Episode 165
Google Zero
The landscape for digital publishing is shifting. At the center of this is Google search, the backbone of the open web. Google's embrace of "AI mode" last week was a sign that it will overhaul its approach to search with vast implications for publishers. Earlier this month, I spoke with Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel for the keynote session at the Media Product Forum, an event put on in NYC by The Rebooting and WordPress VIP. Neil laid out the pragmatic playbook Dotdash Meredith is using to thrive in a shifting landscape.
Transcript
Welcome back to The Rebooting Show.
Brian:I am Brian Morrisey.
Brian:This week I have a conversation I had at the Media Product Forum, the event the rebooting recently put on with our partners, at
Brian:WordPress VIP with Neil Vogel, the CEO of dot dash Meredith, we spoke about how dot dash Meredith is preparing for what Neil calls.
Brian:Google Zero.
Brian:and that is something of a rhetoric, a rhetorical stretch, but it's also a really, important planning scenario that Meredith and just about all publishers have to take because search is undergoing a fundamental change right now.
Brian:That's pretty obvious.
Brian:That was very clear last week with, what came out of Google io.
Brian:Google's head of search is talking about search as a construct.
Brian:That's, uh, that's kind of a sign that things are about to change.
Brian:And that's of course with ai you can now go into AI mode.
Brian:when you're searching, and this is to me a clear indication that Google is going to go fully into.
Brian:Absolutely changing the search experience.
Brian:And that is gonna have a lot of cascading impacts on publishers.
Brian:There is just no way around it.
Brian:So, you know, dot Meredith is in the crosshairs of this, right?
Brian:And Neil is someone who I've always found to be very pragmatic.
Brian:He's always telling me the guy is not falling and that, bad businesses are still bad businesses, and good businesses are still good businesses.
Brian:He's been through these cycles before.
Brian:he knows all about what happened with.
Brian:Platform dependency during the Facebook traffic era.
Brian:And, you know, he's always kind of had a consistent message, which is build a real business.
Brian:cut out the middleman where you can, and, never of course expect anyone to save you.
Brian:We rerecorded this, conversation right after he led the, IAC earnings call.
Brian:we talk about the shifting economics of AI driven search.
Brian:Why Meredith took the open AI deal, and how they're actually, turning to become an ad tech player, themselves, with their first party data solution called Decipher.
Brian:And also what it takes to build, that direct audience muscle, you know, when your company was built, on a very different model.
Brian:Hope you enjoy this conversation.
Brian:You know, we did it live so in case there's, any audio sort of patches here and there, that's why.
Brian:Let's get on the conversation.
Brian:Neil, welcome.
Brian:Hi.
Brian:so Neil, you had.
Brian:the first solo call.
Brian:And I always like the calls because I'm like, what are the questions that they're gonna ask The guy from like, Oppenheim came right at it was like right at it, what are your pro, what are your product PRI priorities for 2025 for growth?
Brian:And I'm like reading into it.
Brian:So I feed it into Chachi, bt, and I was like, what is, what's this guy from Oppenheim getting at?
Brian:And he is like, the subtext of this is Jason.
Brian:He wants, he wants to make sure that Neil has a plan to actually grow this business, not just to maintain the business.
Brian:That's probably right.
Neil:That's kind of what his job is.
Neil:Jason Strom from Oppenheim.
Brian:Right.
Brian:So you laid out basically a few product priorities, right?
Brian:Yes.
Brian:One was, I believe the.
Brian:People app that you just came out with?
Brian:Yep.
Brian:And then I want to talk about each of them.
Brian:Okay.
Brian:The other was, for all recipes you do, uh, for recipes, large recipe.
Brian:Yes.
Brian:Okay.
Brian:The recipe locker, you talked about the recipe.
Brian:Recipe locker my recipe.
Brian:And then the other one was she made it one right there.
Brian:Okay.
Brian:Wonderful.
Brian:and, and the other one was about decipher.
Brian:Correct.
Brian:The first party data, product.
Brian:So let's go through those because I think it can really give like a good roadmap about how you're seeing.
Brian:Your business, evolved because I always bug you about why you guys are not gonna get overrun by AI because we're not Yeah, because you're not, not because you're not dependent on search, et cetera.
Brian:And we'll get into that.
Brian:But explain to me on the product side, why are those like three priorities?
Neil:So you, you have to like, you gotta to like zoom out a little bit for context and.
Neil:One thing we've al always known, and those of you don't know, we're we're the old dash, which is one about.com and the Spruce and a bunch of stuff.
Neil:And then we bought Meredith and Time Inc. So we're people and travel and leisure and food and wine and real simple, blah blah blah.
