Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us for the Fireside Chat with IAC. We have Chris Halpin here, the company's CFO and COO. It's a fireside format, so if anyone has any questions, put them in the chat box down below the video stream, and I will ask them as they fit into the order of agenda. Chris, thanks for being here. So, let's start with DDM. Digital revenue's back to double-digit growth and accelerating. You're guiding to faster growth on a bit tougher comps. I guess talk, you know. I guess give, first of all, give us some color on the ad market, and then on top of that, why do you think you're doing better than the ad market right now? Definitely. Thanks for having me, Jason. Overall ad market, we'd say, is fine. I think the word in the letter was solid. It is definitely not gangbusters, as our CEO, Neil Vogel, would say. What we've seen are the categories where there's been real strength, health and pharma, beauty, elements of retail. Some others continue to steam along, and then some of the categories where we saw real weakness six, nine months ago, have gotten to stability, albeit on depressed bases. So, technology, home, food and beverage, those types of things. The market would still be well below where we were two and a half years ago, but nor is anybody holding their breath to get back to some of those pandemic levels. For DDM specifically, there's a few key fronts that have been driving growth, and they would be quantity and price, traffic, monetization. So traffic, this last quarter, core sessions grew 9%. That's over 80% of our total inventory. And then total traffic is on the verge of getting to flat. And we've said both those metrics accelerated so far this quarter, showing strength. And that traffic comes through producing great quality content, exploring new avenues to acquire traffic, email, social, video, et cetera. Also, on the social side, we've lapped, or with this past quarter, we've lapped the real step down in Facebook traffic that happened about a year ago, where they put up the gate and cut off traffic to publishers. We were able to grow despite that, but it slowed down some of the growth. At this point, Facebook is very small in the scheme of our overall traffic footprint. We're seeing great performance across entertainment, food that Neil and team have done a great job with our large food titles, like Allrecipes, driving traffic there, and really across the portfolio. On monetization, there's two main streams, or digital is divided between direct / premium and programmatic. Direct is about two-thirds of our advertising revenue, consistent with the stability in the ad market, and then also the performance of our sales force that has really gotten efficient and improved. Direct is doing well, and we see continued opportunity there, really aided by our D/Cipher product, which we've talked about. I'd encourage anyone to read the Adweek article that our client at Pandora was kind enough to include data on. But D/Cipher is the productization of so many of the strengths of Dotdash Meredith, real intent-driven inventory, highly great predictive analytics, and what we think is exceptional performance, 2x, depending on the metric, cookies for advertisers. So that's been an aid to premium. And then programmatic, we said in the letter we're growing 36%, programmatic pricing, and we, based on some good data points, think the market is 15%-20%. That's a credit to our tech stack and to the quality of our inventory, and we expect to continue to outperform the market. So we've seen some of the guidance of other companies, can understand, you know, some of the hurdles or tougher comps they may have in their world. We guided to 15%+ revenue growth in the third quarter in on digital and feel good about the state of play. And on D/Cipher, what's the... It's still a relatively new product. What's the penetration right now with- So it is- Yeah, it is a part of over half of our premium deals. And the, and these are deals directly with brands or agencies on behalf of brands. It's in over half. It's very much a process of, you know, crawl, crawl, walk, run on any sort of new product like this. Get them, get them to test it, understand it, see the performance, and scale it up. And we are encouraging them to buy for their campaigns in a different way than the much broader cookied universe. We're saying, "Tell us the segment you wanna reach or the metric you wanna drive." In the case of Pandora, it was visits, in-store visits from people exposed to the ad, and then we target groups, segments on our inventory using our predictive analytics, and we said, drive superior outcomes versus cookies. And then on something like iOS, where there's no cookies, we vastly outperform what's available to people. So as we get them to experience it and give them the guarantee, but also give them the ROI they're looking for, we see more dollars open up to D/Cipher and DDM broadly. So, so let's talk about AI licensing as it ties into DDM. So I think the run rate $16 million, now it's a 2% kind of tailwind to digital, 1% the total. You know, I think that's just mostly with one AI-related company, but just, like, what's the long-term potential, like, you know, multiple partners? How do you think about AI licensing opportunity longer term? Joey said in the letter a quarter ago that we were thrilled to announce the