Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day two of the conference. Corey Carpenter, Internet Analyst, JPMorgan. Pleased to have Chris Halpin, IAC COO and CFO, with me today. Chris, thank you for joining.
Thank you for having me, Corey.
Just starting off higher level, IAC is a different company every year, constantly evolving. You just spun off ANGI. For those who have not followed the stories closely, could you just level set what the IAC portfolio looks like today?
Sure. For those interested, we've posted a comprehensive new investor presentation on our website. There are a mix of fully owned consolidated companies as well as minority holdings and then other assets. We've got DotDash Meredith, the number one digital internet and print publisher, over $1 billion of digital revenue and $300 million of adjusted EBITDA on a trailing basis. We have our 23% stake in MGM Resorts International, a leading operator in gaming experiences, both in person and digital worldwide. We have Care.com, which we fully own, the number one provider of online access to caregivers for your child, senior, and pet. Our 32% stake in Turo, the number one car-sharing platform, Vivian, a leading health care staffing platform, our search business, and The Daily Beast, and then $900 million of cash at Parent IAC.
OK. Along with the ANGI spend, you also made some changes to the management structure. Hoping you could talk about those. Is this something you think of as more permanent or a temporary shift?
Yes. When we spun off ANGI at the end of March, our CEO, Joey Levin, transitioned out of IAC and to Executive Chairman of ANGI, where he's now working with Jeff Kipp, CEO at ANGI, to build that company. We do not have a CEO at IAC. Barry Diller, our Chairman and senior executive, is active in the company. He has three direct reports, COO and CFO. Kendall Handler, our Chief Legal Officer, reports to Barry, as does Neil Vogel, CEO of DDM. Barry is active in DDM, in MGM, and in capital allocation, as well as The Daily Beast. I run IAC day to day and have the CEOs of Care, Vivian, and Search report to me, and then also oversee our holdings in Turo. That's what we're doing. It's not unprecedented for IAC to not have a CEO.
In fact, it was true 10 years ago. It is pretty similar to how we ran things a couple of years ago when Joey was CEO of ANGI and heavily invested in spending his time there. Barry and I were overseeing DDM and working with Neil and team during that period. I have had other companies report to me over time. It is working well. We are energized and pretty clear on where we want to go.
Two kind of higher level questions, then we'll go into each of the portfolio businesses. Maybe just first, across the portfolio, what are the priorities for IAC in this post-ANGI world?
When we look at ourselves, even with some run-up in the stock recently, when you net out the value of our MGM stake of $64.7 million shares there and the $900 million of cash at IAC Parent, all of the other things I listed earlier are essentially trading for no value. As a reminder, we have $800 million of NOLs at IAC we can use to offset gains at MGM, et cetera. Our focus, as shareholders would want it, is shrinking that discount, distilling value, and making it inarguable, the value of those private holdings. There are really three prongs to that priority: execution, capital allocation, and then what we call catalysts. Execution is our businesses: DDM, MGM, Care, Turo, Vivian, et cetera, just driving revenue growth, free cash flow generation, building the best products, content, marketing, sales, etc. , and demonstrate the value, continue to delever at DDM.
We were thrilled to get below four times leverage there last year and continue to build cash flow there, both to delever and for corporate purposes, and build equity value, and also reduce corporate costs at IAC, which we've been active on and will continue to provide information there. Second step, capital allocation. That's capital return. We bought back $200 million of shares so far this year. We will continue to look at that. We get the question, would you buy more this year? We could. The second step is M&A. We're actively looking at opportunities there to either invest through our existing portfolio companies or buy new platforms, large or small, but create equity returns there. And then the third element of capital allocation are strategic divestitures. We said we would pursue attractive transactions involving our smaller companies.
Should they arise, we know they're strategic assets and they can play into consolidation. We'll keep looking at that to free up cash. The third step is catalysts. We spun ANGI last month or two months ago. We've done things like that throughout IAC's history. We will pursue catalysts if we think they will still down value and create value for shareholders.
You typically have a unique view on the economy, just given your exposure to a number of different end markets. Maybe at a high level, what are you seeing in the macro environment, and how is it impacting your portfolio?