Neil:We're 40 brands.
Neil:we're the biggest publisher in America.
Neil:We might be the biggest publisher in the world, but we can't say that 'cause I'm not from Lu.
Neil:I can prove that.
Neil:We're, we're, we're very big.
Neil:We're, we've six straight quarters of double digit growth.
Neil:We've made $300 million in ebitda, which is profit last year.
Neil:This is all public information.
Neil:and we're really good at this, and we're really good at this 'cause our product team is really good and a number of reasons.
Neil:But 'cause products at the center, it has to be at the center of everything.
Neil:They don't feel like it because if you look at that chart of like who owns things, they don't feel like they own it, but they kind of do.
Neil:and the one thing that we've always known.
Neil:And we've talked about this for 10 years, is that you cannot rely on other people for your success.
Neil:Other people being algorithms or being middlemen, you can partner with them.
Neil:You can exist in, in, or like fish in the sea where like you're totally symbiotic, but when they change their mind and they don't need you, it's not, it's not, their fault.
Neil:It's your fault.
Neil:Like you have to know that.
Neil:So what we've known for a really long time is what we need to do is we ultimately need direct relationships.
Neil:With users, which we have all the tools to do these amazing brands, we have huge audiences, and you need direct relationships with advertisers.
Neil:Otherwise, people are going to get between you and your people and you and your money.
Neil:That is because contrary to any narrative, media is a great business.
Neil:I. It like building audiences by making cool things and selling ads or doing transactions when done well.
Neil:Look at Google.
Neil:It is an unbelievably profitable, sustainable, long-term business, so that's why there's so much fighting over it now.
Neil:It changes all over the place, but what we've had to do Adjust and constantly adjust.
Neil:And the thing that we talk about all the time is you can't be sentimental.
Neil:You cannot care what worked yesterday because it doesn't matter.
Neil:The universe could not care less that your print magazine made $200 million 10 years ago.
Neil:It doesn't give a shit.
Neil:The, the, the universe does not care at all that, that oh one oh website that had incredible engagement that you made, that worked really well three years ago.
Neil:Engagement's declining and no one's using anymore.
Neil:The universe doesn't care.
Neil:Your job is to make things people love and get them in front of people in ways they want them.
Neil:And that's what we've been really focused on.
Neil:So,
Brian:and to extract value
Neil:and obviously to extract value, but, but if you build I've been saying this to you for a long time.
Neil:If you build great products and you have great audiences, you can extract value in a way that nobody minds like it's not.
Neil:It's the, the money, this is gonna sound stupid, but the money part is easy.
Neil:If you get the audience part's hard and then you can figure out the money part, it's gonna be different all the time.
Neil:We make a huge percentage of our money now from like transactions and commerce.
Neil:We didn't make any from it seven or eight years ago, but you, you have to be very flexible.
Neil:So what we've been really focused on and done a really good job on is diversifying where people come from.
Neil:And the knock on us for a really long time is, oh, these guys are just content engineers and they're good at Google and.
Neil:That was absolutely accurate.
Brian:Well, yeah,
Neil:and, and, but at the time when Google was all the traffic on the internet, if you weren't good at Google, you were an idiot.
Neil:That's like your only job.
Neil:Like be good at Google.
Neil:So we were really good at Google when we put Dodge Dash and Meredith together, which is like three years ago, 60% of our audience came from Google search.
Neil:Right now it's about 33% and we've grown audience.
Neil:Oh, is it?
Neil:Every quarter.
Neil:Since then.
Brian:And when you, when you took o when before when it was about.com, right?
Brian:It was like 80 plus percent.
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:I don't, again, I can't go back that far, but yes, it was a lot.
Neil:It was the, whether it's 70 or 80, doesn't matter.
Neil:It was the vast majority.
Brian:Yeah.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:And but so the world's changing and we're changing along with it.
Neil:So what we got really focused on, and we get specific, is people, when we bought Meredith, we, we, we had a lot of work to do to,
Neil:We have a whole new team who's amazing.
Neil:Leah Wire, Charlotte Trig's, a whole bunch of people, and we, we got it humming on the web.
Neil:We got it humming on mobile.
Neil:We grew an asset that everyone thought couldn't possibly grow anymore, and we knew that we needed an app, we wanted an app, but we didn't want to do what everyone else does, which is just like.
Neil:Why are we gonna drop our website into an app?
Neil:Who cares?
Neil:The mobile web, super profitable.
Neil:We don't wanna do that.
Neil:It took us a while to figure out what to do, and our product team led an amazing effort that we called a moonshot effort.
