Okay, I think we're live. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us at the Truist 4th Annual Internet Growth Summit. I also want to thank Chris Halpin, Chief Financial Officer of IAC, for being with us for this conversation. Good morning, Chris.
Good morning, Chris. Thank you, Youssef.
Excellent. So maybe at a high level, and to level set this conversation, how do you guys look at the set of operating assets today in terms of their strategic rationale and positioning within the respective markets for IAC? I guess this is really all the more relevant now that you guys announced earlier this week that you're exploring the Angie spin-off. Sure. You know, I think we are proud to have a collection of assets that are leaders in their respective spaces. Dotdash Meredith is the biggest digital publisher in the world, and we think proving out its advantages across content, technology, ad sales, a variety of capabilities versus really the existing competitors, and then also approaching the digital platforms out there for user experience and monetization. Angie is the number one home services site with great liquidity of 180,000 pros and an excellent brand and loyal consumers that come there to fix really anything around their home or improve it. Care is the number one site to line up care for humans and pets, be it children, seniors, and then growing businesses in daycare and pet care.
Joey talked about the metrics there of 7-10,000 jobs posted a day and hundreds of thousands of interactions due to our strong base of caregivers. MGM is the premier integrated resort company, we think, in the world, with a true leadership position in Las Vegas that continues to move from strength to strength as the center of leisure and entertainment globally. Turo is the number one site for car sharing and is, we think, really taking share against the legacy rental market and then also incremental use cases that only Turo and its hosts can serve, and on down the chain to Vivian, Search, and the Beast, so we feel good about the positioning. We've been very focused on execution for the last few years and really right-sizing certain things that may have gotten overinvested in or pandemic froth in certain areas of the business.
And we've been focused on simplifying the portfolio. We sold two businesses, Bluecrew and Mosaic, over the last couple of years. We're exploring the spin of Angie as we announced a couple of days ago. And we've also said, as we've said, there's no business that's destined to be part of IAC forever. That if there is a better home for a business within our portfolio, we will find it, and we're happy to explore different avenues there. But we have said right now, Dotdash Meredith and MGM are the core of the portfolio.
All right, well, let's double-click on the topic du jour, Angie. So I think a number of investors were a bit surprised by the move, by the announcement, especially considering that that business is still in turnaround mode. How would the proposed spin actually be helpful to that turnaround and to maybe prospective investors? What's the pitch now for Angie as an independent entity?
Look, it's been a long journey on Angie for investors and for us. We know that, and Joey went in as CEO just over two years ago and started to rationalize the business, give it focus. We've taken, as investors know, a lot of revenue out while improving profitability. That's an unusual interrelation in a business of shrink revenue, grow profit, but it speaks to the state that Angie was in a couple of years ago, and then Jeff has continued that strategy, bringing with him significant experience in really all elements of the business, having run and built Europe for Angie, and he's brought greater focus, real expertise on product and flow and user experience, consumer and pro, and we feel good about where the business is. We narrowed and raised the midpoint of our profitability range for Angie this year to $140-$145 million of adjusted EBITDA.
Cash flow is strong. Balance sheet is excellent with $400 million of cash and $500 million of incredibly attractively priced bonds. So the business is in a great spot. We also have said, even with guidance towards revenue declines in Q4 and Q1 and a little bit throughout the year, we expect to maintain whole dollar profit next year for Angie of $140-$145 million. And the business is in a solid focus on execution and performance. As we've said, we're exploring a spin of Angie. We do that anytime we're thinking about potentially spinning a company, and spinning has been a core element of IAC's strategy for decades. When we think about it, it's a scale business. It's already publicly traded with about a 15% public float. Profitability and margins are solid and improving.