We spent a lot of time looking at this. In my time here, did the same thing in 2022 when the various inflation, the Ukraine war, etc. , happened. Right now, we'd say it's unclear in the sense that we stare closely at the data. We look for patterns. We look for trends. There's nothing that specific you'd look at and say you see a downturn coming. It's more of an apprehensiveness that things may lead to a slowdown. In DDM, we've got a pretty good picture. We said last week on earnings, premium advertising, which is direct and is the biggest part of our advertising business, has hung in well. Brands are still committing, spending, agencies are.
We have had, this is a great fact about our diversification, we have had categories like health and beauty and even travel offset softness in categories like food and bev and home, where you would see more of tariff concern. That has held in pretty well. Algorithmic pricing, which was up strongly in the first quarter, has slowed down and is kind of flat to up a few %. That is the spot market and has the quickest impact. On performance marketing, consumers are still spending strongly. That sort of aligns with what we have heard from Visa and Bank of America and others maybe being pulled forward or represent real solidity, but we do not see any signs of weakness there. Other businesses, MGM talked about how they feel well positioned for the year. Care, we sort of squint and worry about changes in conversion or the such.
The more we look at it, it's hard to notice any pattern there of softness. We are continuing to talk to other competitors, to other companies, partners, etc . What we built into our guidance was a slowdown in Q2 or in Q3. I think the key thing, and when I say we talked to partners, CPG companies, brands, sorry, retailers, they are wondering what their inventory position will look like in July, August. That is due to the trading disruption, which hopefully with the détente on tariffs will improve. That is where there is uncertainty right now, where we would think, given the détente and the strength of the consumer and other things, fourth quarter would be in good shape right now. We were steaming along well, headed up economically until the tariff disruption.
What we've assumed in our guidance is a bit of a slowdown in Q2 and Q3, but no significant recession. What we see aligns to that.
OK. Let's spend some time on DotDash Meredith specifically. Starting high level, it's been over three years now since you acquired Meredith, merged with DotDash. A lot has changed in the digital publishing space during that time. How are you feeling about just the state of the business today?
We feel very good. The collection of assets and capabilities at DotDash Meredith are a true differentiator in the digital and in the publishing world. Huge scale, both in sessions, in reach. We have got the leading brands and sort of unrivaled segmentation ability and scale across food, entertainment, beauty and style, home, also leading properties in health, travel, and finance. We have got an exceptional content machine that continues to produce both timely and new content and evergreen content and serve a variety of users. The number one ability to test, review, rate, recommend products, which drives our performance marketing engine. We feel like we have got the best ad tech stack and site technology stack anywhere. We have got Decipher. I am sure we will talk a lot about that.
Our ability to guarantee performance and offer intent-driven ad targeting across our sites and now across third-party sites we view as a real competitive engine. We have a great sales force that sells it. We have just continued to make progress there. It gets less attention, but the team's done a great job managing print. That has outperformed, honestly, our expectations. We have our magnificent seven titles that we invest behind that are, we have quality. We use that profitability to offset our corporate costs. We have continued to chip away at those. I feel very good about the property, growth opportunities, and free cash flow generation.
I think two of the priorities you talked about this year are Decipher and going to direct to consumer. Maybe starting with Decipher, your cookieless targeting solution. What type of impact is this already having on the business? Could you talk about your plan to roll it out across the open web?
Yeah. Decipher is a great example of using proprietary data and predictive analytics and AI to take a totally different approach to ad performance and monetization. Our properties are overwhelmingly intent-driven. You are going on, and we have signal within those properties, whether it is food, home, beauty, etc. , that we do not need to rely on cookies to drive performance. We do predictive analytics around the behaviors, the interests, and the consumption patterns of people on those sites. Our OpenAI partnership, which we announced a year ago, has further augmented that. We had mapped a number of third-party sites historically, but we were able to weave in a much broader selection of the internet. Secondly, we can weave in video and image, which OpenAI can do, but we never would have been able to do into our scoring and predictive analytics. We go to advertisers with Decipher.
