Dotdash meredith rebooting

3:55PM Jun 28, 2022

Speakers:

Keywords:

people

brands

work

sites

meredith

media

business

print

advertisers

content

buy

audience

spruce

homes

neil

driven

publisher

traffic

big

ads

We try and avoid keeping clients in the bedroom. We're kind of particularly modern way to do business. So we're not it's not really a thing for us

just going back this is humanistic media Welcome to the rebooting show Riviera edition. I want to thank my friends at origin. In particular Dave Rosner for making room for me at their suite here and can since I basically have unusable Wi Fi at my Airbnb, the South of France stuff isn't all glamour, I promise you. This week I spoke to Neil Vogel, the CEO, dotdash. Meredith Neil has led a remarkable turnaround at what used to be called about.com dot dash broke about tech comm and two vertical brands like very well, life wire and the spruce while adding in smaller brands that have bought, you know, all around the idea of intent media, which is basically service journalism. But more importantly, being there, when people are trying to figure out something to do, whether that's cook dinner, remodel a room for figuring out how to replace a router, in 2021 dot dash made waves as the unlikely buyer of merit of the stable of iconic magazine brands and a $2.7 billion deal. So the company now has assets like people Better Homes and Gardens, food and wine and more. Some of the takeaways that I had from my conversation with Neil is that having a good user experience doesn't have to come at the expense of the business and your immediate business is hard. And I always mentioned how difficult it is to satisfy different constituencies between audience, advertisers and nowadays algorithms to but that dash has proven that you can pull this off and you can have fewer ads, faster sites and better content and still make a lot of money because they're very profitable. The other thing I took away is that print still has an important role. You know, everyone likes to call things dead, but print isn't going to be going away. But it's still not going to be the driver of many media businesses going forward. If run efficiently, it can do an important job of being a statement of the brand, it's not going to be as frequent, and it's probably going to be more expensive too. It does play a role in the future publishing business. Third takeaway is that driving transactions is critical, but maybe not building products. As a publisher. There's a lot of talk about commerce media here and Ken and publishers have seen their commerce businesses as bright spots. dotdash does a large chunk of its business and driving transactions. Yet at the same time, Neil is very cautious and when the discussion turned to actually making products themselves versus passing on the customer, to other companies that do that, and that's because these are pretty much different businesses. So I hope you enjoy the talk. One warning the last five minutes are strictly devoted to the Philadelphia Eagles and their prospects in the season to come. But otherwise, hope you enjoy it.

Neil, thank you so much for joining me. On the show. I'm bummed you're not in Cannes though I'm here in Cannes, I want to thank my my partners at origin for allowing me to to use one of their bedrooms and their suite to record this but you're not here. Why

not? No, this is the first Ken first melon COVID Can I've missed I think in like a decade. We now Own Food and Wine Magazine website home Ed business. We had our big Food Wine Festival in Aspen last weekend. And it was just too much to do both and but I'll be back we'll be back we have a whole continuance that contingent contingent contingency contingent there there aren't it's good evidence or there's some momentum. You know, the the cans in the in the not huge years are always the best ones.

Yeah, no, they actually fall filters the experience of it. Like the I remember the after the financial crisis. It was like, it was a nice Can I mean like, you know?

I mean, I can't exactly say I have FOMO that is not what I am. But it is nice to see clients and do do all

those things. No it all stairs I'm like writing like a piece about this. But like, you know, the one like sort of it's easy to be cynical and can and stuff like this, but it's also sort of bad luck to like, sort of be like, Oh, this is terrible. It's like you're in the south of France. No, it's

it's what do you think it's terrible. You're lying. Like it's not terrible. I in one place, and like, it's really fun.

I'm saying that it's not good to be like that because it's easy to focus on. But I think the one thing that I've like, it's like you think everything's gonna change and COVID and like, you know, God bless the metaverse and stuff like this come to can like humans like connect with other human humans and you know, showing some expense

like don't expensive helicopters, but come to

Yeah, although blade has like, I don't know, like 250 Euro. So think about, I don't know if it's mentioned media link and it's only 200 euros Alright, So Neil, I remember when we it was actually at another one of these type of events. So though it's not as important anymore, it was South by Southwest, you had just joined the, you know, the artist formerly known as about.com. Right. And like we had known each other for years, I had just really joined way back. And I remember going to like breakfast with you. And you told him he was like, well, we cleaned up all these sites and stuff like this. And I nodded, I probably said some nice things. But I was like, this is never gonna work out. We're like,

nice, but you were also you were, most of them were dismissive. It was a great reaction, it was the right thing to

be. And the reason I'm dismissive because I hate when people call me cynical as I'm not cynical and skeptical. It's a professional feature, not a bug. But like, the reason is because the internet is not good with comeback stories. Like I remember when they tried to bring back MySpace and Yahoo is here. They're still trying to bring back my future log. There are no, there are very few if any successful comeback stories. This is actually one, which is congrats. It's remarkable.