The roadmap forward, we can talk about TCPA and the FCC rule change and the short-term impact there, but the forward game plan and the improvements we're seeing in metrics like pro retention, NPS, those things which will lead towards demand growth and solidity of supply and paying pro base are there. And we think it could be a good time for the business to be on its own with its own liquid currency. We've had investors tell us in the past that they would like to participate in Angie, but given the low float and lack of liquidity, given the size of our ownership, is a real factor in preventing them.
The thesis would be it's the right time for Jeff and the board of Angi to go off and drive their own strategy, including on capital allocation versus IAC's priorities as part of a diversified conglomerate or anti-conglomerate conglomerate, as Joey would say. That's where we are. We're exploring it. We will continue to discuss with our board.
Okay. And just to add something to, I think in the letter you guys talked about how that business is on the path to resume growth, and I think Jeff on the earnings call talked about 2026 as a year where he believes Angie should start showing positive growth, right?
Yeah. So there's a few countervailing factors going on here which we can get into. So Joey initially and Jeff has continued this theme of stripping out either low margin revenues or revenues that are dilutive to consumer or pro experience.
We've gone very much down this path of prioritizing spend on the marketing side and then also continuing to fine-tune the quality of the leads that we bring in and that we sell to our pros to ensure that there is a clear consumer request for a job that's properly scoped, properly matched, and what Jeff called consumer choice on the call, where the consumer is saying, "I want this specific pro or pros to reach out to me." That has manifested itself in better win rates, better pro experience, better pro ROI, and also a consumer base that is less overwhelmed with inbounds from Angie and also being contacted by pros that they want to have contact them. We had really chiseled out a lot of the suboptimal lead flows.
There was one bucket that was left, which is when we buy leads from third parties, which you can call affiliates, and parts of that we had improved, and some of these date back to 2023 in actions there that took out revenue, but there was a portion that we were still thinking about the best way to proceed on and would have narrowed down, and then the FCC has instituted the rule change, which is to TCPA, which prohibits any company from contacting a consumer using an autodialer unless they have one-to-one consent from that consumer for that specific company to contact them, so this is going to have significant implications for credit cards, mortgages, insurance, those types of things where there's a massive lead generation element.
For us, there are leads that we acquire from third parties where in a number of scenarios, you really couldn't get that one-to-one consent because when you're buying the lead, you don't know necessarily which professional you will end up selling it to or professionals. So there's a step in there. What we've decided to do is really pivot away on this portion from buying those leads. There's a number of variables that can ameliorate the impact of this rule change on us. The most significant is the broader affiliate market is going to be able to, is going to be less competitive in SEM and other channels to acquire leads that they would then sell on because those leads will be less valuable.
Additionally, and I'm sorry, a bunch of that traffic we think will flow directly to folks like ourselves who have the existing pro network that you don't need to step. You can directly match at that point. And then the actual enforcement and their judicial challenges to the rule change or legal challenges, it's uncertain how it'll play out. We decided to be conservative in how we forecast its impact and to apply it when it goes into effect in January as written, and we'll monitor it. The impact of that is built into the guidance we've given of Q1 being down roughly the same as this past third quarter, sort of 15%-16%, but it may be better, and we'll see what the organic impact is.
On a go-forward basis, that decline in Q1, part of that is just continuing to anniversary actions previously taken, and then a piece of it is TCPA impact. As we go throughout the year, we expect to be second derivative positive on revenue at Angie, and that's what gives us confidence that we will get to revenue stability and growth in 2026. But could it happen earlier? It's really a Monte Carlo simulation of all the different factors and what happens to consumer demand as TCPA goes into the rule change on TCPA goes into enforcement. So it's a bit murky, but we have confidence about getting to growth in 2026 and regular improvement across next year.
All right. That makes sense. So maybe just staying with Angi for a little more. So you've been able to maintain margins, double digits, even in the face of lower revenues by taking a bunch of costs out. Are there any more opportunities to take additional costs out in the system? Or now, to your point, as you may be asymptoting towards that stability by the end of 2025 and into 2026, you start turning back to growth and need to reinvest in the business?
