How to Survive without Google: People Inc's Playbook

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From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also Chief Correspondent at Business Insider. And today we are talking about how you run a big internet publisher at a time when the Old playbook for internet publishing doesn't work. And the new playbook seems well, I'm not sure there is a new playbook. That is the challenge facing Neil Vogel. Who runs People Inc., that's the big publisher owned by Barry Diller's IAC.

Vogel has been on versions of this show in the past, and as we talk about, even though he's basically had the same job, the properties he manages, what they're called, and what his strategy is have all changed over time. This is gonna be a very brief recap. Vogel first started working for Diller in twenty thirteen when he was running what was then called About dot com. That was an important early internet site that tried to anticipate.

What people would want to learn about, and paid experts to write search-friendly answers to those queries. When I first started talking to him in 2019, they had changed the name to. Advertisers. And a couple of years later, Vogel and Dot Dash paid$2.7 billion for Meredith. The big magazine publisher made up of many brands that used to be part of Time Inc., along with other titles like Better Homes and Gardens.

And now that company is called People Inc. because they own People magazine. Got it? I know. I try to be quick. Here I'll do the short version of this. Neil Vogel runs a big publishing company that has many brands you might know. Especially if you remember when magazines were around. But his old business model, which was building properties with Google in mind, no longer works, and his new strategy. Working with AI companies is a question mark. So here's me talking to Neil Vogel about

I'm here with Neil Vogel. We were just debating whether he's been on this podcast three or four times. Maybe someone can tell us. And it is unknowable who we figured out. I know you've had multiple titles. Over the years I've talked about names for a lot of names. You were the CEO of something called dot dash. Yes. Which used to be about dot com. Then you were the CEO of Dot Dash Merit. Now you are the CEO of People Inc. Correct. All the same

Organization. I mean the same things have changed. Correct. We've added a lot to the organization. But the kernel is the same. I've had the same job for going on like thirteen years. The longest tenure in media. The longest tenure you've had in media.

I've had in media it feels like the longest tenure media. And even if you are a very long tenured media executive, so I guess this answers my question I was going to ask you, which is is media a good business? Should you be in the media business these days? Uh so this whole the y this is like you're throwing me red meters. Did I just did I just toss one for you? So the the narrative that media is failing

Can't be successful, structurally broken, is something we've never subscribed to. We believe, and I believe, if you have. Great brands, you have what you need to build a media business. If you have great brands, it gives you the opportunity to build strong, durable audiences. What people get confused is if you have great brands and can build great audiences, you've a great business.

What happens between great brands and building audiences is where people get confused, right? I we don't care and have never cared whether We are reaching people on the web, on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube, on Apple News, in print magazines, like you name it, like if we can figure out how to use each, any, sum, all, nine other things we do that I didn't mention to to build great audiences, great, but we are ruthlessly unsentimental about how we do it or how we used to do it. And

If you can do that, media's a great business. Like we've proved it. We're we're again like You were kind enough to have us on when we were about dot com and we were tiny and we didn't make any money and no one cared about us, but you know, we're a public company now. We're like a billion seven, billion eight in revenue, three hundred and million in change, three thirty in EBITDA. Like we're a a real business that grew fourteen percent in the fourth quarter. Like this can be a good business.

It would be a surprise if you were running a media company that w were as part of a publicly traded conglomerate and you work for Barry Diller and you said, actually, yeah, this is a bad business. Well it would be bad business for me.

bad for you to say that out loud. Uh and I do want to talk to you about how the business has evolved how your business has evolved, but The way I think about it a lot, not your business, but the way I think about media broadly right now is, you know, um, and I'm not alone here, is that

publishers, people who make media are caught between the platforms that are abandoning them, they used to rely on the Googles of the World and the Metas of the World. And on the other side they're looking at the AI companies who aren't even really pretending to align with them. They're work doing some deals, but it doesn't look it um we imagine a future where

OpenAI or pick your chat bot is sort of your entry into all of media and that is a real problem for the remaining media companies. Um so I want to talk to you about how you're navigating all of that. And if I think about it in very big gross buckets. you are fighting slash done with Google. Which used to be a big core part of your business. When I first started talking to you, you were basically building websites. Built for Google.

That was your job. Like how can we my make our stuff visible to Google? That was the business. Now you've moved on from that, you're doing a bunch of other stuff, but uh you are also aligning yourself with the AI companies. You've done a deal with open AI, you did one with Microsoft other books. Microsoft uh meta. Yeah, yep. Okay. Yeah.