Yeah, I mean, thank you. I mean, I think it's a comeback, because we didn't really try and come back, we just started again, which made it easier. I mean, you know, this, I can tell the story, if you want to do it in like 30 seconds. Yeah. But 100 years ago, which feels like 100 years ago, but it was really like six or seven years ago, we're still about.com. Bad about.com For those of you who don't know, was like a general interests website full of random answers to things like help you content, like, in the old days would have been called service content, evergreen content, if you want to call it and it had gotten old and long in the tooth. And it was horrible to us. But some of the content was still really great. And we I came in I was hired by ISC to run it in like 2013. And we spent a couple of years messing around with it, which couldn't get any traction, we were frankly, we were quite bad at it. But the one thing we did learn and being very bad at it was we learned that there was this core of content, like intent driven content that really helped people. And we've talked about this before. But the one thing that kept happening in about.com, that we never understood, because frankly, we were pretty bad is a few really smart really big clients kept giving us money. And they kept giving us money very specifically and where they wanted to go, we couldn't really figure it out. But then we eventually figured out they wanted money because our content helps people and was very down the funnel. So if you're trying to get somebody to go visit your resort, you're trying to get somebody to use your pharmaceutical product, you're trying to get somebody to buy your router, like it makes no sense to be on the content that explains where you should go or why your router is too slow. So using that kernel, we realized that there was no place for general interest website anymore, we took about TOCOM, we had 2 million pieces of content, we threw probably 1,000,006 in the trash. With a four and 1000 remaining, we started launching our own brands and new brands that people have now heard of like the spruce and very well and lifewire. And we launched new sites in health finance, home food, tech travel. And that was all a good idea. Like, you know, let's make brands that resonate each of these verticals as opposed to about.com that resonated with nothing. But as Barry Diller said to us, he was like, You guys have one problem, you know, don't make six or seven problems, it doesn't seem like a good idea. And for those of you who don't know, were we part of IC, which is Barry Diller media holding company. And, but what we did is we also took a look at media at the time, and we thought that was wrong, and it helped. It's no act like we're outsiders, we're not anymore. We're contrary the ultimate insiders. But at the time we were outsiders, we looked at media, and we're like, This is dumb. Like, there's too many ads, these sites are unusable and too slow on mobile, and you got all these problems with algorithms between you and your audiences, you got to find ways to make good relationships with them to understand how to deal with algorithms. So we did something simple, we said, when we make these new sites, we're going to make sites that are super fast. So they work great on mobile, which was a big deal five or six years ago, and still a big deal now, like super, super fast, they're going to be super clean and well designed, we're going to have 30 to 50% fewer ads than any of our competitors. And we're going to spend all of our money on content. So we're gonna end up with the best content to help you with these problems in your life on the fastest sites with the fewest ads. And the bet was, if this works, we're going to have more traffic, our ads are going to be more valuable, and our brands are really going to start to grow. And we'll eventually be able to sell premium advertising. And that's exactly what happened. And we got some traction out of the gate. I mean, the minute we launched our first site very well, it just went up into the right than the spruce wood up into the right, and they all did, and then we start to get some traction, we will well what else can we do here like the one missing part of our formula is we're missing brands, like we're making up our own brands from scratch. We had the arrogance to think like, Oh, we're gonna compete with WebMD or oh, we're gonna compete with Better Homes and Gardens. And we did, frankly, because we were better at the internet than these guys were. So we took share, took share took share, but no one knew who we were. And you'd argue that like, right now, because we know a lot about Better Homes and Gardens because we own it now. Eight times as many people search on Google for Better Homes and Gardens as the spruce yet the spruce has twice as much traffic. So like we were good at this. So then we went out and we started to make small acquisitions and brands like Birdie and brides I'm serious eats and simply recipes. And we ran our plays in our playbook on brands that people kind of knew, or brands that had like really niche footholds. And those like all worked. And we're like 13 for 13. With brands, we launched brands we bought. And then we've been working a lot with ice. And we took a business that was probably, again, this numbers are all public it was, we went from 50 million in revenue to trending towards 300 million in revenue and trending towards 100 knee. But I think our last before we bought marathon like at somebody, but from losing, we were losing 20. But don't start. And so we basically made $100 million