Sure. So there have been three to four main areas where we have taken costs out. One clearly on marketing. And this was a major issue when Joey took over the business, and there've just been continued cycles of improvement where we've talked about this before. We were buying things at ROAS or expected returns that were essentially one-to-one or zero, marginless activities. We also were sort of pursuing some antiquated channels of marketing that just wasn't the ROI and also dilutive to pro experience and lead quality. We've continued to chip away on that. We've also been focused on managing brand spend to the channels that we can see impact and that we can take advantage of driving awareness versus just a scattershot approach. That's one.
Two is the sales force, and we've talked about this, that there was this additions to the sales force because theoretically they would bring in pros, when the reality was the large sales force would bring in pros, they'd just be very low quality, and we had a churn issue. And that was pronounced in the second half of 2022 where they were doing their job. They were bringing in pros, but they were not going to be successful within the Angie system, and also the spend was not merited of the activity. So we have shrank the sales force, targeted them on higher quality pros, and also had better pro onboarding. That's driven cost efficiency, but also improved bad debt, churn, retention, and is arguably better. The third would be just general OpEx and cost savings, and we've continued to get more efficient on that.
That goes all the way down to the capitalized software line, which would be below the EBITDA line, but get to cash flow. We've just continued to be more efficient. Then the last big bucket was all the wasted money and services that existed that was dilutive to margins and general profit. On a forward-looking basis, we can continue to optimize those. The one area that Jeff has talked about and builds on his experience in Europe is platform consolidation and efficiency. So as he talks about going to a single product, which is really merging the existing ads and leads products, which have their roots in Angie's List and HomeAdvisor, respectively, you can bring those together, have efficiencies in platform, not have to run two systems, also have two different salesforces, and be more efficient in your matching and utilization of your lead flow.
So that's a big example of further ROI and margin improvement. Longer term, you can't have revenue decline and profit go up forever. That is a finite strategy, which you need to have had a lot of inefficiency historically to have that option on your menu. But we've gotten the margins to 12%-13%. With growth, we can definitely see them getting to 20%, and that includes 20% with good investment to drive further growth. And so we see opportunity through consolidation of onto one pro product and other efficiencies, and then longer term, it's about revenue growth.
Have you quantified the magnitude of maybe the potential savings from the integration of the platforms?
We have not. And we'll be giving more information on that as we go down the path and continue to fine-tune the rollout of the integration of ads or combination of ads and leads.
Okay. That's fair. All right. Now, shifting to DDM, the integration is now in the rearview mirror. Can you maybe talk about the trends you're seeing in that segment? Obviously, we saw growth accelerate, which was great to see. Seems like you're growing faster than overall digital advertising. Maybe talk about the interplay between brand DR and any reason why you should be growing either slower or faster than the broader digital ad market of, say, I don't know, 10% for the next year or two.
Sure. So on a normalized run rate basis, we would think we will grow faster than definitely than the open web and the broader, we think, digital advertising market. We feel good about the at the end of the day, it's put aside performance marketing, although that's correlated to traffic, but it's price times quantity. So quantity, traffic, audience growth, impression growth, we call them sessions, which are impressions or a subset of. And then price, which is monetization. And that's both direct sales as well as programmatic. One of the good things for us at IAC, we look at DDM, we look at a lot of M&A of other publishers. We are roughly in digital advertising, we do about $630-$640 million of trailing digital advertising. We're two-thirds, one-third direct/premium versus programmatic. A lot of the other publishers out there are 70% programmatic.
And so we feel very good about that. And we have made major investments in our ad tech stack and our programmatic capabilities and integrations since the Meredith acquisition. And we've had a very virtuous cycle of continued programmatic improvements and steps forward and outperformance, and it speaks to how well DDM's inventory performs broadly. So when we think about it, the simple math would be on a future state, 5% traffic growth, 5% monetization improvements. The former, because we really think we are just outrunning other content producers in terms of scale, in terms of product, in terms of capabilities, knowledge of where consumers are going, and that is leading to share gains across our categories of food, health, travel, home, finance, etc.