So you're cutting deals with companies that are doing AI stuff. We're doing all the things. You're doing all the things. So um let's let's start with the first bucket. Okay, so I'll go back and I'll answer your first question. So I again I I don't I'm reluctant to become an industry pundit, but I can tell you our story and and and it reflects exactly what you said. And by telling our story, I'm effectively an industry pundit, right?

When we first and I think you were the first podcast who went on after we bought Meredith, which was Meredith and Time Inc., and the knock on us then. was very common was was this is interesting, but you put these two companies together and seventy five percent of your audience comes from Google. This is not interesting. You guys have too much exposure to Google. It'll never work. Like

cut to today, we've lost fifty percent of our Google sessions over the last two years and we're still growing fifteen percent. So it can work. But here's what happened. I remember soon after we did that, I was at like some investor conference, I don't know, like a City Bank conference or something. And one of the analysts said the same thing that you would say. And it's the right thing to say at the time, which was

Too much your audience is from Google. I'm not interested in this story. And I was well and I would say to Well, how much of the open web is coming from Google at the time? And his answer would be like, Well you know, eighty-five, ninety percent of the open web comes through Google. I was like, we're only seventy five percent, like we're not good enough at it. Like this is like we're gonna fish where the fish are. Like we're not

We should be more dependent on Google. We should be more dependent on Google. Like we're not that g like, why wouldn't we be ninety if the internet's ninety? Obviously that was an extreme stance, but that was truly how we felt. And you were right. It was easy.

We were very good at the internet, we were very good at making content people liked, and we were very good at going. It was a strategy, right? About dot com, which in existed before you got there, but was built specifically to help you. But you were you were taking it really to an extreme. I mean we weren't but what we we never Never ever gamed an algorithm ever. That doesn't work. And and you can't predict what an algorithm wants. You can make

great content, which is what Google wanted at the time, that algorithms knew how to read. But you were specifically saying someone is gonna go to Google and say, Hey, what's up with this SOAR I have? and then you're hoping they would get sent to very well. And was very unlikely and was and it was very unlikely that that that someone would go to very well if Google hadn't sent them. Yes. So but what that did was we were so Google A dependent.

That we were also the first people to see Google start to change. And three, four, two, three, four years ago, we saw that search page changing. First it was all their stuff. YouTube started to show up, then Reddit, and then it all it ends with like AI showing up. And Two or three years ago we're like, wait a minute, this is not sustainable.

We've got these great brands. We have this great distribution channel. We need more. And we we without a lot of fanfare, because no one ever cared what we were doing, because we were boring, but we were good at it. We built incredible email presence. We built TikTok. We built Instagram. We built Apple News. We built all of these things. We built our own assets like later. Um we're we're doing all kinds of things to connect directly with advertisers and users.

So when Google really fell off a cliff two years ago, We're prepared for it. You would think, given what everyone said about us four or five years ago, that we would be the guys that would be doing the worst now. We're kind of the guys doing the best now because we we maintain this view of like We are not sentimental. If if you look at our brands like people. People will look like a media business you would understand, right? We

A lot of traffic on a website. We've launched an app which is doing great as part of like inverting that model. That would look nothing like you'd expect. There is no web business. There is no print business. The entire thing exists in what an old media person would think is like the ether. Instagram, TikTok, Google, events, this, and it's one of our fastest growing brands and it's doing great. So what we've had to do is say, you know what, we're gonna have brands.

that people care about. And we have forty brands. Forty of our brands don't matter. About seven or eight of them matter. Brands that people love and care about, they're gonna be per permissioned to do different things. When we figure out what they're permissioned to do, we're gonna do those things and that's how we're gonna connect with audiences and that's how we're gonna make money. And it it actually works.

So you're saying that you got out earlier than everybody else from Google, you saw it earlier. But people had been complaining about Google as long as there's been Google and and fighting about referral traffic, et cetera. Um what what was what do you think

Just that you just because you were working with Google day in, day out, you're able to see it more clearly? And I think we knew, look, about any of these platforms, they don't owe us or any publisher anything. They're gonna operate in their self interest. What we realized a few years ago is there are platforms that our incentives are more aligned with. For instance, Uh TikTok and Instagram need our content to attract users to have a a vibrant environment.