a year, you can see you can make money in media turns out,

yeah, it's not that hard. But here's the thing. Anybody who thinks they're going to reinvent the rules of historical media, like don't give them money, you're not going to like media is super simple. Collect and serve audiences that are valuable, make yourself valuable to them, deliver them to advertisers, partners and marketers in a way that works for your audience and your marketer. That's it. Like all the other nonsense, like any publisher that tells you they're a tech company, like run for the hills, like they're not like, you may be very good at technology. And we're very good. We've got hundreds of engineers, and we're awesome at it. But it's all in service of being a media business and a publisher, and we get paid by selling ads, and we get paid by sourcing transactions for people. We're going to do that. So go back, going back to the story. The summer, we had the opportunity to read, really looked at Meredith for a very long time. And we originally broke up about.com and two brands, we basically took Meredith and on a wall, dissected it, all of their properties, all their templates, every single thing that they did, and we're like, well, we need to beat this, like, oh, we think we can beat that. And we did the same thing to a bunch of other media companies, too. And then we ended up building a better web product, which is the only reason why are we work because our brands aren't nearly as strong as theirs. So this summer, a series of things happened to Meredith that made it available to buy. And we went back to IC to Joey Levin and to Barry Diller. I mean, it was a fairly short conversation, it was like we need $2.7 billion to buy something that is three times four times our size, because it's the best brands in the world that have been cloaked as print brands, but they're really digital brands. If you look at the revenue and how they make money, it's a good digital business. And we think if we did this with Bertie and the spruce, imagine what we can do with people in Better Homes and Gardens and real simple and Southern Living and all these brands. And that make a long story short, we bought it. That was six months ago. We're now like the biggest publisher, maybe the big publisher in the world now online and print. The vast, vast, vast majority of our profitability is online. But the print is a huge key to branding and a really interesting part of the mix. We've actually really like. So now we're here five years ago, six years ago, we're $50 million, losing $20 million. We were about.com We had no future. And now we're in

July, it was very sad to leave that breakfast and be like, Man, I hope you could still go back to the web these

look like this. The best part about this story isn't the same crew like Tori Brangham, Alex Ehlers and Tim Quinn, these names some people in the industry now, like we were the same guys that were here when the sucked. And we worked it, we got it together. And a combination of we had a good idea that worked. And then we had ICs, press your bet mentality and balance sheet. And now we're here. Yeah. And it's been really fun. But

the point I want to talk about a little bit is like creating that like virtuous cycle, because I think everyone wants to write particularly modern digital publishing. A lot of times you're working against yourself, right? Like, you have to choose which side you're going to please like, are you going to please the audience, right? You're going to have a clean, fast loading website? Are you going to please your customers? Who are often the advertisers, right? Like, are you gonna please the the algorithms and you're trying to please all these different people. And I think what becomes very clear is, if your business model isn't right, you're not gonna be able to please, you're gonna have to make

100%. But let's break that into two buckets. So audiences and algorithms are one bucket and customers, advertisers are the second bucket. And this is something we say internally all the time. And it's not true. But we say at first, that it's, we do not care about money, money doesn't matter. The only thing that matters to us is that we build really big, intent driven audiences, right? You got this intent, where they're cooking dinner for their family, they're dealing with diabetes, like they're doing something very specific that you know, their intent, you don't need cookies, you know exactly what they want to do. We can do that at scale. And we can do it in a branded environment that's trusted. If you can make really great content on a really fast site that is going to cause you to be unable to do a lot of things for advertisers they want you to do, you're not you're not going to be able to do a lot of stuff programmatically. You're not going to have to do some stuff premium, but that's totally fine. Because when you build really Big responsive audiences. And all on all deduct our sites, every ad is 70% viewable or better people need you. And what you can do is you can then work with advertisers and sponsors and say, Look, we're not going to do that, because it doesn't work our model, but we can do this instead, it's never know, it's always like, no, but so our focus is 100% audiences algorithms, and then secondarily, customers. Now, it turns out that customers actually loved this. And I think our numbers bear that out. They, we know what makes our sites tick. We know what makes them work, we know what people respond to. So that's put us in this place where yeah, we're not gonna let you do like a pop up and a takeover and a nine minute long pre roll. But we know exactly what works in our sights. And it's it really works. Yeah. So but it also makes you way better programmatically.

Yeah, so like, I think that's what's interesting is that, like, you know, there's always been this, you know, being here in Canada is always been this, like, weird divide between, like, remember, like, like, like, above the line and below the line, right? And like, you know, for a while, I mean, people still say that. No, that was the that was always the sort of, but now, like, you know, now that direct marketing has been totally new what that meant. It meant direct and meant, like direct globalen was direct, direct marketing, right? It was like that.

made no sense that somehow you let direct marketing people pay you less, because they were direct marketers, but

I don't remember. Yeah, no, but like, you know, whatever. It's like the TV people that are calling their commercials films like to be like, direct mail guys, that's not like real. But what I think is interesting in the internet, because like, you know, direct marketing was I used to write for DM news, like I, you know, after the.com bubble like I, I learned the direct marketing industry, I'm like, these people are very sensible, and like, they apply data and smart ways. And if something's working, they do more of it. And if something's not working, they don't do it. And it's like, very logic to

them. Like direct mailers are the true first began, never understood the internet,

but like we like made it into, like the industry made it into performance marketing. And what I think is interesting is, the more I think, in some ways, like the more performance driven that your business model is, the better your user experience has to be like it used to be, if you were in the big image advertising, Vogue and stuff like this, you would have like, that's the best media experience. But if you go to like, for instance, Forbes, go to forbes.com, and have that experience, and then go to Forbes advisor, which has a different business model that is based on performance. And guess what, the site is cleaner, the site loads better, like it's just better. It's not a technology problem, not a technology problem.