Neil:That said, whole new team segregate them.
Neil:I think there's like 50 to 75 people on it right now.
Neil:All they do is this.
Neil:We're gonna make the definitive effort this space, and it's gonna function like people want to consume this kind of like entertainment content.
Neil:It's gonna work like TikTok, it's gonna work like Instagram.
Neil:We're gonna make content specifically for this.
Neil:This isn't repurposed other content.
Neil:It's got its own room.
Neil:and it's doing unbelievably well.
Neil:Like engagement on this thing is like three or four, five x what engagement on the web is.
Neil:And it's like we just started, we've barely started marketing it yet, and it's, I think it might be the best thing they've ever built and it's gonna be a huge success.
Neil:And I know that people who've looked at it, their response has always been like.
Neil:Oh my God, I can't believe you guys made this.
Neil:And, but that's the wrong response.
Neil:We've been making amazing things for a long time.
Neil:We just finally made an amazing thing in a context that lent itself to like making something really interactive.
Neil:People.
Neil:Well,
Brian:you've been making web web pages for a long time.
Brian:For a long time, yeah.
Brian:Yes.
Brian:Tell me about the future of making webpage.
Brian:That's, are you gonna be making web pages in five years?
Neil:Yes, a hundred percent.
Neil:We're making magazines still, so of course we're gonna be making webpage.
Neil:But like everything, you have to be completely non sentimental.
Neil:And the way that, the article page looks now with whatever you would put on it, you know, like headline share tools, title words, picture, maybe video and like shitty research thing at the bottom.
Neil:Like, like, like foot.
Neil:Like that's not tasteful Content Recommendation network.
Neil:That that, that was for a really long time for us in particular, like a desktop or, or, or visit to that for us was gold.
Neil:Like that is the single most valuable visitor you can get.
Neil:Unfortunately, it's still a great asset, but it's a declining asset.
Neil:So you're like full innovator dilemma here, right?
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:We need to manage this because we have multiple declining assets.
Neil:We have tons of declining assets, but we have tons of growing assets too.
Neil:Okay.
Neil:But that's the thing, if you're a media business and you don't have growing and declining assets at the same time, you're not doing it right.
Neil:Like, it just how the world works.
Neil:I, I wish,
Brian:yeah,
Neil:we could lock media in place.
Neil:We do so well, but I don't know.
Neil:so, so anyway, always realistic.
Neil:So what we're doing and what you're gonna see from us is, so we've got these, our fourth project has to do with absolutely rethinking.
Neil:What that page looks like.
Neil:A fundamental rethinking and literally the five or six people sitting right there are doing it.
Neil:rethinking the article page, what that looks, the article page and what the article page will look like.
Neil:And is it more feed like?
Neil:Is it more swipey?
Neil:Is it more what we're gonna see?
Neil:Like how do you take advantage of the medium in which people look at article pages, which is by and large the same medium that look at TikTok, but make it.
Neil:Well, 'cause again, the article reading experience is not the same as the social reading experience, right?
Neil:People want informa, so it's, you have to get it all right.
Neil:And I'm very confident that the way pages look on the internet is not how our pages are gonna look a year from now.
Neil:I just have no idea what that's gonna look like.
Brian:Do you have any hints like, about what it will be?
Brian:Because I mean, I guess when we see where people are gravitating to, I just think about like, also expectations.
Brian:Two things because I always ask people sports, I'll give two things that are both sports to look
Neil:at.
Neil:Yeah, they're both.
Neil:Sports is the, I read people and I read sports.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:ESPN when you get to an article, basically functions almost like an infinite scroll.
Neil:They do a really, really good job of it.
Neil:It's super simple.
Neil:It's clean.
Neil:You don't even know you're doing that.
Neil:That's a really good data point.
Neil:The other data point is if you are a baseball fan and I'm a Phillies fan, like
Brian:yeah,
Neil:they do these game wrap up that are essentially.
Neil:it's, it's almost like a, it's like an Instagram story of a whole baseball game.
Neil:Clip, clip video, and, and you get to scroll through it and it's right on the web and it's amazing.
Neil:That's cool.
Neil:I want content that way.
Neil:I don't mind that there's ads in the middle, like, this is cool.
Neil:I want content this way.
Neil:I don't mind that there's ads in the middle.
Neil:We're like, oh, those are two really interesting things that we should look at for.
Neil:I'm not sure recipes or food content are any different.
Neil:I'm not sure home design content's any different.
Neil:I'm not sure health content's any different, but we've gotta figure it out and
Brian:yeah,
Neil:we have to know that like being married to what we're doing, we're will die.