And then monetization should keep improving as we broaden the accessibility, understanding, and use of D/Cipher, which we really view as our game-changing product. And then our programmatic just does it better than anybody else. And then performance marketing was a great driver of growth for us last year, has underperformed this year, partly driven, or heavily driven, I should say, by real weakness in the finance categories, insurance, brokerage, etc. We think we're lapping the worst of that, and then also maybe we'll get a boost in brokerage and crypto and those things coming out of the current euphoria. But commerce has continued to be strong. That's the biggest part of performance marketing. We're feeling good going into the holiday period. We've got great partnerships, Amazon, Walmart, other retailers.
And then the last element of our digital growth is licensing, which comprises a few elements, but the growth there has been Apple News, where we think we are tops or if not tops, one of the top couple publishing families on Apple News, and our licenses for AI, like our OpenAI deal, and we feel great about that partnership and expect to have more over time.
All right. So I want to go back and double-click a little bit on D/cipher. That seems like really kind of a game changer for DDM. Talk about the opportunity to improve targeting and ROAS for advertisers, maybe not just on the DDM platform, but off DDM, and just how long do you think you need to kind of make the vision be reflected in the P&L, if you know what I mean?
Sure, so yeah, we view D/Cipher as a significant differentiator versus any other content producer that sells advertising that we're aware of, and as you said, the incremental growth opportunities it opens up, thanks to the vision and strategy of Neil Vogel and team, is significant, so just for those who don't know, D/Cipher is the productization of the Dotdash Meredith portfolio of digital properties is heavily built around certain categories: food, health, go down the chain, home, and others. We don't do broad news and information. We don't do sports.
Now, within those categories, and this has been a major effort of predictive analytics, machine learning done by the DDM team over the last few years, there is so much signal based on intent of what a consumer is looking for, what they are reading, their path, and the contextual content that using predictive analytics on that signal, we can serve ads in a targeted way that we have our 27-plus case studies far outperforms cookies performance in comparable settings. And we've done this in A/B testing with brands and agencies, and then blows away non-cookie-based platforms like iOS. So that product today is offered if you go to DDM as an advertiser and agency and have a direct forward contractual commitment. So you say, "I want to go deep into these demos or these potential spending categories," etc. We can build a targeted audience, guarantee performance, and outperform.
Of our $640 million of digital advertising revenue, all of our inventory can be addressed by D/cipher. So D/Cipher, if you give it the parameters you want, can utilize all of our existing inventory. But only about half of the revenue we generated comes from avenues that have D/Cipher access right now, which are those direct forward commitments. The other half are real-time purchases, either direct sort of spot market real-time ad purchases done between agencies and advertisers directly with DDM or the open programmatic, which we talked about before. Our roadmap is to get D/cipher usable across all of the real-time markets, so within spot ordering on DDM and also open programmatic. But within the current ecosystem, D/Cipher-related campaigns are growing 25%. Campaigns that include D/Cipher will include other parts of things are growing 25%, and non-D/Cipher are growing 5%.
It's a key driver of growth. The product roadmap is to continue to roll out D/Cipher to more of the ad buying channels on DDM-zoned inventory. We think we'll get uplift in CPM and take share and grow the amount that goes direct as we make it more addressable. The other element you mentioned is off DDM. This is a big part of the OpenAI partnership. We had mapped some competitor inventory previously using text and lookalike patterns on very comparable premium publishers in food and home. But OpenAI allows us to go much deeper. I think Joey said in the call, we've now indexed about 30 million URLs on about 200 competitor sites or properties into D/Cipher.