More so than Google our incentive in Google was. Google We wanted them to send people to us. That is not in their interest. Right. And go and Google and Google for a long time has been, hey, there's more of the an the the the answer to that query you just typed in, it's on our homepage. It's on the page. You just you don't need to go to the next site. You could go to the site, but we've already told you when the Super Bowl is or something more.

group is the source of the answer for everybody. There's some danger in that. There's no more picking your answer. They give you the answer now. So but that's a whole nother conversation. But it's not just that. It's It could be Facebook. It could be we're very cognizant of how Instagram works and how Apple News works and how how syndication when we syndicate content, uh I don't know, Yahoo or MSN or whatever.

You you have to be everywhere. The best thing is to be there directly, where they come to your apps, they come to the things you're building. Um this is what every publisher I talk to, at least on the record, says, right? Well well the way we're gonna survive and thrive is our brand means something. People are gonna come to us directly, we're gonna have a direct relationship, we have a direct relationship.

I'm sure that will be true for a very small number of publishers. How do you how do you make sure you're in that very small group? I mean, we're as of now. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Our math is everyone for everyone to see. We're in it. Like the group of people who are executing on this is sort of newscorp and all the Muradoc stuff. It's the New York Times and it's kind of us. And there's there's others that are successful obviously, like Axel and some of those guys are doing really interesting things.

But we're on the other side of it. Google right now for us is I don't know, I'm gonna get the number slightly around twenty-five percent. Google's actions don't knock us around in the way they would have like five or six years ago. And the thing that like We don't Think about that very much anymore. We think much more about making things that will resonate with humans and the different ways we can connect with them.

What happens when when you trade uh a set of eyeballs that came to you from Google, but they at least came to your page and you could show them something, including an ad, versus reaching someone some somewhere else, if it's you know, if you're talking about Instagram and TikTok, you don't own that platform, you may not be able to show them an ad in front of that content. Aaron Powell The thing that you have to figure out if you're gonna run a b media business now is

And this is our business used to be like very easy to understand. Get traffic to website, sell that. It's math, right? X times Y equals Z. We are not that anymore. We are now call it forty brands, ten brands that that matter.

Our ten brands all have dramatically different business models that do dramatically different things to make money. And each of those things to make money has a different model. For instance, the number one thing we do at Better Homes and Gardens, the probably the biggest, most important part of that business. It's a license we sell products inside of Walmart, right?

And that's a great business for us, but that's a very different metric in a very different way. Candles, towels, tabletop. And it's a it's an amazing license words inside of Walmart. They're a great partner. It's amazing.

Food and wine, the biggest thing we do in his events business, food and wine classics, best new chefs, that is a different metric. Like Southern living, events, and old school publishing. And it looks like old school publishing. People looks like something you'd be familiar with. In style looks like something totally brand new. And and the thing that we we call it, and this is like a it's like a Barry Diller term and we've all adopted it as like our rallying cry. We call it inverting the model.

And there is no longer if you look at a media business and and you want to have one model across everything, you need to do something else. So our business went from being super simple, x times y equals z, to now we need people who are able to manage at Ten plus different brands, very complex numbers.

That again, add up to one point seven billion dollars. That's a lot of different things we have to do now. You're describing a world where you have a bunch of different businesses and business leaders and business ideas and so you need different people to staff all that. Correct. All that sounds plausible. It also sounds like the opposite of what you're trying to do when you build up a scale publishing business, scale media business.

You've watched the wire. Like The greatest line ever said is Marlowe, like you want the world to be one way, but it's the other way. Three, four, five years ago. We thought we could have a one stop shop where you you come to us with a with an ad qu request and we serve it to our giant audience, distributed to all our different stuff. It's not that. It is not up to us to decide.

how our audiences want to receive our information and our services. Like maybe they want to come to events, maybe they want to buy our products, maybe they want to read about us, see videos on TikTok, maybe they want to read about us on the web. Not up to us. It's up to them. And what we need to do is

decentralize ourselves in a way that we can be immediately responsive to them. The amazing thing is we we have an org that if if somebody was reviewing the performance of our management team, there's like two thing there's two types of people that that they would say they would say either A

God, these guys are great. They're so flexible. They change all the time. We're doing all these new things and the proves out in the numbers and they really know what they're doing and they've created a lot of value around this. And they're succeeding in an area where a lot of people aren't. The second take is These guys are all over the place. What a mess. I don't know my job is. What a mess.