So here's the thing, historically, and I think it's been our advantage, they're trying to take these simple concepts and turn them into brain surgery. It's not, it's not like clean messages, fast sights, good experiences, fewer options, and you do way better, like and the thing for us is, we've been doing this now for like five or six years, and it's been out there for everyone to see. And there's a lot of people that have like, tried to knock us off in traffic this but like, the thing is, it doesn't work unless you do everything, you have to make the sides fast, you have to cut down the ad load, you have to increase the value of the content, if you don't do all three of those, this whole thing that we do is not going to work. But you said it, the thing is, there's this historical view, that if you're like a brand advertiser, or for like a direct, you know, performance driven advertiser, that's a totally different experience. It's not it's actually the same thing. It's totally not you might use different tools, different units, but it's and you just said it's the same thing and the same discipline. And when you have a company of 4000 people or 4500 people, whatever we are, forget the exact number. You have to have like simple messages, right? And the simple message that we put forth is best fastest us best content, fastest sites fewest ads and it doesn't specifically specify like what type of ads and if you're helping someone find what credit card to use, that experience is gonna look a lot different than if you're like diagnosis, diagnosing like your tennis elbow, it's going to be a very different thing. But that concept weaves through everything and it gives you like the discipline to know like, how am I going to make decisions here?

Yeah, so talk about like then taking on like, you know, quote, unquote, Legacy brands. Correct. And it's one thing to build a brand for that. Yeah, it's

again, here's the thing like if you look at merited size, you know, look at dotdash sites, the percentages of traffic from sources are very similar so that we were a little bit more Google I think, just because we grew so quickly there. We haven't had a chance to like our brands aren't as good so like they have way more direct traffic and email traffic, but like the percentages aren't that far off. It's pretty close. The the most amazing thing about the Meredith brands and what got us so excited is everything we dealt with first we created ourselves. So then, and then we bought a bunch of brands that were that are really interesting brands, but none of them are particularly big and The thing that you have to be on the internet and this is what we learned is you can't be just as good in the win. You have to be better. So if you're gonna win and help, you have to be better than Healthline better than WebMD, better than everyday help better than Mayo Clinic materially, that it's very hard. If you're going to win in food, you have to be better than all the other food sites that are not. So now we are a lot of the food sites now. So we're often competing ourselves, which is fine. But that's what we really learned because we had to overcome this brand hurdle. Like if someone's going to go to very well, for legitimate health problem, we have to be so much better. So someone trusts us. The interesting thing with the Meredith brands, it's so incredible, is they've been doing this for so long, and they're so good, and the content is so good and so trusted. Now, it may not be in the right format that the internet needs. But it's so good, that we've been able to get consumers, email lists, Google Pinterest, everyone is so much more responsive to improvements on these brands, and they ever have been on our brands, just because there's so much more trusted that we get to grow these things, I think it's going to be way faster and way bigger, like there is no logical reason. The spruce is twice the size and Better Homes and Gardens on the internet. It makes no sense.

But isn't it shouldn't be. So I guess, is that like a technology problem? Or is that that they're not creating the right content that is satisfying needs out there? So like, will these brands because we have seen brands that or were legacy brands, and that were taken over? And were turned into basically glorified SEO farms, right, like the brand still has a lot of stuff, I'm just trying to, you know, antagonize a little bit. Yeah. Whatever, you know, you gotta keep it real.