And also, it's not just text, it's video and images, both on our sites and theirs, further enhancing the contextual data set we have to score performance and be predictive. What we can do is then expand our supply of inventory across really any category or subset that advertisers and agency want. So young families having a child, people painting a room, somebody throwing a dinner party, etc. Using the same data that we've done on our own sites, we can then expand our inventory and just sell more because when you're at two-thirds premium, you get capped out on a lot of your best inventory in that vein. And then secondly, we can weave in cheaper data. We have customers that are getting priced out of DDM inventory because it's so performant.
So we will buy that inventory on programmatic, mark it up based on our D/Cipher data, and sell it on at margins way better than ad networks or those types of things because we have D/Cipher's pricing capabilities. So that's a further vector of growth for DDM digital going forward.
How quickly do you think you can ramp up this off DDM?
Yeah. We're in market. We expect to grow it across 2025, and it'll just go from there, and it's very much getting it into our packages to premium advertisers.
Okay. Another topic that often comes up around your content business is GenAI and how that's impacting your search traffic, etc. Maybe, again, I think the last two data points we got from you guys this quarter and the past quarter is that you haven't really seen a material impact. But maybe unpack that a little bit, and what are you guys doing to mitigate against the risk of maybe your organic search traffic kind of drying out or declining over time?
Yeah. I mean, our message would be, "Good news is we're not seeing any significant impact, but we are vigilant, and we don't trust Google or any of it long-term on this front." The way we've tracked it is in the searches that are relevant for our categories, there's about a 20% hit rate of an AI overview appearing in those searches. And when an AI overview appears, there is a small negative reduction in click-through rate, but not material. And then when you think about less than half our traffic comes from search and 20% incidence rate and small impact, the impact on our overall traffic is de minimis, negligible, you just do that math. So that's what we're seeing. We are closely monitoring it. We're going to protect our IP.
We have seen some executions on others' content that we think is eyebrow-raising in terms of Google, and we see them talking about maintaining engagement of people staying on the search page and those actions. So like many others, we're going to protect our IP. We know it's premium. We can see through token data and others how important we are. And in our discussions with a number of LLMs, we know the cycles of learning have occurred where training on the best content is increasingly important, and validation of where the model is going with premium content is becoming increasingly important that you just don't pump out, put glue in your pizza. So we are focused on it. Traffic's been good. We haven't seen a material impact, but we are vigilant.
Okay. All right. That's fair. I guess that's really all I can do at this point. One last thing I want to touch on before we move to capital allocation. Operationally, within Emerging and Other, Care.com is obviously the biggest piece there. You've decided to break it out to investors so that we can better appreciate the asset. Maybe unpack that a little bit. What's the performance there been relative to your own expectations? How do you view growth potential of this business over time?
Yeah. So Care was acquired in 2020, and they've done obviously some M&A to bulk it up a little bit. It was definitely a COVID winner where both there's two main parts of the business: consumer, where consumers directly sign up for access to the Care site, which is the number one site for in-home human care, I'll say, or pet care. I'll say that versus home services and Angi. This is the living entities in your house versus the non-living structures. And the consumer business is I go directly to sign up. The enterprise business is my employer as an employee benefit gives me access and gives me backup care days I can use to line up caregivers on Care.
Both got a tailwind a little bit lagged or a little bit different timing where with the pandemic, employers said, "Let's give folks backup care so they'll be more likely to come in the office." And then during the pandemic, consumers said, "I'll have someone I trust come into my house rather than sending my kid to daycare." The enterprise trend, after lapping some tough comps, is clear. And it's really a solid business. We compete with a few players, including Bright Horizons on the enterprise side. We have a number of blue-chip companies. And it's become ingrained as a standard benefit and is, in fact, expanding to backup pet care, those types of areas, summer camps.