I I don't know what what to work on. There's no direction. I hate this place. We we need a company. We need 3,000 thirty five hundred of the first group, not the second group. The we're gonna go find our audience where they are, we're gonna find them on other platforms. Um I think literally ten years ago I was at South by Southwest listening to Jonah Peretti uh talk about the BuzzFeed strategy of of going to find audience on Facebook. And this was the t time when

a a hot digital publisher wouldn't just say how many page views or visitors they had. They they they would talk about this expanded universe of of views they were getting from Facebook. And then we all moved on from that, right? Everyone said, Oh, that was a terrible idea. It turns out that there was no business in Trying to get eyeballs on Facebook. The only business that mattered was trying to get uh eyeballs on your own site. It sounds like you're kinda going back to that.

The only thing that mattered then, in that era, For building durable audience research. We've talked about this. I have a Wall Street background, my CFO's Wall Street background. So we're like, wait a minute. This is where the money is. I wanna go where the money is. I wanna maximize how we perform in the programmatic ad markets. with great content that people love and intent driven audiences at scale. That's gonna work. When that started to break down.

We gotta do something else. We we can break this down into like two phases of the web. First, there was like print to digital phase of the web, right? Which which Uh BuzzFeed, et cetera, was like an outgrowth of those. Pretty we we navigated that pretty well. And now there is there is digital is like the open web is I don't know what's gonna happen. Like it's flattish for us, it's fine. Now we're in digital to brand.

And if you don't have brands, you're not gonna be able to do the nine different things to quote invert your models to do this. Like we launched an app at people. It's doing incredibly well. It The average session in an app is three or four times longer than a session on the web. And if they play one of our games, it's like five times, six times longer. Is it someone who remembers people in print? So the people in print

We're still about two million copies a week. I think we're still the biggest magazine in America, but we are almost ten million sessions a day just on the web. Do you think there's people who did not grow up with people? It's people who did not grow up with the People Print magazine in there. Maybe there's some. I mean you never know.

The core of that. That is it. You found new audience. Millennial Gen Z audience. Yeah. And and I think one thing worth talking about and and'cause these changes don't happen themselves. And we made a structural change at our organization that makes us look a lot different than other publishers. that um really set us up to be able to do all these things. Like it was a little bit

When I talk about it like we've talked about it, it's a little bit like that South Park model, like the steel like the underpants gnomes. Like like steel underpants profit. The middle part of steel underpants profit is we fundamentally changed how we do. Editorial. And I I'll use people as an example and I'll tell you an idealized version of it to make it easy to understand. When we got our hands on people four or five years ago.

We thought this was the most undervalued asset in media. It was still like print driven command and control. like editor in chief sitting on top of a mountain commanding what we're going to do. Now we have this amazing editor in chief named Charlotte Triggs, and run by a woman named Leah Wire, and she's Charlotte's amazing.

And what Charlotte has done or been tasked to do that we've all kind of figured out together is Charlotte's job is setting the direction of the brand. And in people's case, it's like Ordinary people doing extraordinary things, extraordinary people doing ordinary things, focus on uh celebrity style fashion human interest, right? So makes a lot of sense. But we sh her job is to no longer like pick the stories and then propagate them out. What we have is a separate group.

content creative, um e even product and tech in some cases. There's a team that does exclusively TikTok, a team that does exclusively Instagram, team that does the magazine, that's a big team, team that does the web, that's a big team, team that does the app, team that does all their events. Events are a huge part of our business.

And what they do And the TikTok people are not tasked with taking the what was in the print magazine and making movies. They can do whatever they want and the TikTok people can work with the Instagram people if they want or if they don't want. And this is a terrifying thing we did. We absolutely gave control of our most valuable asset, our brand, to all these different groups of people.

And none of them look like the person who used to be editor in chief. Like the print people don't look like that and I can tell you the TikTok Instagram people surely don't look like that. And you let'em do their thing. And you end up with an ability to, oh, we want to do events, we can plug in events. Like everybody knows what the brand is and it's how that we've gotten people younger and it's how we've brought the energy back. It's why the app is so amazing. Like because we let people

live natively in their environments. I was going to ask you about this later, since we're talking about people.

It's such an interesting brand, right? Uh a magazine dedicated to celebrity gossip, how crazy this is. And magazines were very important then, right? And this was like how flippant and then became the most powerful brand within Time Inc., which was a really big deal publishing company. And then basically I think around two thousand there's every time you

looked into that business, someone wise was saying, this is the end of people. They are getting displaced first by Us magazine and Janice Minn, and then later obviously by the Internet. We're back, baby. We're back with a scan and and and the idea of seeing a celebrity You can't not see a celebrity if you boot up a screen, right? So How does people and just saying we're gonna, you know, we've got a tet we've got a mission about, you know, elevating people or whatever it is.