partnership with OpenAI, and also we expect anybody who's building a large language model that's going to matter will have a partnership and a license with premium content developers like our—like ourself, and then also the other major players who've announced deals. It's a bit of the, we'd say, five stages of grief for a number of these players getting towards acceptance for them, that they need such a license to to build their models, continue to refine them, and to... for consumers coming out of those models to serve the answers to queries and such that are optimal. It's the value of brands, it's the value of regular content generation, something that we think is a real strategic advantage of DDM, given our size and health. And also, it's a statement about as the generative AI arc develops, people realize trusted, proven brands that actually do the work, validate, and don't make trollish or specious connections for large language models are increasingly valuable. We're thrilled to announce the OpenAI partnership, and we are in discussions with others. Where we are, again, is for the given operator, sort of a reflection of where they are in their development and their acceptance of this new licensing world. We expect to announce others over time, but just as we were with our first deal, we're gonna be patient and want the right terms and care about precedent. And there are gonna be, you know, some small ones, and there's gonna be, have to be, you know, at least one big one. And as, as Joey said in the letter, they'll get there through reason, economic incentives, regulation, or potentially litigation. And do these deals tend to—are there, like, escalator? Like, in other words, is there typically an inflationary increase over the—or do we just think it's, yeah, like, the run rate is the run rate? There's clearly variable elements based on metrics that will drive. We have one in our OpenAI deal that we've talked about, but it's—I think it's going to be customized to the player and what are the outcomes they're going to try to drive. And in that setting, would we want variable participation, or would we just want a fixed payment? It's gonna come down to the facts and— Right. And then obviously, all of these, you know, presumably you're not doing overly long contracts, and you learn, and each renewal, you renegotiate. But the point is, investors should think that it is a run rate, and then there is some type of, like, inflationary increase, like, over the life of the contract. Yeah, we said it was a medium-term deal with OpenAI, OpenAI. I guess my hesitancy is GAAP has certain requirements of how you recognize revenue for these contracts, so on a cash basis, you can imagine step-ups, but GAAP has its own formulation. Right. Got it. Okay. So, like, given what now has obviously been, like, a successful integration of the Meredith properties, a whole lot of effort to kinda get the products digitized, the advertising working, you know, and now, like, the benefit of kind of AI, what it can both bring to the business and bring revenue, do you wanna own more brands at DDM? Do you think about organically launching new brands, even if there's, like, some, you know, potentially margin, you know, short-term margin dilution from that? On the last point, launching new brands, that market has... That opportunity has probably sailed. It speaks to the strategic advantages we have, given our brands, established brands and scale. In this world, those are the winners, both, you know, from consumer trust, direct nav, advertising sales, but also, search, share, and licensing. So we feel very good about our portfolio of brands. We feel great about the scale that we have by category. When you think about home, we cover through a well-established title, pretty much every segment across income, age, living situation, and that's very attractive to endemic advertisers. Similarly, across food, and for entertainment, we've got best-in-class brands. We've got one of the biggest finance brands. So scale matters, brand matters. Where we would think about M&A and adding our established brands that we think have clear, intent-driven, predictors or signal. So that's essential to D/Cipher, is that you can apply predictive analytics to understand the best next action, the most appropriate ad or optimal ad to place against it, and also, demographic signal without any privacy data. And that's why D/Cipher works so well. And then brands and, properties that would benefit from being part of D/Cipher-- or sorry, Dotdash Meredith's exceptional tech platform, speed, quality, and programmatic and monetization stack. So, we continue to look. We think, the broader open web is, not as well-positioned as we are, and, that there's, you know, a property that has a good brand that will benefit, yeah, we'd be interested. How do you think about the long-term margin target for DDM? We've guided towards mid-30s on digital Adjusted EBITDA. Still feel good about that increment. Even with investment we're making this year in content, in paid performance marketing, in D/Cipher, and in digital marketing, we feel good about our incremental margins and getting to that mid-30s, which was a goal at the time of the acquisition, we still feel good about. One of the questions in the chat was: When would be the right time to spin off DDM? It's a good question. It's clearly a scale