Brian:We're dead.
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:But it seems like two dominant modes right now.
Brian:Are the chat interface, like, because that is becoming normalized.
Brian:I think the more people use these tools, like your partners at OpenAI with chat GBT, the more they get used to a chat interface and then the TikTok interface, you know, and, and I think the feed is like yesterday's.
Brian:well
Neil:again, I think a feed, A feed and a TikTok interface are the same thing.
Neil:And, and they're different.
Neil:They're cousins.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:look, I, all, all I know is the form factor of a magazine for us is still really profitable and really successful.
Neil:So you just have to get the right form factor for the right audience and the right type of content you have, like very well, which is a very serious health site where people read about cancer diagnoses.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:Is gonna look different than better homes and gardens is gonna look different than people.
Neil:Right.
Neil:And, but you have to like, you have to set up very well to be.
Neil:A different consumption experience than if you're trying to like, find ideas for a new bedroom.
Brian:Yeah, fair enough.
Brian:so when you, like, talk to me about the recipe, what you're doing there with recipes, because you know.
Brian:I, I used to joke that like one of your great achievements was making a recipe page that wasn't like awful.
Brian:thank you.
Brian:It didn't need a jump to recipe button.
Brian:I think the biggest failure of the last generation of the open web was the fact that the jump to recipes button existed to be clear.
Brian:Do you know why that happened?
Brian:That is because of Google Set, set up the incentives.
Brian:You don't want it either.
Brian:Nobody, and they respond.
Brian:You respond to the incentives.
Brian:I get nobody won it.
Brian:I hate the game of player.
Brian:Very defensive.
Brian:I know it's okay.
Brian:I'm very defensive about it.
Brian:This is a safe space.
Brian:Jump rest people.
Brian:It's a
Neil:very safe space.
Neil:Um, so the, the one of, the things we, we did when we put this company together is we've, for a really long time believed, food and, branded cooking, branded food on the internet is.
Neil:An incredibly overlooked, unbelievably valuable area.
Neil:And from the time we were buying up little sites to the time we bought Meredith, we bought sleep of the recipes.
Neil:We bought cereal seed, we bought food and wine, we bought our recipes, we bought all these things.
Neil:We're now, if you believe comScore, between 40 and 50% of the recipe traffic on the open web goes to one of our sites.
Neil:and we have everything from the highest end recipes at food and wine to.
Neil:Mac and cheese on our recipes to like total Brooklyn food on Serious Eats and it's amazing.
Neil:And one of the things that we, that people have been trying to do for a long time is the old school recipe locker.
Neil:Right.
Neil:The, your grandma's little box of your recipes in it.
Neil:Yeah, we're just going to do it online.
Neil:We now have all the scale across all these properties and all these brands to do it.
Neil:So we launched something called My Recipes, which is an old domain we had, and we pivoted it to be That is your recipe locker where you're gonna be able to save what you want, sort it.
Neil:Recommend things.
Neil:It is the most 1.0 idea ever.
Neil:And it is crushing because no one's doing it.
Neil:'cause no one's been able to do it because all the recipes have been in a million different places.
Neil:And there's some cool apps that do some very clever things, but they're a little more for like, like really advanced.
Brian:Well, the New York Times has that.
Neil:Yeah, but that's just in the New York Times.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:Like we're, we're literally the New York Times.
Neil:Whose food is stuff is incredible that like, I use it, I love it.
Neil:It's like the tiniest sliver of the market.
Neil:Like New York Times food appeals to 30 zip codes in America, use New York Times food, the rest of America uses all of our stuff and they use New York Times food too in those zip codes.
Neil:so it's been amazing.
Neil:We, we have a really big head start on this 'cause all recipes had a very big recipe locker and our recipes is by far the, yeah.
Neil:Largest food site in the world.
Neil:And you, you can see how this would like evolve and roll into like app form and into other things.
Neil:But it's another way that we can connect directly with users, give you a reason to come back, and there's all kinds of privileges and services you get for being a
Brian:member.
Brian:But like some, like your recipe content must be very heavily SEO, like more than your 33%.
Brian:I would think that that would index far high.
Brian:Again, it depends on the site.
Brian:Some sites, yes.
Brian:Okay.
Brian:Less sir, but all recipes, I would think it was like 75%.
Neil:Any site that is the scale of all recipes is impossible to be that big without an amount of Google traffic.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:Right.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:So it's, it's big, but it's not as, we don't like giving out, I'm not supposed to give out percentages site by site.
Neil:It's not as much as you'd think though.
Brian:Okay.