So. So I'm thinking it's fine. So what I mean, the trick with these brands are buying the brands from Meredith, all comes from print, right. And because of the history of Meredith, and how long it's been around, and everything, it was very much a print first place, print drove the bus with everything, and which is great, but I think since we bought it, we were very clear, when we bought print that like we're not the guys that are gonna sell the secular decline in print. However, print has a place to immediately ecosystem that's really valuable. For us. It's branding, it's an expression of like, what a brand feels like, and can be very profitable of size properly. And we've done that we caught a bunch of titles, and we're now down to like these seven titles we really love. The trick that you need to do is not like turn it into a content farm or shopping magazine, that's that. The workflows and work product and use case of these different media things can all exist under a same brand and the same editorial view and be totally different. So let's take I don't know, let's take Better Homes and Gardens, whatever the magazine is for inspiration. It's for stories, it's beautiful, it has pictures, you want it on your coffee table, it comes once a month, it's got a surprise and delight, four and a half million people got that every month. The website is for that, but the website is much more for utility. It's help it's researching a project, it's I want inspiration, it's I want to know how to cook this, I want to how to paint this, it's much, much more. And then there's it's a very different workflow and a very different way you need to structure things like like we may do the spring planting issue and Better Homes and Gardens, like all the things you planted the spring. And then on the internet, you do a giant garden plant library that has 1000s of plants in it. And depending on where you live and your climate, and we'll help you plant stuff. And then on social, that's the entertaining stories that combine these two other things. And the trick is to get everybody working on everything to agree on what the brand is and what the brand means. And let them do their thing. And if you do that, it totally works. If you try and say the digital people are in charge, or the print people are in charge, the social people are in charge. That's where it gets messy. The second thing you have to do is and this is much, much less of a problem now. And it's been amazing how quickly the Marathe people have adopted this is you will have to play ball together. If the digital people and the print people and social people and these people cannot get along, they cannot work here. And it's been really amazing to watch them all, like work together and thrive. And the Better Homes Gardens is the best example like two months ago. It's our it's we got Harry Styles to do the cover of Better Homes and Gardens, which for us was a huge deal and for the Internet and for the world was a huge deal. It was part of showing the world that we're taking Better Homes and Gardens and we're taking it from like the best home making magazine to the best home magazine. That's the transition we're trying to make with it. We've got Harry Styles on the cover, it got like I'm gonna get these number of billions and billions of media impressions. It broke the internet, there's galleries, there's pictures. If we would have done that online, nothing would have happened. But because we did it in print, it was a huge signal. We'd like Drew Barrymore on the Drew Barrymore show saying like, look out Better Homes and Gardens is coming for you now like so. So what print can do is unique and special.

But what did that do? What business results to that drive? I mean, you're used to like you Know you create content and you grind to the RPMs and stuff like this. But is that like, how do you put a value on that

there's branding buyers, there's performance buyers is everything buyers of brands have to feel fresh and new and always do new things. That's the beauty of a brand, the implied trust of a brand and what a brand means you have to clearly communicate to the market. Also, RANS and we see this with Meredith brands and our brands, real brands perform better with users in terms of all the metrics of engagement and how they interact with advertising. brands that you know, perform better than brands, you don't know because people trust them. Right, like, and we've seen at our brands, performance has increased over time, like when we first launched this, Bruce, it was okay, and now it's outstanding. And you see a lot of that. So just really understanding how media works. And knowing that the vast majority of the money you are going to make and properly you're going to have is going to be digitally centric, right? It's going to be gonna be selling ads, you're going to be sourcing transactions, you'll be doing stuff on social, but print as part of the ecosystem for a people a real simple A Better Homes and Gardens, a Southern Living a Travel and Leisure of food. And wine is an incredible part of the mix. And something that like we're straight digital guys, we like print more than printing guys, because like we can't believe we have real assets. We're like, I can't believe we like print stuff that people really love. And I think we have a very different view of it. It doesn't have to be, there's no illusion or expectation that print is like this huge profitable has to grow part of the business. It's not. It has to promote brand. It has to be beautiful. It has to be aspirational. People have to want to have it. And it's really filled with

digital, like, do these brands need to create different kinds of content? Like what I'm guessing is like, how do you? How do you keep the DNA of the brand and not just have better homes and garden with a lot of stuff that looks like spruce. I mean, this verse is great, but like it's different. Like it should, it should have different types of service. Okay.

So let's take people as an example, right? Because we're going very deep on people right now. And what people does it in print what they've done digitally in the past is they do two things. It's the it's like ordinary people doing extraordinary things and extraordinary people doing ordinary things. Let's celebrity and human interest. And what we've learned about how this works is we have an editor in chief who's amazing then blows back and the entire people team now agrees what people it's and it's those things, right? However, the change we've made to people that has been a really big deal and it's really helping us and we have a lot of momentum from it is we have to understand what works in People Magazine is probably content about George Clooney, the Queen and Julia Roberts right on the cover totally works, right? That human interest stories you know, the like rescue cat from tree, I'm not belittling it. They're really amazing stories, but like, I just can't think of a good example. Now then digitally. What works is you know what, not that interested in Clooney, it's like younger, it's a little there. Clooney still works. But it's a little bit more Kardashian in the content. And the content we make is less like long form features and much more quick hit entertainment news, celebrity news, and longer humaniq Talk and Instagram and they're like, who's Julia Roberts. So that ends up being like takes in a million sisters. But what we've the change that we've made is said that the definition of celebrity for people used to be driven by the magazine, like digital reported into print until we bought this. Once we said, okay, let's all agree on what the brand is. And people that know how the internet works and know how social works, can use this brand. For the celebrities and audiences that they're serving. All of a sudden, like the lights came on last month, we had our highest traffic month that people ever had. Now, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard help that a little bit, but we probably would have had it anyway. So it's really just like freeing, understanding what a brand means. And here's the thing, you need to have healthy debate. Right? You can't we're not we don't compensate anybody on traffic. We don't trace Chase traffic. We don't even generally look at individual URLs for tracking. We look at groups and concepts and things like what is working what do people want what algorithms like what humans like and it's been like a fascinating transition