That's not enough. How do you command attention for something that is Literally a commodity. It may be less of a commodity than you think, because the the people brand is w whatever you want to call it. It is the New York Times or Wall Street Journal of entertainment. It is a place of record.

We don't do rumors, we don't do salacious things, like we're not outing people, we're not doing any of that stuff. That matters maybe for a journalist, for an audience. You just want the stuff. It actually matters'cause and and we also for the stuff, we make the highest volume of the highest quality of this content every day across all of these platforms in a way that people want to consume it. When we took over the brand in whatever, twenty twenty one, we were here. Um that was not the case.

But the brand was so strong That once we started to do this. on other people's algorithms, on our own websites, on anything. It just starts to work. Cause there there's something about the people brand, whether it was like your mom got it or it was in the doctor's office or you still see it and you buy it in the airport. There is some magic to that brand that permissioned us to do all of these things.

And again, the proof is in the the math and in the numbers. I think I might get this wrong, I think we're the third biggest news brand in America behind Fox and CNN, like people alone. It's that big now and that well distributed because We have been super unsentimental about how we distribute it. Like we still do the magazine. There's still two million copies a week, but I don't know what it used to be. It was probably ten. Like it's just not that anymore. But we produce so much content.

All made by people, all made by writer, all made by ever, all human lowercase P people across so many different places that um we're we're like back in the consciousness of things. And The math is the math. Just look at the numbers of the audiences and the reach and how well the business is doing and

Uh we're we're just that's like truly our success story. I mean the place we're struggling it's not people, it's other places. Yeah, I I mean it's not exactly analysis. I just sort of think of you guys as And the internet just blows that up because you can literally get that anywhere. And it seems like

I can it's impossible for me to not know what Timothy Chalamet is up to at any given second, right? There's just a constant and picture whoever the person is. And it just seems in a world where that is just everywhere you can't hold it back that that is a very tough opera uh place to operate if you're people magazine. I mean or people brand. It's either a tough place to operate or there's a great demand for this kind of content and it's a tough place to operate. Right? So

Tough, doesn't mean I mean we dwarf everybody. We we dwarf TMZ and we dwarf us and we do all this stuff. It has a lot to do with the fact that people want the Timothy Chalamy information from us. I'm I'm not like I'm not like making it's not like a like all these things are sort of what I like about our business now and what I do like about being public essentially is being public's a pain in the ass for many reasons. But

W the the truth is spoken for us. Like we're not making this up. Like this is really working. You can't say you can't see it, but trust me, there's real demand. It's not like, well, we were profitable last year if you add back these nineteen things. Like if you don't include all of our expenses, we made a lot of money. Like you can see what we're doing. We'll be right back with Neil Vogel, but first a word from a sponsor.

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And we're back. We've talked about you moving away from Google sort of earlier than other folks and away from that platform dependency. And then at the same time, you are cutting deals with AI companies that many sober, rational people believe. are gonna be like the other platforms, but even worse because they're gonna give you less. And if you thought that being batted around by Meta or Google was rough, wait till you see what happens when uh Chat GPT's newest

Set up your daily news thing is available to everyone and no one ever goes to a website again. Um so walk me through your logic in in doing these deals. Because you're you're aware of all those things. Yeah, we're very aware and and we've been Uh very much at the front end of doing these deals. So what do I say is if you take a step back. Trevor Burrus, Jr. I should do that disclosure. Trevor Burrus If you zoom out and you think about what um

an AI company, right? At LLM needs they need they need three things. They need a model, they need a lot of power, and they need data to put in that model. The world is currently out of data. Everything that can be crawled has been crawled, right? Trevor Burrus There's a little new stuff created every day, but that's about it. And who's making that is us. So we're we're very important. Plus we're a source of truth for everything else.

We uh did an open AI deal first, uh and then we did uh soon thereafter deals with with Meta and Microsoft and there's we're talking to everybody. The the real discussions got kicked off last summer in July. When we essentially took our content off the internet for the purposes of LLM crawlers, we blocked everyone using a partnership with Cloudflare. Cloudflare has been great. We helped to develop it.

All of a sudden when our content wasn't around anymore, people seemed to be able to figure out the value of it, where before that they just couldn't figure out what the value was, right? No one is gonna work. uh on on their own benevolence here w which which we know. You could no longer get our stuff, open AI or whomever. Correct. Uh just scraping it. If you want it, you've got to pay us. Correct.

