Dotdash in the Digital Age

When Dotdash acquired Meredith in 2021, it inherited a portfolio of iconic but aging brands—PEOPLE, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, among others—at a moment when legacy media was already under pressure. Since then, chief executive Neil Vogel has tried to apply a digital-first strategy to stabilize the business and reorient it for a changing internet.

In a conversation with Status, Vogel reflected on that pivot, explained how his team is preparing for an era of declining search and social traffic, and weighed in on the thorny economics of licensing content to OpenAI. He also offered blunt words for Google’s Sundar Pichai—“stop stealing our content”—and gave an update (or lack thereof) on Josh Kushner and Karlie Kloss’ plans to relaunch LIFE Magazine.

Below is our Q&A, lightly edited for style.

Dotdash Meredith is a legacy outlet, publishing magazines such as PEOPLE, Travel + Leisure, InStyle, Food & Wine, Southern Living, and more. How have you been working to pivot these businesses for the digital age? What's been the biggest challenge?

When we (then Dotdash) acquired Meredith three-and-a-half years ago, the conventional wisdom was that we bought a dusty legacy publisher, but that was not how we looked at it. We actually bought some of the most iconic brands in the world—PEOPLE, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, etc.—but they were not instrumented for the modern media landscape.

Our bet was that we had a fresh, digital-first playbook that, when coupled with these iconic brands, would revitalize them. The plan was to restore their luster by being ruthlessly unsentimental toward the old ways of doing things, and to make content and products that people love. The cultural challenges between the companies were material, difficult, and sometimes funny, but we got everyone to believe.

And we were right. Once we got past the post-pandemic advertising and traffic doldrums, our ideas took hold. We have delivered seven consecutive quarters of digital revenue, audience, and profitability growth. Our brand thesis has come to fruition—my favorite fact is we still print seven monthly and weekly magazines (profitably!), and those properties align with our fastest-growing digital brands.

A lot of your publications are focused on topics—like food, travel, and design—that are facing increased competition from Instagram and TikTok. How do you compete with the entire internet?

The answer is our approach to brands. The foundation of any brand is what it means to people, the emotional connection it has to its audience, or what problem it solves. Once we understand that, we can figure out how we play in any particular medium, or not.

Take PEOPLE for instance. In the old days, the brand was run by a print editor-in-chief, who called all the shots across distribution channels. Everything was command-and-control, non-organic, and not growing. That was clearly not optimal.

So we changed the role of the EIC, and the business followed. Now the EIC (the incredible Charlotte Triggs) sets the overall mission, tone, and goals of the brand. She manages distinct independent teams that determine how PEOPLE will live on the web, on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube, in print, at events, or wherever it plays. Each medium requires drastically different content and products.

It's a radically decentralized content model that initially felt like a huge change, but now just feels obvious, and it's working incredibly well across all of our brands.

Earlier this year, your parent company IAC restructured in a shakeup that saw longtime chief executive Joey Levin exit and Barry Diller take the reins. What are things like with Diller back in the driver's seat?

I love Joey, he is a great leader, and we had an incredible run evolving About.com to Dotdash to Dotdash Meredith.

I feel incredibly lucky to work with Mr. Diller—I love a culture of debate, which is a requirement to be part of the IAC family for almost 12 years. He best describes the experience in his own words—read his book! The hallmark of IAC is we have the autonomy to run the business as we see fit, with a very supportive parent.

You struck a lucrative deal to license content to OpenAI. The deal is sending millions into your coffers. But there is a real worry that A.I. deals like the one you inked could just be a short-term sugar rush that ultimately cannibalizes the business in the long run. How do you make sure this partnership doesn’t undercut your core business?

Our future is our brands—if we can we continue to make content, products, and experiences that users love, want, and find essential we will succeed in any environment. So far so good, the proof is in our results and we are really optimistic about our plans.

We are happy with our OpenAI deal. They see the value in our content and are compensating us accordingly and providing attribution as appropriate. We think it's very important to have a seat at the table as AI products develop, and to be as close as possible to the leaders of those products.

Importantly, OpenAI has helped us improve the quality and reach of our ad targeting product D/Cipher, which uses our volumes of real-time first-party data to target audiences not only on our properties but across the open web, massively expanding our addressable market—D/Cipher performance beats any other ad targeting in the market.

Unfortunately, some of OpenAI’s competitors have not been willing to engage in appropriate economic deals or cooperate in satisfactory ways.

On the topic of A.I., Google is rewriting the rules of search with AI Overviews and other features that will unquestionably cut down on referral traffic. How worried do you believe the publishing industry should be about these changes? What's your message to Sundar?

My message to Sundar is stop stealing our content without payment or attribution.

That being said, we have been calling the phenomenon of Google no longer sending traffic to the open web “Google Zero” for some time, and we have been preparing for this for years.

Just to follow up: Can you share how you are preparing for a world where less traffic comes from traditional search and other distribution sources like Facebook have dried up?

Today’s media ecosystem is neither surprising nor unanticipated. Traffic from Google search represented around 60% of our total traffic at the time we put Dotdash and Meredith together, and it is now about a third of traffic. Facebook was up to 20% of the traffic of properties like PEOPLE and that is now low single digits. Yet through all of this change, our traffic and overall audiences have grown.

We have proven our brands have the gravitas to connect with our users in many ways, from email to Instagram to Apple News to major events (Food & Wine Classic in Aspen is in three weeks). We are laser focused on continuing to grow our direct connections to users, with products like our MyRecipes recipe locker—people don’t realize our food brands account for nearly 40% of the recipe traffic on the open web—and the PEOPLE app, with many more products in the pipeline. A huge part of our job is prioritizing and executing new ideas, and there is no shortage of those.