player, and, as Joey said in the letter, and we definitely believe, we've DDM has achieved exit velocity from the world of publishers, given its scale and performance, and tech advantages, and we think is, you know, moving into the world of platforms, and really distinguish capabilities across digital. We love the cash flow it produces, and for IAC, it's serving as an engine of free cash. We've said, once leverage at the DDM credit facility gets below 4x EBITDA, we can dividend cash out of it, and we have clear line of sight to get there, by the year-end, by the end of the year or early next, based on our guidance and patterns. That's the real question of value as a source of cash flow and a strategic asset within IAC or as a standalone company spun. And then, I mean, look, you know, we can kinda get a sense of, I mean, we've got a sense of where margins will be this year, you know, high teens-ish, and presumably higher next year, which is obviously still a long way away from, you know, like, you know, a 35%. And do you just think philosophically, if you were to spin something, I mean, granted, you made comments about, like, cash flow and leverage, and obviously, Angi plays into this as well. But, like, do you philosophically think you wait to, you know, get to a, you know, 30% margin, or the idea is it's attractive to spin it off to investors while it's below that, because then that's what they're investing behind? Yeah. Well, and one comment, I think when you're talking about those teens margins, that's print and digital blended? Right, that's print and digital blended, yeah. Yeah, sorry. When I'm saying 35%- Right ... that's with, that's just digital standalone. And we've said we expect print and corporate to offset each other. On the strategic question of spins, it's really around, you know, what's best for the company, and by extension, our shareholders, of being part of IAC or being standalone. It would not be something where we say, "Okay, we've maxed out margin and growth," and then spin. That doesn't seem rational. It's more, you know, for the company, and this would be true of any company, not just DDM or another company in portfolio, for their strategic objectives and their employee retention, and incentives, as well as the relative value of how IAC and it are valued inside versus external. That's the exercise. I wouldn't tie it to current margins or growth rate as much as, does it make sense—does it do better, outside of the family and off on its own, or as part of, IAC? There was another question online, basically, how you think about DDM's debt and cost of debt? Yeah, it's. We've been excited to see the loan trade to par. It's a reflection of the improved credit quality and delevering going on there. It is a highly flexible classic levered loan structure, Term Loan A, Term Loan B, with a revolver that we don't use. Cost is high. And, you know, we will continue to explore options around optimal structure, but it's pretty attractive in terms of prepayability, delevering, flexibility of cash, just as any institutional term loan is. Well, let's move over to Angi. So 2 issues to turn this business around. So one, you know, doing a better job matching consumers and SPs, and two, growing efficiently through paid and organic channels. I mean, so just break down both. Where are you? You know, I don't know if you wanna use a baseball analogy, and then you get into new rules and old rules of baseball. But maybe, like, on a scale of 1 to 10, like 10 being we're all finished, 1 is when we're at the bottom of this, perhaps a bit ago. Like, where, how are we making progress with each of these initiatives? Yeah, I'll use more of a football analogy. No, I'm just kidding. I'd say where we are, think about the two sides of the platform, consumers and pros, and then the integration between them. When Joey took over as CEO in October of 2022, a key point of focus immediately as he dug deeper in from being chairman but really got under the hood, was improving consumer experience through fewer direct marketing efforts, fewer calls, better product, and more relevant pros being served to them based on the search or what they're looking for. That has been the longer of the two paths, but we're getting there. We've reduced outbounds, and at the expense of marketing, just right, at the expense of leads, we've reduced emails, outbound calling, all those activities. We've also continued to improve the product, and as Jeff talked about it on the call, of predictive and using predictive analytics and AI to get the right questions to efficiently extract the most information and scope the job correctly. We're making progress on there. We're seeing input improvements in NPS, which will be the leading indicator. But longer term, we're gonna now need to drive repeat rate, which is a product of getting jobs done well, and we're gonna need to drive overall demand through better application of marketing and better SEO, better repeat. On the pro side, that was the early actions, and there were a few elements there. One was we stopped recruiting low-quality pros, who were either not gonna succeed on the platform, or higher propensity to churn in bad debt. We really focused about a year, over a year ago on improving lead quality to pros, so the leads they were getting had better win rates and all the predictive indicators would give them