And again, the pretty standard conventional wisdom was, well, maybe they're gonna need you for uh this specific thing or that specific thing. And yes, they need new news, but there's so much of it. If they're not getting the latest Timothy Chalamet update from you, they can get it from somebody else, they can get it from someone who summarized your work. Very possible. That your stuff is not worth nearly as much as you think it is to it's it's your entire business.

But to these guys, it's it's a fraction of a fraction and it's substitutable. Maybe. It's possible. I don't think that's true based on what's going on and what has happened, but it's possible. So so this has evolved for us and there's two types of deals for us, right? And people We produce a ton of new content every day, every month. They want that. They want our historical archives. They want our videos. They want our pictures. Like they they they need our things.

And r remember, w we we're not news. We're not traditional news in that sense. We're we're all of these like called enthusiast categories, whatever, the old service categories. Deals are working two ways, it seems. One is the all-you-can-eat deal. Which is people can have all the access they want to our content for the purposes you give us a fly some consumer model. That's essentially open AI and that's essentially what we did with meta.

And it's it's one price no matter how much your stuff how much of people's stuff is Yeah p how much of people ink stuff is and all kinds of stuff. But it's essentially a we have one deal with them and it's however they pay us, they they get unlimited access to the all of our things. The other thing is Microsoft's a marketplace. So for everyone who uses Azure or Azure, I don't know how pronounce it Azure, whatever, that needs to power an LLM model.

That is all their corporate clients that needs rights cleared things for their model, which is very important, will theoretically pay uh more of an a la carte. as they build their models and do their things. And uh we're help Microsoft create this thing and we're very optimistic about where this is gonna go. Uh this is gonna end up being for smaller clients that and particularly for

corporate clients I think and this is gonna end up being much more than that. What's the units that they're paying for? Is it per crawl, per article, per thing retreat? to use like a shitty sports analogy. We're like first pitch, not even not even like first inning. Um So th that's the that's the the landscape, and we're talking to other people about doing other things similarly falling into these two buckets. There is a chance we are a hundred percent wrong on all of this.

There's a chance that we're 100% right. The truth is probably somewhere in between. Right now, I think it's leaning towards right. In case we're not right, none of our deals are more than a couple of years long. So if you're getting abused, it turns out you are getting abused by open A. We can deal ends and we can we can redo and we can figure it out. The the interesting thing is the biggest player in the space is Google.

And Google is set up right now that they use essentially one crawler for search and for AI. Because they know that it is not blockable by us. They're still a big part of our business. We can't block them from search. So that's a major sticking point. So Google searches your website. Which you want them to do if they're gonna send you search traffic. Correct. They also using that same crawl. Correct.

And that's why you call them a bad actor. Not because they're screwing you on referral traffic. No, no, listen. No, we're business. So the the number one thing we don't I will never complain about an algorithm doing things in the interest of that algorithm. But what they're doing now is Again, I'm not a lawyer, I don't know what power they're abusing, but they're abusing market power.

Because they know that they can't be turned off because we all need search. And you are suing them over that or you attach yourself to a lot of people. Uh I don't know if the words aren't suing Google. I hear a lot of quiet complaints about Google.

from people like you. Uh and not many people who are actually going out and fighting with Google. Again, I think we've been very public about our complaints about Google. We have not been quiet and they're you know, I have no idea what their opinion of our opinion is. I'm I'm sure we disagree on things. Um My concerns are s are economic. We are not looking for like uh we're not gonna get some like legislative relief or whatever any s like Uh I I just think it is unfair that we make content.

And if they choose to not pay for it, they can still take it. And that's not right. And there is no academic argument that makes it right to us where everyone else has said, you know what, you are right. We are gonna pay for it.

And um if our content isn't valuable, then let us block it so you can't have it. But so they're they're they're clearly our content is valuable because they won't let us separately block it, but they also refuse to pay us for it because somehow that's too complicated when everyone else seems to have figured it out. So but I don't want this to be about Google and complaining because like here's the thing, we're still

We we live in a world that is a current set of circumstances. We're just gonna deal with these circumstances and we're actually doing great. For the go so we'll move off Google, go back to the the LLMs you are you are working with. Um you get cash from them is part of the other premise that They're gonna refer I mean you there's links in in Chat GPT. I use them when I'm doing research, but I can't imagine anyone else. I th I don't believe going forward that

that there is going to be material traffic sent to us from an L.A. wherever we used to do. Trevor Burrus That is that is I mean if it happens it'd be great, but there is absolutely no part of our model that says that's gonna happen. So if you know that going in and you're surely just selling them data for money. And there seems like there's a very good likelihood that not only will th right now they've got a product that really doesn't send you traffic, that they'll that will

accelerate, right? It'll just be stuff that has things people care about. Some of it will come from you. They'll pay you some money for the fact that they're getting that for information from you. But not only will people not go to your site, They won't know that that came from people that will weaken your brand. Aren't you creating creating another hole for yourself? Potentially we are. But I think the case that you're outlining is

Like that's what that's search. And we've already lost more than half of our referrals from Google and we're fine. If we lose even more, we're still gonna be fine. The trick for us is our content has to be good enough and our offerings and our videos on Instagram and the episodic dramas we're doing on YouTube and our events and even our print magazines, which is a very, very small part of our business.