The consumer side was the main point of focus, I believe, when the business was bought, and there was recognition of need to improve the underlying platform, the product, and a few other elements. A lot of progress has been made, but it became clear in the last year plus that the tailwind of COVID masked some of the suboptimalities in the product, and we have a new CEO there, Brad Wilson, and he's been building out his team. They are laser-focused on improving the product, improving matching, all the real building blocks of our consumer marketplaces, and we've got a great network of caregivers. We get a lot of traffic. It's really around conversion, signups, and matching, so it's a lot of things that are within the four corners of our business and better marketing for re-engagement. Solid business, $365 million of LTM revenue.
We said $45 million of LTM adjusted EBITDA, pretty much all free cash flow. We've declined 5% in revenue this past quarter. That was driven by consumer, and we probably will return to revenue growth next quarter and then a little up and down over the next couple of quarters, but the actions to improve the product and drive better conversion will get Care back to a long-term grower, and this is a business that should be growing double digits with scaling margins, and we just need to do the right things, which we believe Brad and team are doing.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you for that. So I think we have time for maybe one or two quick questions. On MGM, that was a beautiful purchase when you made it a little over two years ago. I think you own about 21% of the company now. As you think about your original thesis for investing, I'm not talking about the returns. I'm talking about the strategy of what MGM has done or is doing. To what degree has that played out? What still needs to happen? And what would cause you guys to change your ownership stake, either higher or lower?
Sure. The original thesis was COVID low, people will return someday to gamble in casinos and stay in resorts and go to incredible food and music performances, the digital opportunity both domestically and internationally through BetMGM and other opportunities, and then the international thesis both through return at some point of Macau, which was also struggling, and building new premium facilities like the one in Osaka. So a lot of the first element definitely played out, and in fact, has ripped up. Digital took off. BetMGM has slowed down relative to competitors. We've been working with our JV partner at Entain to get the product where it needs to, and we're optimistic that it is there and it'll go back to a strong competitor, hopefully regain some share in the domestic market.
And then we made the international investments in LeoVegas and other properties that we've been buying and rolling up to build a scale international player. And then international facilities, Macau's come back strongly after a lot of ups and downs, and we're still building in Japan and elsewhere. I think we're looking forward. We think it is, even despite the bounce back, MGM's highly undervalued. And some of this is skepticism about the ability of Vegas to maintain its current levels and sort of multiple there. And then just general lack of excitement in the gaming stocks generally. And then secondly, digital getting BetMGM to be valued fairly back to strong growth and competing in its own premium positioning with FanDuel and DraftKings. And we just view tremendous value in the stock.
Barry and Joey are on the board, actively involved, chairing the finance committee, and we think the stock has a long way to run.
Okay. Lastly, can't let you go without asking the capital allocation question. So Angi, we've seen a nice improvement in profitability. DDM, we've seen an inflection in top line and mid-teens type of growth rate, nice free cash flow generation. How are you looking at deploying capital? I think at the IC level, you have over $1 billion. You can do a lot of things with it. You haven't yet, but it seems like where the stock is trading right now, IAC, that could ultimately be the greatest use of capital here, but we'd love to have you opine on just deploying capital overall.
Sure. I think we've talked about for a number of quarters, we can buy our own stock, buy more of the entities that we own or invested in, be it MGM, Turo, invest through our portfolio companies, DDM, Care, etc., to buy or buy bolt-ons, other competitors, and we can buy something new. There was strong focus this year from Barry down of looking at new M&A. And Joey mentioned in the last letter that Barry didn't want us buying the stock versus new M&A. We continue to debate the optimal capital allocation areas. Our stock trading down. I mean, Joey's letter highlighted on Monday the implied discount in our stock, and this is now Thursday, and it would be even more pronounced.
So we understand the question and the thinking, and it is a question of how we decide to allocate the $1 billion of cash at IAC Parent to optimize return for our shareholders. And it's an ongoing discussion.
All right. We'll be watching. Chris, thank you so much for this. This was fun. Thank you for being here with us.
Thank you to Truist.
Yep. Thanks again. Thank you, everybody, for being with us. Take care.