better ROI. And we've continued to improve the onboarding of pros and the options for them between leads, ads, and services of what best fits them. Where we see that relevant is, or we see that manifest itself, is better retention, and we've talked about the improvement in pro service pro retention data, improved bad debt, and reduced churn. The middle is the matching that we're making progress on. We need to continue to improve the data and the tools there. Jeff talked about we need to get better information quickly, through a better product out of consumers and drive that matching. There have been improvements. That's where we see increased monetized transactions per an SR, so more events occurring out of a given service request. We'll continue to drive that. So I'd say, you know, we're probably halfway through, more to do on the consumer side than the pro side, and then continued progress in matching. That consumer side will lead to reinvigorating demand, which is our biggest headwind. We've cut a lot of demand. We've proactively reduced marketing, cut out bad channels, we closed CraftJack, et cetera, et cetera. But consumer, or sorry, investors appropriately are saying to us, "When are you gonna start growing again? When is there gonna be SR growth? When is there gonna be revenue growth?" And that's where we need to deliver. So, how do you think about interest rates, lower interest rates being a tailwind? I think you've said, is it two-thirds of jobs tend to be, like, non-discretionary, something breaks, you need to get it fixed. But ultimately, you have one-third is consumers choosing to do something, whether it's they wanna, you know, put a deck on a... Whatever, it's by choice, and I would imagine a good chunk of that ties into people moving to new locations. Yeah, 60% of the business are non-discretionary jobs, leaks, you know, emergency fixes, appliance breaks, those types of things. We would think... There's a natural hedge within the Angi business of when consumers, you know, when consumers need us more, pros may need us less, 'cause supply has been relatively fixed, and when demand goes down, pro propensity to spend increases. I think we've been in a depressed period of demand being low after the excesses of the pandemic, where demand massively outstripped supply. Lower interest rates in a more even somewhat more dynamic housing market, we think would be neutral to positive. It could be better than that, but that's where we'd sit right now. Where you'd see it is that 40% that are discretionary jobs, maybe it ticks up a few percent in, you know, in share, but also, ticket size will increase, and that goes to lead value. And, since they're tied to ROI to the pro. So we're thankful to have gotten through the last couple of years on the home side. And, we feel good about getting our business lean and mean, and with a clean revenue base and a better product for whatever the market brings. But we'd be, you know, mildly constructive on macro in that context. And philosophically, and I've asked this in the past, I mean, with keeping Angi public as a stub, you know, you obviously sound more confident in the business now than in a while, for obvious reasons. And again, we, we may be going into some kind of cyclical tailwind, potentially as well. You know, you could tender for the public stock. I mean, that being said, you know, investors could just be incredibly patient if they choose to kind of do that, but, you know, just any thoughts on kind of why it makes sense to still have the public stub out there? It's something we discuss and think about. Pros are, you know, having fewer public stocks underlying IAC is helpful than having more. You'd save on some public company costs there. They would have, you know, the ability to free up time from being a public company. On the flip side, there's still a material subset of a public company. We'd still have SOX obligations. Jeff would still be probably talking to investors as a major CEO. So pros and cons. Right now, you know, the message we've put out is we don't want that distraction and, you know, having a minority squeeze out and dealing with that. We'd rather just focus on getting the business fully repositioned and go from there. But there are merits that we consider in a, you know, buyout. And then, are there any competitors in home services that you think are doing a good job? And like, I guess, like, would they be an interesting acquisition? But just how do you think about the competitive environment in home services, you know, outside of Google, but just are there companies that you pay attention to, you think do a good job in this? Sure, uh- Without naming names, I guess. Yeah, no. So, you know, we think the... I'd say in the broader market in home services, there's been a rationalization from some of the overfunding during the pandemic and the amount of capital that flowed into flawed business plans. You know, we went down the services path too hard and wasted some capital in that, but we had a core business that's an industry leader that underpinned it, that we've built around. So, in terms of the venture-funded competition, we've happily seen that decline. We tracked the other players. Yelp is doing a nice job, and we always viewed them as under-monetized relative to where they were, and they've driven that monetization better. They're also, you