Before I let you go, I must ask: In 2024, Josh Kushner and Karlie Kloss announced they had struck a deal with DotDash to acquire the publishing rights to LIFE magazine and revive it by early 2025. Obviously that has not yet materialized. Do you know what the status of their plans are?

I really enjoy the time I have spent with Josh, he is incredibly smart. I don’t want to steal their spotlight, you have to ask them.

And finally: In an industry dominated by disruptive change prompting layoffs and belt tightening, what bright spots do you see?

The narrative that all media is doomed is lazy and wrong. Too many people have conflated bad business models with the death of media. In the long term, if you serve valuable scaled audiences, and your brands and products are essential to people’s lives, you can build a durable and very profitable business. This has been true for the last 100 years and will continue to be true. This is what we are doing.

Media looks infinitely different than it did ten years ago, and we know it will look very different 10 years from now. Trying to figure out the future in real-time is the fun part. As Mr. Diller says, you do it by showing up everyday with a plan and putting one dumb foot in front of the other. If you are not optimistic and enjoying it then you’re doing it wrong.

• "I was told anything's good": In an interview with "CBS Sunday Morning," Elon Musk said he wanted to talk about space, not Donald Trump. [Mediaite]

• Lester Holt signed off the "NBC Nightly News," declaring that "facts matter, words matter, journalism matters, and you matter." [The Hill]

  • Tom Llamas spoke to Ted Johnson about taking over as anchor of the "Nightly News." Asked how he can beat the dominant David Muir in the ratings, Llamas replied, "I can’t wake up at night thinking about that question.” [Deadline]

• OAN fired its MAGA-loving Pentagon correspondent, Gabrielle Cuccia, after she had the nerve to criticize Pete Hegseth's crackdown on the press in a Substack post, Brian Stelter reported. [CNN]

  • Barbara Starr blasted Hegseth in an appearance on Fox News, saying his press restrictions are "completely unnecessary" and a result of him being "embarrassed" by leaks. [Mediaite]

• Howard Kurtz—who turns a blind eye to almost all of the incendiary and outrageous commentary that airs on his own network—got Big Mad at Scott Pelley over his viral commencement address, declaring it to be "wildly inappropriate." [Mediaite]

• The "CBS Evening News" bid farewell to news chief Wendy McMahon, calling her a "friend, a guide, and a great supporter of this broadcast." [Facebook]

  • Meanwhile, Max Tani reported that the California State Senate has invited McMahon and former "60 Minutes" boss Bill Owens to testify in an inquiry over whether Paramount has broken the law. [Semafor]

  • And Lesley Stahl spoke to David Remnick in a frank interview about the pressure on CBS News. [New Yorker]

    • On Owens resigning: "When he announced that he was stepping down, it was a punch in the stomach. It was one of those punches where you almost can’t breathe."

    • On McMahon resigning: "Well, she was the intermediary between us and the corporation, and she sided with CBS News. So when she stepped down, that was another blow, because she was another barrier."

    • On if she's angry at Shari Redstone: "Yes, I think I am. I think I am."

    • On the news interference: "To have a news organization come under corporate pressure—to have a news organization told by a corporation, Do this, do that with your story, change this, change that, don’t run that piece—I mean, it steps on the First Amendment, it steps on the freedom of the press. It steps on what we stand for."

• PBS joined NPR and filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration. [NYT]

• Glenn Greenwald said sexual videos of him posted online were uploaded to the web without his consent, but that he had "no embarrassment or regret about them." [Daily Beast]

• Taylor Swift purchased her masters from Shamrock. [BillBoard]

• Shakira canceled another concert due to a "production issue." [Deadline]

• Sydney Sweeney opened up to The Sunday Times, saying that when she is auditioning for roles, she finds "that it’s the women who give me the hardest time." [Sunday Times]

• HBO dropped Jesse Armstrong’s “Mountainhead,” which has a solid 78% Rotten Tomatoes score from critics, but is being roasted by audiences, with a dismal 25% score. [RT]

• Netflix held its "Tudum" event on Saturday in Los Angeles, gathering its fans for an evening in which it made a number of announcements. At the event, the streamer:

  • Shared the trailer for "Stranger Things" season five and said it will drop in three installments, the first on November 26, the second on Christmas Day, and the finale on New Year's Eve. [YouTube]

  • Released another trailer for "Squid Game" season three. [YouTube]

  • Unveiled the trailer for "Happy Gilmore 2." [YouTube]

  • Dropped the teaser for "Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery," which will debut December 12. [YouTube]

  • Confirmed Lady Gaga's role in season two of "Wednesday" and released six minutes of footage. [YouTube]

• Paramount released the trailer for "Deter: Resurrection." [YouTube]

• "Your Friends and Neighbors" creator Jonathan Tropper teased season two of the Apple TV+ series, saying Coop is "never gonna become a criminal kingpin" and go down "the Walter White role." [Variety]

• "Lilo & Stitch" dominated the box office for a second consecutive week, printing $63 million in receipts.

• "Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning," also in its second week, posted a solid $27.3 million.

• Meanwhile, "Karate Kid"—which has been panned by critics with a 59% Rotten Tomatoes score—struggled to land a strong punch at the box office, with a not-so-great $21 million haul.

• Elsewhere, "Final Destination: Bloodlines" earned $10.8 million; "Bring Her Back" $7 million; "Sinners" $5.2 million; and "Thunderbolts*" $4.8 million.

[Data via Box Office Mojo]