We took a crawl, walk, run approach as we ramped it up, have them test it, have it perform, outperform cookies. We've got 40-plus case studies of it outperforming cookies and then blowing away uncookied platforms like iOS and then ramp up their spend. Decipher is part of over half our premium deals, and premium is 2/3 plus of our digital advertising. Decipher users spend significantly more than non-Decipher users. We will continue to ramp that up. It's a great calling card. We're rolling it out through Decipher Plus to third-party inventory. This was always part of the strategic roadmap, where we have now scored comparable sites in our categories: food, travel, health, home, etc. , and can use Decipher to identify underpriced, attractive inventory. We guarantee performance to our advertisers and generate attractive margins.
From our advertisers' perspective, it's getting them Decipher performance on even more inventory. We think it can be a meaningful contributor to growth in 2026 and beyond.
Touching on your other initiative, direct to consumer, maybe why is this a priority? Could you talk about some of the initial offerings you've rolled out, like the People App and My Recipes, and the response you've seen?
Yeah. Increasing direct consumer engagement has been a major point of focus since we closed the DotDash Meredith acquisition. Part of that was we now had exceptional brands within DotDash and DotDash Meredith. It was on the advanced tech stack and performance stack. We could combine exceptional trusted brands and infrastructure with best-in-class performance. We've said that when the deal closed, about 60% of DDM's aggregated traffic came through Google Search, and then another 10%+ came through Facebook. We have transitioned that to today. It's about a third Google Search and just a few percent coming from Facebook. We've really used the power of the brands, direct relationships, things like email, and also repeat traffic, direct nav, as well as off-platform traffic, which isn't really captured in our sessions data, but whether it's social media, Apple News, etc. , to enhance our consumer engagement.
You can do it when you have the brands, when you have the content generation, and the innovation that we have. The desire to keep expanding direct relationships is also manifesting in our new products. We have launched the People App. There was no app before. We spent a lot of time, Neil and team spent a lot of time making sure the product was much more in keeping with the sensibilities and experiences that users expect in entertainment content, think social media, etc . It is also an attractive platform for our advertisers as well. That is a direct touch point. We will continue to ramp it up, have proprietary content. We loved what happened around it with the Met Gala. Secondly, My Recipes. If you take a step back, in food, we have tremendous scale.
We have segmentation at the tip of the spear or the top of the pyramid of food and wine across various other properties. We have the massive My Recipes, which is everything food and people posting and testing and rating recipes. We built My Recipes, which is essentially a locker that you can keep your recipes on our platforms and others, a great engagement engine, a great discovery engine. We will continue to roll out new products like that to drive repeat engagement, to have direct user relationships. We have had a lot of learnings and feel like there is more opportunity there.
I'll skip around a bit. I want to ask about, or do you want to ask about AI? Certainly a lot of debate and concern just around the risk generative search could hurt publisher traffic across the web. You've cut your dependence on search significantly, as you just said. How are you thinking about this risk? Have you seen any notable impact to date?
Yeah. We've been thinking about this risk since we first saw we actually had OpenAI, Sam Altman, presented at our offsite in December 2022 and demonstrated ChatGPT 3 to us. It was consciously we thought about the opportunities and risks there. The biggest step so far was when Google rolled out AI Overviews about a year ago. They've been trialing different things. We've been tracking closely. We've publicly talked about the frequency of AI Overviews appearing in the top searches that are relevant for DDM's titles. It's about 35% right now, varies across property. In terms of impact on click-through, we've seen some decline, nothing massive, but we're tracking it closely. We may be benefiting relative to other publishers that our brands are so trusted that we have better attribution and appearance in the AI Overviews.
A lot of our content areas, you're not going to go off just a straight AI overview. You want to get deeper into how do you renovate your home or do such decor, throw a party, or go into this health issue. We may have better experience. When you think about a third of our traffic or so coming from Google Search, about 35% frequency, and then some small deprecation and click-through, it's not a material percentage. We still track it closely. I would say the bigger impact, the Google Search experience for consumers has degraded over the last few years. In many ways, a lot of that happened in 2023 when a lot of Reddit was inserted at the top of the page. We have been tracking it. It's really been around diversifying and building other channels.