They have to be good enough to stand on their own with brands that resonate and people care about. Now what has happened, which has been like a benefit to us that has been unexpected. As we've done all these like inversion things, like more events in an app and and this and that, it turns out that in this current environment,

with a lot of uncertainty, both in media and like in the broader universe, people default to brands because they trust them. People don't know what's real. They know that they don't just want an LLM answer or an artificial experience. And I I think part of the reason why we're doing really well is we have brands that

mean something. I'm not a guy that's like, oh a brand is a brand's not your friend, but it means something to you. Like people mean something. Real simple means something. Food and wine means something. Serious eats means something. Like they mean something to people that cuts through this clutter.

Advertisers like it and consumers like it. The other thing that's happening on the advertiser side of this, which is really, really interesting, is Twenty years ago when you and I were like maybe not even that young in this business, but we're in this business. Everything was premium, whether it was T V or magazines or even the early web, everything was premium. Now nothing is premium. Everything's a platform. It's

meta, it's Instagram, it's y whatever it is, it's all platforms and we're still premium. So all of a sudden we have this crazy reach, we have increasingly direct connections, we have more of an open field run in what is a a premium branded place, all of a sudden like I like our chances. Like we have like a real

differentiation from what is happening on Pinterest or what is happening on Instagram than we ever had before we were competing with people that looked like us. We'll be right back, but first a word from a sponsor. And we're back. You said earlier we'd we'd tried to build our own brands for about dot com. We turned the health vertical into very well and we did a good job at that. And then we bought these real brands and realized what a real brand is.

Uh, what has that taught you about building a brand and or maintaining a brand? When we bought uh Meredith, the Meredith Timing combo. We knew that we needed brands that were stronger than ours, but we didn't understand what that meant.

And how we very quickly understood what that meant when we we had a playbook. We had a really good playbook. We built very well to be the second or third biggest health site on the internet. We built the spruce. It was the biggest home site on the internet. We did these things in like five years. from the carcassofabout.com because we were really, really good at making content and really, really good at the internet and early social and all this stuff.

It turns out that when you do that playbook and you run that playbook on Better Homes and Gardens and Southern Living and People, if the angle up was like forty five degrees for our brands, the angle up was like vertical for these brands. Because humans, algorithms, platforms

Everybody loves a brand and they trust the brand and they know what it means. Like with the spruce, you had to teach someone what the spruce was, you had to teach about the content. So is the answer the answer the way to have a brand is to have someone else build it fifty years ago? In the context of our kind of brand

I think it is virtually impossible to start a new one. So if you guys today said, you know what, there really is a space in consumer electronics, there isn't, but let's say you wanted to go after that. you would say, Well, let's go buy a thing that does that already rather than try to build our own. A hundred percent. I'd either buy one that did it already or we would find

one of our brands that was permissioned to do that. But in the case of tech, we'd we'd have to buy one. We we like for instance, we have this tech brand that you've n probably never heard of called LifeWire. At one point, LifeWire was like a top five tech site on the internet because we were just so good at the internet No, it's not. Still a great site, but it's tiny because all the things that we can do with

Food and wine, like where we can do everything from events to talk about this part of our like immersion stuff. We're gonna launch a wine club. We're gonna launch this all Can't do any of it with LifeWire because it doesn't mean anything to anybody. It w we we're we could hack the internet and get traffic, but they weren't brands. The question is like, well, if if you guys are

been so incredible at rejuvenating these old time ink brands, these old merith brands, how come you're only growing fourteen percent? And the answer is cause Those are up. Ours are down and the delta is fourteen percent in in many instances. And Thankfully we did it, right? Some of it we cannibalized our own audience, but

Having these audiences associated with these brands is much more durable than the old days. And how do you think about that, like trying to h measure the half-life of these brands, right? Like there was a time when l everyone knew what Life magazine was. And now no one does, except I guess for Carly Kloss, because she bought it, I guess. They did. They licensed it. So there you go. What our job is is to identify the brands we like and make sure there isn't a half-life.