but people is interesting because like never in a million years what I imagined dot dash to have started a people like like I understand it was part of the Meredith like portfolio. But like that was like It's a strange fit to me like we just because like a lot of your business is very intent driven. I do not think I mean, you can stretch the word intent driven however you want to print it, but I don't think

it's not it is absolutely not about call 40% of their traffic is intent driven when you break it down as to what people are reading and doing so 60% not, and it's 70 million uniques a month like it's one of the biggest single like ish topic sites in the world. It's amazing. I think what we loved about it is we've always said we're never gonna do news. We're never going to do sports I can't sell that we don't want to be any part that. But we never said we were never going to do entertainment. The problem with entertainment was the economics are different, right, the traffic is less valuable, it's a little less predictable. It's going to be a little bit more programmatic. Although we have tremendous like entertainment, advertising and brands and advertising there, if we did to people, what we did to our other brands, and again, people had been in the shadow of print for this really long time, that we knew that entertainment could work, if you had scale. There's only really like one or two things, mainly people that has enough scale to make entertainment work. So when we had a chance to look at Meredith, we are initially very skeptical of people like what we don't know how to do this. And it turns out, we actually do know how to do this. It's the same thing we've done for other sites, right? Just a different kind of content. And you're doing it Gail. It's like unit economics are less, but the units are so much more that it totally works. And from a brand sell perspective, being able to include people into deals that are like super performance driven, intent driven down funnel is something that lots and lots of marketers want, right? Like, we our first step at the Academy Awards. And of course, we do all kinds of stuff. We have a whole new management team, they're led by like lead wire, and it's like a row like the all female management team. It's all female matching, they haven't had female leadership, and God knows how long and it's going to be really, it's been actually like,

frankly, you're widening the lane. And I wonder because like we've talked over the years, about like, you know, I will not mention, but you're like I don't know why they're doing news. Like they're not like that's like crazy whenever was like pivoting into news like what again. But I wonder like, because this is like you're getting to service.

What's the word news in that it's entertainment news. But what it is, and what works for us is not so much service, so that we definitely do like service. And again, 40% of this is service. It's defined audience. News has no defined audience and the defined audience for sports is like, dudes. So the defined still 29%

of the population celebrity audience.

Yeah, I know. But it's too broad. You can't, unless you have a giant, you could do sports, if you have a humongous site, and you can make money doing it. Like, that's what people is so big, and so scaled, and look, the other thing, which is not, which is the other thing working in our favor, and like I'll just say it directly, people for whatever it's worth, and it has been run by print people since its inception. So it has gotten to 70 million uniques a month, always playing second fiddle to a print magazine that, frankly, is a way smaller part of the mix. So by putting real digital people in charge and letting the digital have, you know, equal time, if not, the lead slot has changed. Yeah.

Let's talk a little bit about the business model. How important has commerce been because like, I always think about, like how you guys were always very performance driven to me like and in that I don't mean that as a knock, that's good. Because you want to be on the performance side, really, you can add the brand stuff like you know, I think that's wonderful. But like performance gives you a ton of leverage. And I think of commerce as being like the perfect performance, like instead of like, you know, giving it over to someone, it has any changes to me, the mindset of like the pub, the organization to some degree, probably.

So we never, it's like all things we've talked about, we never did like a pivot to commerce, like four or five years ago, when we started to understand what like intent was, we learned from studying our users that if you're on Live Wire, because your router is too slow, there's two paths to take. We're gonna help you fix your router, which never happens because nobody can fix a router. Or you need to buy a new router. And people wanted us to help them buy a new router. So we started to do this, right? The here's the best router, here's the best router for a big house for a small house for you know, under 100 bucks over 100 bucks for your office for your whatever. And that started to work. And before I'm not sure, and now, I think last year between dotdash and Meredith, I'll get these numbers slightly wrong. I think we sent $3 billion of transactions to partners last year, helping you buy the best blender, helping you source, the best brokerage account, helping you do all these things that when you have super fast sites with incredible content, and it's trusted people then want to take the next step. And we do it all with impeccable editorial integrity. And we do it all where there's not a single person who writes any of these reviews that knows anything about how we get paid. We have after the merit of acquisition, we probably have 100 to 100 and 120,000 square feet of product testing space. We have 48 or 49 test kitchens, where we test every recipe that we that we write every like tool and every pot and every pan because we're so big in the food space. Like it has become a huge business for And it's a material part of our revenue. You know, I'm not sure now forget the combination how much it is, but it's probably close to 25 30% of our revenue is from Yeah, helping people decide what transactions to do. And again, it happened very organically. The beauty for us is, it wasn't this thing. We're not like some random news publisher that said, Okay, well, now we're going to tell people, what vacuum cleaners to buy. That's not what we do. We review vacuums spruce, and we review it on Better Homes and Gardens, and we review it on my domain. And, you know, if we're reviewing products on, on our recipes, right, because the audience is different. So we probably have 200 250 people that are just product testing, review writing now. And it's really become a major part of what

we do. But you're also selling products, right? I'm interested in that. Because like, look, we've seen like with food, 52, and a few others, like it, learn a lot of things that sound good on paper, but are really difficult to execute.