Brian:but I would think, and I understand for certain instances, but like recipes to me.
Brian:Are what, like AI is coming for recipe
Neil:is the one thing that AI can't do right now.
Neil:Cannot it?
Neil:Can you?
Neil:Cannot?
Neil:I have cooked with that.
Neil:I know you can, but like by and large, AI right now cannot, you cannot make a recipe by amalgamating and mushing together six other recipes.
Neil:It doesn't work.
Neil:It just doesn't work.
Neil:Right?
Neil:And generally speaking, not you and this, this is gonna get better.
Neil:People don't trust AI for a recipe when they can go to.
Neil:Name, the brand they trust or the brand they love.
Neil:So we are obviously trying to get in front of that.
Neil:we have not seen any AI creep into our recipe business at all.
Neil:we actually.
Neil:Entertainment around people and like beauty style, entertainment and food are our fastest growing categories right now.
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:So that's the content and that's the distribution.
Brian:And I wanna get into the monetization piece on two levels.
Brian:One is, is decipher.
Brian:So you're moving into becoming basically an ad tech player too.
Brian:I mean, you're opening up, your past did moved.
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:So you've moved into becoming.
Brian:Your own ad tech player.
Brian:Now you developed decipher as a first party data targeting tool.
Brian:Yes.
Brian:Normally a publisher would use that just as a competitive advantage in the market.
Brian:But you're also now going to be going out beyond, I mean, you're a massive publisher.
Brian:Yes.
Brian:But this is going to Well, open web.
Brian:Be the open web.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:So very quickly decipher is for us, almost all of our brands are some sort of like old school service publishing.
Neil:So.
Neil:we, we really know what you're doing.
Neil:We know that if you're on an article that says, I wanna paint my kid's bedroom, my newborn's bedroom, we know you obviously just had a kid that helps targeting.
Neil:We know that you need to go to Home Depot or Lowe's.
Neil:We know you probably need a car, probably need a credit card, may need a new house.
Neil:These are all really good things to know.
Neil:So when credit card company targets us, we can then put their ad on this.
Neil:Why, what code do I pay at my kids' room?
Neil:And it performs way, way, way, way, way, way, way better than cookie targeting.
Neil:And we figured this out a long time ago, and we created this product called Decipher.
Neil:To commercialize this, you could target across our own sites.
Neil:Right now, decipher is part of, more than half.
Neil:Of our premium sold deals, deals that have decipher targeting in them are on average 60% bigger than our other deals, and those clients are growing much faster slash renewing more than normal client.
Neil:It totally works and we guarantee it.
Neil:We'll, we'll do full make goods if we don't beat whatever other targeting or doing, and we don't need cookies, we don't need individual identifiers.
Neil:What we then realized is, well wait a minute again, we gotta get closer to our advertisers, and there's a million people between.
Neil:Us and our money.
Neil:Why can't we help advertisers?
Neil:We have more first party data than anybody in that I can think of, but it's not first party data based.
Neil:First everything's first party data is like, I know what kind of glasses you have.
Neil:It's not it.
Neil:I just know what you're doing When you're on that kind of content.
Neil:I don't need to know who you are.
Neil:So we can go out and look at the other 250 sites we think are premium map every page, compare it back to our pages.
Neil:Find which one it's the most similar to, and then ads on that page are gonna perform just like they do on our page.
Neil:And they do.
Neil:So we can now go out for advertisers and say, well, you're paying a 15 CPM to advertise your tomato soup across all of our tomato recipes.
Neil:Mm-hmm.
Neil:We want to get tomato soup recipes across the rest of the internet.
Neil:We charge eight bucks for that.
Neil:We take their eight.
Neil:We go out, we buy it for four, we package it, we give it them for eight, and we're off to the races.
Neil:So it's a managed service, DSP, basically.
Neil:And we just hired a guy named Jim Lawson who ran Advent, many of you know, a big DSP that was very much based not on cookies.
Neil:To come in and run it for us.
Neil:And it's early, early days, but so far so good.
Neil:I mean, you get to take the first party data signals that are super real time from all these brands you love and trust and use them to target the rest of the internet.
Neil:And it does way better than cookies.
Neil:So it's, it's actually a fairly easy thing to explain to people.
Brian:So that's like a big bet.
Neil:It's a huge
Brian:bet.
Brian:That's our biggest bet right now.
Brian:Okay.
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:And so the other thing that I was interested in, I've, I've bugged you about this before, is licensing.
Brian:Because what I wonder, I was, I was bugging Dr. John about this last night, John Roberts, and I was saying, won't, don't you think a lot of publishers are gonna be wholesalers?
