Dotdash Meredith CEO Talks Google AI, Adtech Acquisitions, and Unsentimentality

Almost three years exactly after the digital media company Dotdash acquired Meredith Corp. in a $2.7 billion tie-up, the resulting business has finally hit its stride.

After a complex, 18-month merger, the combined organization has now notched three consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth and boosted its profitability by streamlining its print operations, chief executive Neil Vogel told ADWEEK CEO Will Lee during a Mediaweek panel in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday.

“Whether it’s TikTok, a print magazine, Instagram, or whatever, if you have a brand that delivers value, and you can assemble high-quality audiences that love what you’re doing, you can solve for the rest of it,” Vogel said. “That’s always been our plan.”

In their conversation, Vogel shared how he and Dotdash Meredith’s executive team are navigating a period of immense upheaval in the digital media landscape. 

In particular, Vogel pointed to three main areas of focus: the delicate diplomacy of partnering with artificial intelligence firms, his plans for strengthening direct distribution and monetization, and the importance of unsentimentality when it comes to the media business.

Abby Phillip and Brian Stelter Talk Fox News and the ‘Subclipping Mafia’ at Mediaweek

Fair and unfair AI

In September 2023, Barry Diller, the owner of Dotdash Meredith parent company IAC, exhorted the digital media community to work together against AI companies scraping their content. Then, in May 2024, the digital media firm turned on its heel, announcing that it had signed a licensing partnership with OpenAI. 

Vogel has explained the rationale for the about-face previously, and he expounded upon the decision again on stage. Through the partnership, Dotdash Meredith is compensated for the use of its content as training data, is cited in summaries, and has the ability to collaborate with OpenAI on new technologies.

The real story, according to Vogel, is the lack of similar collaboration from Google, which is also ingesting publishers’ content to train its large-language models and using the material to produce answers to search queries.

Unlike OpenAI, Google has been uninterested in striking any kind of partnership with publishers. 

“They take our stuff, they read it, they steal it, and they produce an answer that competes with us,” Vogel said. “We’ve approached them a number of times to do a deal, and they tell us to go fish. So there are a number of people that feel like this is going to come to a head.”

Going direct and eyeing adtech

Dotdash Meredith has built much of its business on its ability to produce content designed to helpfully answer search queries. 

But as Google’s distribution becomes less reliable, Dotdash Meredith is working to increase the strength of its direct relationship with its audiences, Vogel said.

“I can’t exactly talk about it now, but we’re building some very big things around People and our food business that are going to go directly to audiences so you won’t need middlemen,” Vogel said. 

Vogel later compared the forthcoming products to “what Amazon did with Prime,” although he cautioned that Dotdash Meredith has no plans to introduce a subscription product. Later in the conversation, he alluded to his interest in complementing the Dotdash Meredith adtech stack through potential acquisitions.

Both efforts aim to circumvent intermediaries, which Vogel described as “the people between you and your audience and you and your money.” As the digital media firm looks to operate more effectively, it sees opportunity in cutting out adtech middlemen and fickle sources of distribution.

Embracing unsentimentality

Media operators need to be unsentimental when it comes to plotting their future, Vogel said.

Dotdash was able to acquire the much larger Meredith in part because Dotdash had been run more nimbly, without the nostalgia that weighed down the balance sheet of the legacy firm Meredith.

Since the merger, Dotdash Meredith has reduced its print circulation from 800 million to 200 million, but it has improved the quality of its print products and stopped selling them at a discount, according to Vogel.

The company also focused on distributing editorial content in anticipation of how audiences will consume content in the future, saying the company “needs to be preparing for 2030.”

Balancing reverence for the legacy brands of Meredith, which are some of the strongest performers in the whole portfolio, with a need for clear-eyed decision-making is one of the inherent tensions of modern media. But ultimately, it comes down to quality, Vogel said.

“When [Dotdash acquired Meredith], some of the magazines were thin and shitty and sucked. We said, if you can’t make a magazine that you want on your coffee table, stop making it. Do not have an event you don’t want to go to,” Vogel said. “If you can give that extra 10% of effort—even if that means doing 20% fewer things—it changes everything.”