So we don't really sell almost everything we do is we send to someone else to sell, we have tried to sell some things ourselves, we tried some stuff@flickr.com. We tried some other small things. And you're right, like we're not. There's a whole secondary thing, when you sell something and everything's you just sell it and it's over. Like the customer service sourcing inventory. Like, we don't know how to do that. And maybe we learn and we can definitely learn and we weren't playing around, you know, we have this amazing cocktail kits@liquor.com that we sold a million, not a million, but like, yeah, a whole bunch of last Christmas. It's an immaterial amount of revenue. But we're learning how to do this. And right now for us in the value chain. It is working much better at let's get the six, whatever home sushi makers, the best ones, let's test them, let's have all the shops do all these things, then let's tell you which one to buy. And then if you click through us, we get paid something that is better for us now then tried to merchandise sushi makers and sell them. Yeah, that's not gonna work.

Yeah, because it's interesting, because a lot of people like want to go down this direction of blurring the lines between media and product, right. And I get it like, you know, it sounds good and presentations and stuff like this. And I'm like other exciting,

you know, like, you i, it is very hard to think of anyone who has successfully. There's no such thing as a mega log there. It has never worked in there. It has never been there are publishers and people who have MIDI assets who are excellent at selling. But they're really two totally separate things. Yeah. So you don't you're not you know, it's not like it's a different audience. Yeah.

So the final thing is just is around like when you think about the business and how it's changed right over,

over last year, we talked about the Eagles here, because a long time,

Brian, first time that we talk about the Eagles every single time I get shit, every time I've had you on a podcast, we were like, We don't want to hear about you. But it is as important. What do you think about like, how the business has changed? You know, is there an area that like, because I know you said like, we're not gonna go into news, we're not gonna go into sports I find a little bit stranger because like, now sports is media is very transaction focused. I mean, maybe that window is closing with sports betting,

I think what I would also say is in I think we saw the landscape in entertainment, where we thought we would compete is significantly more open than the landscape in

sports. Okay, there's a lot of like, but like, Are there any sports is way more competitive? Like, because I think what's interesting, then we'll see how it goes with people. But like, you know, running that playbook on people is totally different than running the playbook on Better Homes and garden. I think, like, maybe it's totally okay, like, but do you think like, that'll give you like, even more confidence to like, you know, to go into a lot of broader areas? Because I mean, you've been like very much.

I mean, that'd be our me, that'd be our worst problem. Like, you know, we generally have lacked for confidence, some times it's misdirection. But you don't maybe, I don't know, we'll see. I think that we actually have our hands full. We're six months in, we haven't done anything yet. We haven't proven to anybody. We've done a million things internally that make us believe our thesis, right, that we think we were totally right with this deal. And there's all these green shoots and things that prove it. But like, we have to go do it now. And I think the one thing for us is if we don't do it, like look, the markets tough now, it might get worse, it might get better, all these other things are going on. But if we don't do it, it's our fault. Like and we really believe that with the things that we know from dotdash. And having to do this ourselves, to combined with these, like incredible brands that we got from Meredith and frankly, the incredible people at Meredith that know how to deal with brands, so we don't we have to learn from them. Like if we don't do this, it's our fault. Like it's not like you're not going to hear us blaming Google or blaming Facebook like it's not their fault. It's our fault if we don't do right and we have I think we have as good a chance as anybody to make a look traditional publishing media business that can stand on equal footing with the Facebook, whatever meadows and Googles of the world, and when you go into an advertiser, and if we can do that, because of this combination of scale, and intent, and brand, we can do that and our size, and we're almost as big as those guys in terms of uniques. Like, we got a puncher's chance to do something really incredible here. And that's what we're trying to

do. Yeah. So like, when on that journey, like, I'm wondering, like, because like, you know, in can now it's like, it's all, everyone's talking about data, like, nonstop and stuff like this. And like, I think everyone's saying, well, now the publishers have more power, because they have first party data. And it's all about first party data, you know, give me your sort of reaction to that. First of all, like, is that real or not?