Like we're on the other side of it. We're taking brands that at one point were on a half life and we have gotten them going. Now. We've not been able to do that with all of our brands, right? And I uh but I'll be very honored, like we would love to have done this with parents. Can't get parents to go. Do you think it's about the brand or do you think it's about the space? Aaron Ross Powell Uh Well the space is I mean, our whole audience is parents that should be good.

Is it because there's so much other parenting stuff? Yeah, there's so much other parenting stuff. And the service-y content stuff that parenting used to do has just been eaten up by AI and by search. And I think we miss the window and there's all these these incredible people on

social on YouTube that are answering these questions and doing these things. And we've just been unable to get it going. We've been unable to and there's a whole ho I mean we have forty brands. There's again seven or eight that matter.

Most of the brands we have still have one or two things that really resonate and really work. But our whole focus is on these big seven because to make sure they don't have a half life is an incredible amount of effort on the on you know, we're thirty five hundred people, I'm gonna guess

I'm gonna get these numbers wrong. 2,000 of them are creative or creative adjacent in some way, or supporting creatives in some way. Making stuff because The other thing we believe and we've always believed is that we're not going to be able If if you are cutting creative expense, you are dead. You're doomed. And everyone's like, well, AI is gonna make you not need no AI is just gonna let us make more stuff. And if you can make more really great stuff,

You have like a real chance because in this distributed world, you don't know what's gonna work. Yep. So like we we get a lot of questions and and our board is. You know, it's like David Rosen, Black from DoubleClick and Michael Eisner and Barry Diller and Bonnie Hammer and all these people. And they'll ask you like All people who've seen their businesses disrupted. Yeah. Right? And and they'll be like, well, how do you

How do you know what content to make and what's and we're always like we make the joke all the time, like half our content is not gonna perform, we just have no idea which half. And like you just gotta make it all. And if you try and slice it too thin, you're just gonna lose.

Cannot let you leave without talking about Barry Diller'cause it's entertaining to talk about Barry Diller. Uh I always have the same question for you, which is does he care about this? I know I know he does, because it's his business and it's a growing business.

But it's not sexy. I whenever he's he's interviewed constantly, he's always being interviewed about Hollywood and what this studio ought to do and what a good streaming strategy is and maybe he'll buy CNN. But he hasn't been in Hollywood for decades now. That's the thing he's still talking about.

When you're talking about about about improving yield on a people dot com page, does he glaze over or is he into it? Aaron Powell I can't speak for Mr. Dealer. I spend a lot of time with it. I could show you the inbox of my phone and tell you that he really cares. Um w what I would say is he has believed in us from the jump, which from the time we were about dot com and we went to him and said we need to change this and launch brands through today.

I mean, he's given us a couple of billion dollars to buy Timing and Meredith. And I think I would hope to think that he's very proud of where we've landed now as this like profitable, stable. growing media business that has brands that America cares about, that he cares about. Like Travel and Asia is the biggest publication in high-end travel. Nobody knows more about travel than Barry Diller, right? Between

Expediate, I'm Jim Grant. He's incredibly helpful with his ideas. Like we go through people, we go through food and wine. And I don't want to speak for him again, but I think what is most interesting to him is what's most interesting to me and to a lot of the other people is that

All of us are roughly the targets for the things we're making. So it's easier to understand what's good and what's not. And when we say to people like, don't throw an event you don't want to go to, don't write something you don't want to read, don't put out a recipe that you haven't made that isn't great, like He really gets that and and look, every day working for Barry Diller, it's not Christmas, but that's kind of the good part too. Like

The incur he calls it creative conflict, like the encouragement of the argument and like best idea wins. What's a what's what's a what's a particular non-picnic day you can recall? There's always non picnic days. Is he is he still a yeller? What No, I mean is he I mean I'm a yeller too. But here's the thing. Again, like what what I what what I would say is like it It is not always the easiest room. But it's not a good thing.

A fun room. Okay. I want you to keep your job, so I'm gonna stop asking about paragraphs. Yeah, exactly. You know, so he has the vision for this, which is pretty incredible. Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc., thank you for joining us. Maybe we'll continue to have that title next time I see you. Well maybe it'll be something else. Thanks, Neil.

Thanks again to Neil Vogel. Nice to see him in person again. Thanks to Charlotte Silver, who produces and edits this show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring this show to all of you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. See you soon.