dotdash Meredith against most other advertising options for brands, especially endemic to our category.
But we are really excited about in our AI partnership, generative OpenAI partnership, what they bring to D/Cipher, and the ability to scale up the reach across the internet, and the ability to model predictive analytics around the performance of third-party inventory. We've done some, but they can also, using OpenAI, do it on video, on images, not just text, to say, "What is it? What is an individual looking at, and what's the optimal ad to serve to them, even on third-party content?" They've been good partners, Neil talked about it on Friday. We expect, you know, we are having conversations, and over time, expect more generative AI partnerships, and they'll all have their own different flavors. And then probably some will be harder to wrestle into the boat, but we think they'll get there.
Okay. Just quickly, maybe touch upon the print side of the house at Dotdash Meredith. How should investors thinking about managing that for cash flow versus growth, and where it fits inside the portfolio for Dotdash Meredith?
Yeah. Neil and team went in, and, when we acquired Meredith, and were highly disciplined and focused around reducing the number of print titles to what we call the Magnificent Seven of core titles that have... that stand on their own and, are profitable... have real subscriber bases that, and real advertisers. And that led to a lot of restructuring costs out of the box, but that has played out very well. And, the print category or print segment has outperformed our expectations, surprisingly, since we bought it. The titles we have are excellent, Southern Living, Travel + Leisure, People, et cetera. We will continue to manage that portfolio for profit. They are additive to the digital experience. They are complementary.
We feel like we can manage cost structure, frequency, et cetera. And our goal, as we've said, is to use the adjusted EBITDA out of print to offset the corporate costs that sit at Dotdash Meredith in their structure, and we feel good about continuing to do that. We'll continue to prune, rationalize frequency, et cetera, but it's been a nice story.
Okay. And last one, just you've talked a lot about margin potential at Dotdash Meredith from the point in time in which you acquired the asset, and obviously the asset's been on a bit of a journey since that point because of some of the macro dynamic. But do a check-in for us on where we are on long-term structural margins with respect to Dotdash Meredith.
We continue to feel good about, you know, 50% plus incremental margins. We are investing right now, and that is really a product of the opportunities we see. So we are actively investing in D/Cipher. We're actively investing in content where we can, you know, break out and get ahead of very credible competitors in our segments who we think are constrained, and just serve the customers better. We're also very focused on acquiring more direct traffic and traffic through new channels, especially video. That the opportunity in video for the Dotdash Meredith brands has only increased in our minds since we've owned it and understood the performance we see there. So we are investing. We guided to, you know, sort of 30% incremental margins this second quarter.
We beat that through better monetization. I think we would guide people towards 50% incremental margins on a go-forward basis, and, you know, we just got to keep executing.
Okay. You also have a search business inside IAC. Maybe I'll skip ahead to that and just ask how investors should be thinking about the growth versus margin profile of that business looking out over the medium term?
Yeah, I mean, it is, I think the business that everyone expected to go away for a long time and has kind of hung around. They have continued to reinvent themselves and come up with new opportunities in the Google ecosystem and Bing ecosystems and search. It's been a tough twelve months. There've been a number of changes in the areas it operates, and you can see that in the revenue slide and profitability. Our guidance is, you know, sort of a lower baseline of profitability. I wouldn't think about growth in the near term there, and it's profit we use to offset, you know, corporate costs and other activities.
Okay. You typically, as a company, don't find yourself with minority positions in equity investments, but you do with respect to MGM and Turo. Maybe talk a little bit how those fit into your broader philosophy about owning businesses, operating businesses, making investments, allocating capital, and what the update is about sort of Joey and IAC's broader view about MGM and Turo.
Sure. So IAC has clearly always been a control organization, that's Barry and Joey's instincts, and, you know, what they like to have. I think what are data points that are important on Turo, where we invested in a private setting, and then MGM, where we bought public shares in a setting, we are by far the largest shareholder in both. So we are about 32% in Turo, post exercise of our warrant, and we are 21% shareholders of MGM, and neither's close. And we're active on the board, have substantial a significant influence on both, and view them as long-term holdings that we see value.
Taking them one at a time, Turo, you know, is a real disruptor in the car rental, car sharing market. Andre Haddad, the CEO, and his team have done an incredible job on that product and making it, you know, the NPS and retention and repeat rate for Turo are exceptional, especially when you compare it to rental car competitors. The opportunity is there. The biggest thing is awareness, where, you know, you guys can do your own scan. But roughly, if you go to a dinner table, roughly a fifth of people have heard of Turo. They overwhelmingly love it, would love to use it, and 80% haven't. That is a big opportunity, but that also requires brand, marketing, awareness, and is the big point of focus.
We're very excited about the partnership announced between Uber and Turo last week. It is a great combination of the traffic and user base Uber has with the product and network of hosts that Turo has. And we also you know thought you should read in that Uber tried the car-sharing business through their acquisition in Australia and have pivoted out of it. And I think that reflects how good Turo is at what is not an easy business. It took a long time to figure out insurance, took a long time to figure out host experience and opportunities there. And so we are very focused on them taking advantage of what's in front of them, acquiring more consumers, and giving them an incredible experience.
MGM, we think it is, you know, undervalued by the market. The Las Vegas properties are iconic and one of a kind. They have continued to perform, the international opportunity we're very excited about, be it MGM China, which has been doing very well, and our European digital assets, which we started with LeoVegas. And then BetMGM, and number three player, it's a big year for them in terms of delivery of new product capabilities through our partner at Entain. And, you know, they've got to get back to stabilizing and taking share in the... They are a great performer in iGaming. They gotta get back on sports betting. But we think the market is greatly undervaluing MGM's assets.
Okay. We only have a few minutes left, but probably the topic I ask you about the most on public earnings calls, and probably the section of the shareholder letter I go right to, is capital allocation. You always have an array of choices in front of you, investing in businesses, committing to M&A, returning capital to shareholders. Give us a current snapshot of your capital allocation priorities inside the company, and how should we think about some of the key messaging that Joey's been trying to send through the shareholder letter as the years progressed?
Yeah, the core message is we feel it is a very important time. You know, we talked about two and a half years ago, it was sort of adding to and building the strategy was building the IAC portfolio. Now is the time to do it. We've gotten Dotdash Meredith to a great place. Angi's stabilized, and we expect to continue to maintain profit and margins irrespective of the revenue profile. The other... We've cleaned up the portfolio. Now it's about going on offense and finding a great business that we can add to the collection to create value for shareholders, and also elements we can add to our existing business. So we have been aggressively focused on M&A. It's tough to, you know, wrestle a fish into the boat.
We do think the market will improve, and a lot of parties that were sort of not fully committed to a transaction. Things need to start happening there. We also, you know, have been buying back shares at Angi. We continue to think about the value that's embedded in our IAC shares. As I like to say, if you like MGM, every time you buy an IAC share, you get three-quarters of a share of MGM. If you like Dotdash Meredith, you get a lot of that for theoretically free, and you can go on down the list. We continue to analyze it. We've got cash. We're producing cash, which is great.
When we get DDM to below four times covenant EBITDA, we can start bringing cash flow out, and that is the cash flow engine in IAC right now. So we're on offense, and excited about the opportunities.
All right. I think we're gonna have to leave it there, but please join me in thanking IAC for being part of the conference.