What we can do is build the value of our brands and also our repeat and direct relationships with consumers.
Last one on DDM, given the time. Near-term macro aside, you talked about the programmatic changes. You have also talked about double-digit growth for the long term. What gives you confidence in getting there? Is there a certain algo you target in terms of sessions or monetization?
Yeah. We think about growing traffic. Q1 core traffic was down 3%. We expected weak traffic in January and February, tough comps, fewer days. We also were losing some growth for Easter in March. The fires had a bigger impact on entertainment than we anticipated. I think we're going to have to lap the news flow associated with presidential news this year at some point. We were growing again in March. We expect some element of growth in sort of our algorithm from core sessions. We also expect continued improved monetization, both premium and programmatic. This is steady state medium term, put aside whatever happens, current macro. Decipher aids in that. We expect continued off-platform growth via Decipher Plus, things like Apple News, other licensing, et c.
That mix we see getting us to steady state 10% plus digital revenue growth.
Let's go to MGM. Your stake has grown to 23% since your initial investment in 2020, thanks to share buybacks that they've done. You're well in the green on the investment today. What's the rationale for holding on to it? What would cause you to potentially increase or decrease that stake in the future?
Yeah. Barry Diller, our Chairman, said on the two earnings calls ago that it was a forever asset. The key message there is we are big believers in the embedded value in our stake in MGM. We talk to investors about this all the time, many of whom recognize it. When you look at where the stock is trading and you take out the interest in MGM China, and they had this in their last earnings report, you have got a 3-4 to 4 times multiple on everything else. In everything else, you have got premier assets in Las Vegas, bless you, and where Las Vegas has developed into really the global leader in entertainment and leisure and is continuing to fill its calendar, maximize yield. We love our assets there.
You've got BetMGM, where they reported solid Q1 results and have a management there, has renewed focus. Entain, our 50/50 JV partner, has done a good job delivering on product. Management is executed. We have a solid digital player there, including a great Gaming business. You've got international digital for MGM, which will be a continuing value creator, be it in Europe, Brazil, et c. We love the mix of digital and facilities and live experiences, the international opportunities. We think the company is highly undervalued.
One question on Care.com would be just what's your kind of longer-term, bigger-picture outlook on the company? Could you talk about the different dynamics impacting consumer and the enterprise segments right now?
Yes. IAC bought Care.com in Q1 of 2020, immediately went into COVID. There are two core segments to the business, consumer and enterprise. Enterprise got a huge boost immediately out of COVID as employers wanted to get their employees back in the office and invested in backup care as a service. That led to a strong run-up in 2021, 2022, and then some tepid growth as we lapped that and now is growing strongly. You can look at the competitive environment there. We feel very good about our place. That business, employee-provided backup care, has become a base benefit for most employers. There is still a lot of opportunity to acquire new logos, everything from Fortune 500 to small businesses. We have the offerings to serve all those.
The employer side is just around execution, sales, continue the product, continue to improve the product, and serve great tailwinds. The consumer side, we also got a later COVID benefit, think 2022, the 2022 period, where people wanted to get out and go to restaurants and were more comfortable having people in their home for nannies, et c, and senior care. That tailwind, in many ways, masked core deficiencies in the product. As those tailwinds abated, it became clear. We brought in a new management team in late 2023, Brad Wilson as CEO. As he was taking the reins, it became clear there were core deficiencies in the product, which hurt conversion, recapture, retention. We needed to make certain improvements in the platform, such as payments and other, to really enable the product to be where we wanted it.
They have put in the hard yards on a go-forward basis, priorities there are product messaging, matching, and fulfillment. That is going to be rolling. That is rolling out this year. We launched messaging a few weeks ago. Second step that we have is improved marketing. We have held off on bigger marketing spend until we had the product where we wanted. Third is the element of pricing and packaging and offering different price points across pet consumer, child, senior. That business should be growing 10%+ . It is an industry leader. The sectoral tailwinds there are inarguable. Everything is within the four walls of Care.com to drive that growth. The margins are good. We generated $45 million of EBITDA last year on about $370 million of revenue. They should scale as we get it growing. It is a solid business.