I mean, I mean, is it real? Is it not real, like, so here's what we have always thought and believed, look, this entire ecosystem built around cookies that is, in that it's at some stage are falling apart, it's probably like two thirds apart. Now, what we've always wanted to do, and even people fits into this, too, is if you're intent driven traffic, like if you land on content for us, that's like, what color do I need to paint my kid's bedroom? My infants bedroom, we know everything about you, we need to know way better than a cookie could ever tell you. We know that you likely just had a kid or take care of your kid. We know that correlates with needing a new car. You know, Carlton, needing a new house, we know Carla has a new credit card we know correlates with paint and furniture, like we're good on target. And the story we have to tell is that beats cookies and beats any of this data and identifiers. And we don't need to know who you are, we seem to know what you're doing. If we can tell that story, we're great. Now, what we've been able to do is, you know, I think we have 30 million user sessions a day across 30 million plus user sessions a day, when you aggregate the behavior of all these people, we know an incredible amount of things. Now, that's first party data. That's how they're performing on our sites. But I don't need to know that you're Brian Marcy, I just need to know that you went to this soak. It's so we get around a lot of these issues. And it's a story we're trying to tell. Now, the question for us is there's a lot of people trying to make other identifiers, like do we play ball with them? Do I play ball with them, you have to do what advertisers want you to do, right? Because it's their money and all of them, you know, like CMOs and agencies and advertisers and this supplier and that supplier, and they're all built around something that is self serving for if you're the CMO and you just spent all this money doing all this like cookie based stuff for the last five years. You don't want to go back to your boss and be like, Oh, dude, I was totally wrong. So we got to figure out how to work with that. But at the end of the day, we like where this is all headed.

Okay, so now we're gonna do five minutes on third off his sports for those of you who are uninterested you can stop listening right now, we're not gonna talk about the Sixers for obvious reasons so we'll just go and I think

I don't want no I don't want PJ no PJs it's too on the nose Stop it so you trade Five Below you what but no PJ,

but like so I think because like you know with Philly sports karma and just excitement like it's gone from you know, excitement about the Sixers to excitement about the Eagles. Personally, I think it's misplaced until they have a new quarterback but I defer to you.

I don't know what my take on hurts. I think we're good. We're good enough. We're good enough. We're not going to only we're not winning anything important, but we're gonna we got to see here's the thing that gives me encouragement AJ brown loves the guy wants to play with a guy now he got a lot paid a lot of money for a lot of money. You might want to play with your friend who's not that good. Because I got a

guy like what was good? What are you kills like in in, in Miami and like to I can hit like the side of a bar and he's like he's more accurate the ball. And that's what he's saying this room is like, it's like South Beach like mansion or whatever. Like, it's like, whatever.

Totally, I liked the defense. I like to pick up Davis also, my son's name is Davis so I can buy a jersey that says Davis on the back. And it doesn't have to be one of those weird custom ones you make and put your own name on the back. So I can add it to like the Anthony Davis Jersey collection, which is very positive for my house. Yeah, um, but I don't have I feel pretty good. Okay, we have a Millennial. Millennial T shirts.

He has. He's, you know, he's planning his seeds and whatever. It's growing and whatnot, but like, so give me the year over under what's the record this year now? There are now 17 games that I was. I know that I always wanted to say tennis six.

What's the busy over under nine and a half? I think so. I take the over I think they went 10 Seven. I think the energy is so horrible. Yeah. Like the commander's karma is terrible. The giants are terrible. The Cowboys are just the Cowboys so that you've got five wins there. And then I think they find five more there's like the Jaguars at home. There's a bunch of weird games. They should be fine.

Okay, we're gonna end on that optimistic she

was looking at the schedule to figure out to figure out which game I can hit someone up for tickets in Philadelphia.

Oh god, you gotta have like, you know, the dot dash dot dash Meredith bought nobody. Hey,

we're on your travels. In your sales have you seen hustle yet? Watch hustle the Adam Sandler movie on Netflix about when did this come up? The Sixers Philadelphia basketball story 1000 Great Philly basketball.

Now I've been in Europe for

a few weeks ago. You got to watch it. It's actually not it's a pretty good movie. It's not like

a little bit more sophisticated.

You wouldn't really want a lot of plates. So watch hustle. You should watch how so it's very good. There's outstanding cameos from like from Julius Erving on down to like Tyrese, maxis, and I watched it with my again my eight year old sound who on like a one to 10s No sevens No 10s You gotta commit six or eight. If you're from Philly, and we're like a bad to mediocre high school basketball player like me. It's a singular act of cinema that I love deeply. The only person who liked it more than me it was my son because like Tyrese Maxey was in it. He's eight and he's like, My son can't separate the fact that like both Tyrese, Tobias Harris are playing themselves. How can this not be real? I'm like, well, it's not had it

was great. But we want to end up we want to add it on an optimistic note. Neil, thank you so much. I'm unclear. Oh, that's cute. That's Tobias does. Fine. If people want to shit on me on the internet, like all day long and someone goes get Twitter and $76 million contract deal. Every day.

That's fine catches you. Tobias is new and he's only got two years left. He might be like a deadline. Chip.

God is good to Tobias. Thank you, Neil. I appreciate it.

All right. Thanks. So that was fun.

Thank you for listening. This week. We will be back next week with a new episode. The rebooting show is produced by pod help us podcasts are a great way to expand your client base. Pod help us lets you focus on having engaging conversations giving your brand the full stack of services needed for a professional look and sound. Start your podcast today at pod health.us