Brian:in that like, instead of like in a retail business, you're wholesaling to to, to basically aggregators and that like.
Brian:You're now licensing is a growing part of your business because you have a deal with open ai.
Brian:I know nothing is new in media.
Brian:You've had licensing revenue before in in the magazine business, but it seems pretty clear with a lot of these AI engines and with the amount that they're pinging sites that the business models could possibly change to where.
Brian:A lot of content is just being fed on a licensing basis to these centralized nodes, because that's where all the distribution is.
Brian:And that you will then be feeding those engines.
Brian:You are feeding, chat UBT, correct?
Brian:Correct.
Brian:Okay.
Brian:So like, is that going to become like another, like a big part of the business?
Brian:Um,
Neil:so.
Brian:Uh,
Neil:we did a deal with open ai.
Neil:Yes, either some people think it's the smartest deal and some people think we're idiots.
Neil:I think it's smart.
Neil:We, you, you, we wanted a seat at the table with these guys.
Neil:They helped us develop decipher.
Neil:We're we're helping them really develop their search product.
Neil:We're very close engineer.
Neil:They've been a great partner.
Neil:we obviously are very active and, and very aggressive and may or may not be more aggressive at like, protecting our IP rights.
Neil:Like you can't take our stuff and compete with us unless you pay us for it.
Neil:Everybody else is doing that except open ai.
Neil:But that's a whole nother.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:Panel to talk about, whether or not we're like a, here's the thing, like they have our data anyway.
Neil:Like all these guys in this current administration, current environment, every scraper, every, they've lie.
Neil:They put a different, like everybody has all of your content anyway.
Neil:Mm-hmm.
Neil:It's too late.
Neil:It's not like the Netflix argument we're like, oh, well, studios licensed their content to Netflix.
Neil:Then Netflix get their lunch.
Neil:What a bed.
Neil:We didn't choose.
Neil:They just took it all.
Neil:So like we have to figure out how we're gonna exist in the future from here.
Neil:And there's a lot of guys trying to figure out how we'll maybe we can protect from these crawlers.
Neil:And there's some clever things going on, but it's how do we exist these, Dr. John said, paper crawl, the only, the only, right.
Neil:Could be.
Neil:The only thing that we we have is we have brands, we have trusts, and we have experiences.
Neil:And if we're really good at those, we'll be fine.
Neil:So far we've been more than fine.
Neil:We've been great.
Neil:And if you look at our financials.
Neil:Licensing for us is not that.
Neil:It's a very small, small right piece of it.
Neil:Licensing for us is Walmart and Dillard's and all these places that use our brands.
Neil:We make real products and we sell them in their stores.
Neil:That's the more traditional licensing we're talking about.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:But content licensing's never been a huge thing for us.
Neil:Like I know it hasn't been, but that is what you're doing.
Neil:it could be.
Neil:Yeah.
Brian:Yeah.
Neil:And like we'd like this one deal.
Neil:It'd be great if we had eight of them, but we don't, we have one of them,
Brian:so
Neil:I don't
Brian:know.
Brian:We'll, we'll, we'll see.
Brian:We got a couple minutes for questions.
Brian:any questions for Neil?
Brian:yeah, I think Mark has one.
Guest:Um, quick question on, you mentioned all recipes and you know, cha PPT can't replicate recipes.
Guest:but then you said like they're crawling your data anyway.
Guest:So how do you kind of square that circle if all recipes content is already sucked up by chat GPT or open ai?
Guest:Why isn't that a threat?
Neil:All recipes, data is already sucked up by chat GPT and open ai.
Neil:Yes, correct.
Neil:it's definitely a threat.
Neil:if they start replicating our, recipes wholesale, which they haven't done to date, but they could really do whatever they want, that wouldn't be great.
Neil:As of now, no one has really.
Neil:Found a recipes thing that has any traction, but you could say that about any single part of our business that some LLM is taking.
Neil:Again, it's up to us to, can we connect directly with users?
Neil:Can we make things that are really appealing or brands matter?
Neil:Does does, like people love and trust food and wine.
Neil:They love and trust Serious Eats.
Neil:They love and trust our writers.
Neil:They love and trust our creators.
Neil:If they do, we're good.
Neil:If they don't, then they're gonna go useche, GPT for it and.
Neil:That's incumbent upon us to make sure they don't do that.
Neil:But yeah, it, we can't sit around all day like hand wringing and staring at our belly buttons, like, oh my God, oh, someone stole all our content.
Neil:Wo is us.
Neil:What are we gonna do?
Neil:We're gonna actively try and do things that play to our strengths, that give us like a real chance, and that's what we're doing.