Maybe we'll do one final question just on the rest of the portfolio, then save the final five for capital allocation. Anything notable that you'd want to highlight across Turo, Search, and the emerging segments?
Sure. Turo is the leader in car sharing. It got a huge tailwind out of COVID and the limitations that the rental car companies had. That is now the base. They were disclosing information through a public S1, one of the only companies I know that flipped to a public S1 right when they are not on the doorstep of going public. They did it. They were updating their data. $900 million-plus of revenue, real liquidity on both sides of the platform between guests and hosts. They pulled the S1. We are very supportive of that. We have always said we were indifferent to them going public. What we want them to do is execute on the opportunities in front of them to disrupt the car rental space, to take share, and also innovate within access to cars with new offerings, long-term usage, car testing.
If you're thinking of buying a car, you can test it on Turo. You know exactly the car you're getting. There's a number of applications. The biggest limitation there has been marketing. Unaided awareness at Turo is 18%. If you anecdotally test and you're at your next dinner and you ask people if they know Turo, guarantee you 2 out of 10 will have known Turo. They almost certainly have used it. They will have high NPS, quote unquote, and the rest will have not heard of it. Getting more people into the experience, more people into the funnel, and just driving it forward is key. They are heads down, focused on that. We support them in that effort. Search, Vivian. Search has gotten to a period of stability after a tough couple of years.
Vivian's a real leader with 2 million clinicians on its healthcare staffing platform and using AI in truly innovative ways.
Closing on capital allocation, you're repurchasing shares right now. Maybe on the M&A side, could you just talk about what are you looking for in potential targets in terms of size, business model, new businesses versus add-ons to existing businesses? Maybe kind of a direct question is, are there ways you can leverage your MGM stake should a larger opportunity arise?
Sure. I'll try to answer all those. We're definitely looking through our existing businesses. We've been pronounced in saying DDM. We are looking to add there, looking at ad tech elements that would accelerate Decipher or our performance marketing capabilities. Those would be smaller bolt-ons and bring strategic elements. New platforms, we're looking. Russ Farsh, our Head of Strategy and M&A, has been actively driving our process there, and Barry's involved there. We're looking at new names and ideas constantly, companies in all different elements of growth. I mean, think about our portfolio. We bought Vivian for a few million dollars all the way up to Meredith, which was an unusual deal, but a couple of billion mature company. We look at all different stages. We're really looking for things that will have real growth opportunities and create value.
We're not a private equity firm trying to buy something, double cash flow, and make 2.5x. We do have a cash flow bias that is inherent. We skew more towards control. People ask about minority or public investments. I'd say both MGM and Turo were specific situations where we saw elements that worked for us in terms of being the biggest investor in control, or not control, sorry, in influence. We definitely don't have control and alignment with management. We'll look at some minority investments, some growth things. I think our bias is generally towards having control.
So I have a closing question, unless anyone in the audience wants to ask a final one. All right. Ending bigger picture, Chris, maybe the one or two things you're most excited about or you think could be most transformative across your business in the years ahead.
Yeah. I'd say two things. One, if you take IAC as a whole, I think the clarity we have right now in our businesses on strategic elements, getting ANGI spun in on their own, and we knew they were in a good spot with Jeff and Joey to be standalone, the driving greater clarity, greater focus on capital allocation, and creating value for shareholders. In my period here, it's the tightest, clearest game plan we've had. I am excited. I know all of IAC is excited to be executing on that. The second is I am a real believer in Decipher. The first time I had Decipher explained to me, I came from the NFL, where we had a large premium digital advertising. I said, this is exactly what everyone's looking for, which is intent-driven focus rather than guessing based on cookies and previous site searching.
With the quality of our sales force, the scale of our properties, and the ability to go off-platform, it is something very different. I do not think any other publisher can do that. It really is an example of proprietary data inventory testing with really smart PhDs and mixing in some AI and predictive analytics. I view it as a major competitive advantage.
Great. We'll stop there. Thank you.
Thank you, Corey.