Neil:Or trying to do at least.
Brian:Okay.
Brian:Other questions?
Brian:It's a good question though.
Brian:I mean, it's the obvious question.
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:What do you think about like, sort of single site like AI tools?
Brian:Like, I mean, why wouldn't you just have like an all recipes, like AI menu bot where I'm like, okay, I have, I have these ingredients.
Brian:Give me an idea.
Brian:I mean, this is how I would use ketchup.
Neil:We, we, we might, we could, but.
Neil:That's the, the current human behavior around recipes on the internet.
Neil:It's not that.
Neil:So we've played around, you can build some of these things.
Neil:Just because you build something doesn't mean anyone's gonna use it right.
Neil:In some way.
Neil:So I don't think the world's necessarily ready for that exact application, but.
Neil:They're getting there.
Neil:You gotta do the mom and dad test.
Neil:You gotta talk to your mom and dad.
Neil:You gotta talk to your normals back in Philadelphia.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:And see how they're using the internet doing these things.
Neil:And you're like, you need to be slightly ahead of them.
Neil:When, when you operate at our scale, you need to be slightly ahead of them.
Neil:There are people who, there's a hundred apps and a million things to do that right now.
Neil:Yeah.
Neil:Put all the ingredients in my cabinet in this thing and make a thing.
Neil:You can definitely do that, but no one
Brian:does.
Brian:Talk to me about that with the sort of product when you're studying your product priorities.
Brian:Right, because like you have to think about like where things are going obviously in like five years, right?
Brian:And it is hard in this 'cause maybe it's three years, right?
Brian:But a lot of this stuff doesn't show up in the numbers.
Brian:Right.
Brian:It's like tariffs.
Brian:Right?
Brian:The tariffs have not shown up yet.
Brian:Right.
Brian:Necessarily in the numbers, but they're coming for sure.
Brian:And I almost feel that way as a lot of times with user behavior when it comes to these AI tools because you have like the reality, which is like.
Brian:I, I didn't listen to it, but I did, I did read the, the transcript of your call.
Brian:You don't, it's, really boring.
Brian:I assume it was similar you to it, experience listening, but, the, but like, you know, like there's this disconnect where you're being like, no, AI overviews.
Brian:It's not, hasn't cratered like our traffic at all like this, but it's very clear that Google is going in a completely different direction than what.
Brian:Its previous role was, which basically dictated how the open web operated a hundred percent.
Brian:And
Neil:what, what I would, my point I would make to that is if you are a publisher, and I'm sitting here and I just realized that right now I'm an idiot.
Neil:Like we've this crew over here, us, we've known this for the longest time and it gets to.
Neil:Again, we're, this is gonna come back and like, we're gonna have a bad quarter and everyone's gonna laugh at this, but like 6% of our traffic to 37% of our traffic and aggregate traffic grew the whole way through that.
Neil:we knew that was coming.
Neil:We've been doing a million small things, whether it's direct traffic or email or all the things that our product team works on.
Neil:Like, to combat that, this is gonna be like, for instance, now look at, look at ai and you can.
Neil:Do this math from the earnings call.
Neil:We'll do math for a second.
Neil:It's really boring.
Neil:It's Google's a third of our traffic, right?
Neil:We have AI overviews on a third of those searches right now, so that's, call it 10% of traffic.
Neil:If those go down by 40%.
Neil:I've just lost 4% of our aggregate traffic.
Neil:Like great, like we have to do what we have to do to build our brands and do our things and like not.
Neil:Run around and blame AI for everything.
Neil:Like AI is not our problem.
Neil:Like your problem is you're not building things that people love and want to connect with.
Neil:Like, do the math, everybody.
Neil:And that's our math.
Neil:Like our math that was laid out for Wall Street yesterday because everyone on Wall Street's panicking too.
Neil:You kinda have to let them know what's going on.
Neil:Well, wall Street hates these businesses.
Neil:I don't say they hate them.
Neil:I would say that we don't nec again, I, I can't.
Neil:Comment on how they, but we don't, definitely don't trade at like the earnings multiple of Nvidia, but like, but we're, but it does, they don't hate us.
Neil:Like in a very good market, a media business like ours will trade at 12 to 15 times cash flow.
Neil:And in a bad market, you'll trade at seven or eight.
Neil:And if you're bad at it, you'll trade at four.
Neil:And if you're really good at it, you'll trade at 20.
Neil:And that's how it works.
Neil:And the flip side of that is if you, these businesses are really good.
Neil:They're really high margin, they're really durable.
Neil:Brands are really amazing.
Neil:Like, we we're very profitable.
Neil:Our margins are very high.
Neil:Like, you have to take advantage of that.
Neil:And that's the other side of that argument.
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:Do you like internally say that we should prepare for Google Zero?
Brian:We literally, what, what do we call it?
Brian:Zero.
Neil:Ah, there you go.
Neil:Well, we, we, we've actually, I'm on the side, did tell you that.
Neil:No, I'm looking at the, uh, our plan for this year, our little internal plan, and our friends at Google got mad at us.
Neil:We called it Google Zero.
Neil:What does this look like?
Neil:If Google goes to zero for us?
Neil:Google zero.
Neil:Zero everywhere.
Neil:Zero ad demand, zero traffic, zero everything.
Neil:If we are Google zero, what do we look like?
Neil:I mean, at 30% of traffic, it still doesn't look great, believe me.
Neil:But what better than when you're 75% better than when you're 60.
Neil:Better than when you're 60.
Neil:But we're really focused on, but remember, we're also at, for a lot of you guys we're at Facebook, zero.
Neil:Facebook for the old, Meredith was 20% of their traffic.
Neil:We grew through that too.
Neil:Like that's zero.
Neil:That's gone, doesn't exist.
Neil:Like people, Ew, they were like 20, 25% in Facebook, gone to zero.
Neil:But we grew.
Neil:'cause you gotta, but what no one talks about is like, oh, we can do really well in syndication.
Neil:Like we can do really well in Apple News.
Neil:We can do really well with our own emails.
Neil:We can do really well with Direct.
Neil:We can do all their own apps.
Neil:We can, there's all these other places to find audience.
Neil:We can do exceptionally well on social, we can do well on YouTube, we can do all this stuff Sometimes you just gotta cut bait on what's
Brian:not working.
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:And move to, and that, that's hard.
Brian:So, final question is, I think, and it came up on, on the call about the, the sort of cadence of shipping.
Brian:'cause I think we're gonna be doing a session next about product centric organizations, which does not mean being a technology company, which we've discussed.
Brian:You're not pro publishers who, tell say that they're protected.
Brian:No.
Brian:You should be great at technology.
Brian:Yes.
Brian:Not a creator thereof.
Brian:Okay.
Brian:So product centric and like.
Brian:You know, product companies ship a lot quicker than like publishers.
Brian:And you basically said, we're gonna ship like every, every quarter or something.
Brian:I mean, we
Neil:ship all, we again, we are a publisher, we do publisher things, right?
Neil:And we make beautiful things, compelling things, and hopefully we can have audiences.
Neil:But the only way that we would get to our scale and get to our growth and do what we've done is if we're shipping constantly and constantly changing.
Neil:And, think we're really good at it.
Neil:I like in terms of like people in our peer set, like we're, we, I believe we are head and shoulders.
Neil:This crew here is better than anybody.
Neil:And, I think we compare really favorably to people that ship stuff all the time.
Neil:And if you look at what our business looked like five years ago and what it looks like now.
Neil:Or what it looks like at the time of the Meredith merger and the time of now, it's like it doesn't even resemble what we were doing then.
Neil:The way we make content, the way it was structured, we went from the Meredith guys, like each brand had like one editor in chief who was the commander of all the things.
Neil:Now we have.
Neil:An editor in chief who's in charge of an overall vision, an entirely separate team that does every platform.
Neil:There's guys that do TikTok, guys that do Instagram, guys that do print, guys that do the web, guys that do that.
Neil:And they're totally separate.
Neil:They make different content, they make whatever they want, as long as it's in the vision of this person and you gotta redo your whole product and tech team to work with that and the amount of content we make in this stuff, it just exploded.
Neil:And It is terrifying.
Neil:Like the whole thing is absolute loss of control of, for senior people.
Neil:Like, you just gotta let people do that.
Neil:You can't, like our, our team that runs like Capital P People Magazine is so complex in how they get seemingly not complex content out.
Neil:It's bunkers.
Neil:Like the the Met Gala.
Neil:It's on the app, it's on TikTok, it's on Instagram, it's on the website.
Neil:It's entirely different content and photos and videos for each one.
Neil:Like they're live, they're on the red carpet.
Neil:Some of them are with E, there's EW next to them and they're in LA doing something in the studio like, what is happening here?
Neil:Like, so yes, we're good.
Neil:We're we?
Neil:You have to be good.
Neil:That's like, that's what we do.
Brian:Yeah, exactly.
Brian:Alright, Neil, thank you so much.
Brian:Really appreciate it.
Brian:Thanks.
Brian:Thanks