know, doing. We're more in request a quote, but off a smaller base, but we respect what they're doing. Keep track of Thumbtack and other players. But for us, it's really around Angi and our performance, our taking advantage of our strengths of liquidity on both sides of the marketplace, leading platform of service professionals and brand and reach on the consumer side. And we focus. You know, we don't look at any competitor impact as a major factor. Last Angi question: long-term margin target for Angi? I believe it should be a 20% margin business, Adjusted EBITDA margin business, at... with, with, getting revenue back growing. You can see where we've taken it, the last few quarters to, you know, 13%, 10, 11, and higher. And this last quarter was a little bit flattered by, some period, some expense shifting into Q3 from Q2, but gives you the broad strokes. But with revenue growth, I definitely think there should be a 20% Adjusted EBITDA marketplace. So talk about Turo for a minute. How big is it today? How fast is it growing? You know, any impediments to faster growth? And I guess, you know, do you agree that you get basically no value for it inside of IAC, even though you've tried to tell the market that, you know, you're the largest shareholder? I think it's like 33%. Yeah. Well, we definitely agree with the last point, that we get no value in—we exercised our warrant on a net basis this past quarter, disclosed it in this past earnings and added 2% in the company. And also reported what we thought were excellent numbers at Dotdash and solid guidance. Our discount actually increased when you looked at the relative performance, the performance of Angi and MGM relative to IAC on the day of earnings. So, there's definitely no value for our Turo stake. It is a real business, and investors can see in the amended S-1 that they continue to keep on file, size of the business. Growth has slowed down, but that part of that is working through normalization of the rental car market. We follow the comps closely at Hertz and Avis, and they're reporting similar pressures in ADRs. And in pricing, volume growth has continued. We definitely think we're a share taker in the space, and we think we should be doing even better than we are through better marketing, growing the brand, growing awareness. It's pretty consistent. If you talk to people you know, it's roughly a fifth of them are aware of Turo, and most of them have used Turo and would be proselytizers for great NPS and repeat rate. It's really getting more of that other 80% exposed to Turo, and to realize the benefits of knowing exactly what car you're gonna get, have it delivered, not be dealing with big rental, as the company calls it. And we need to get more people exposed. That's improved brand, improved marketing. We think the product's in great shape. Andre and team have done a great job building that. And we just need to get more consumers exposed to it as they're in their rental car journey. But it's a good business, and we think has great opportunities in front of it. I mean, no question from a like a leisure travel standpoint. Do you think, though, like, ride-sharing, I guess Lyft, Uber, like, have maybe been an impediment to what, you know, potentially would have otherwise been more growth in some of the urban areas for Turo and the ability to unlock, like, the car sitting on the sidewalk that somebody rarely drives in an urban area? You know, it could be. I mean, the growth was so strong through obviously pandemic tailwinds with 2021, 2022 and most of 2023. I think that would be a factor in broader rental car and short-term car rental dynamics, but there's so much share to be taken by Turo that we don't lose sleep over that pressure. Right. We actually think there are opportunities... Or as understanding and usage of Turo increases, more use cases open up for both hosts and guests of how to use Turo and how to use them for a longer term. Two more, so one on Care.com. So I think, LTM revenue is about $370 million, so the business is kinda quite large, but I think growth was flat year in the second quarter. What are you doing to accelerate growth, and how do you think about the long-term margin potential for Care.com? Yeah, we still feel very bullish about Care. As an industry leader, Joey talked about in the letter, given the scale of consumer traffic and positioning the brand, it's a good, profitable business. Growth has slowed down. They got more of a boost out of COVID than we even realized, particularly on the consumer side, and it's been a, or it was one of those situations where tailwinds obscured some real suboptimalities in product and in marketing. And so, you know, water goes out when the tide goes out, you realize some things that you don't like. We have leadership in there in Brad Wilson, the CEO, and he's been building out his team, who are making the investments in product and marketing to reinvigorate growth. There are two main businesses within care: the consumer side, which is any of us signing up and using it to find a nanny, babysitter, and then the new and senior care, as well as new categories like pet and out of home. That is where we saw the biggest slowdown recently. There's also the enterprise side, where our employers provide access to care and backup care hours or days to employees as a benefit. That has been reinvigorated with that, and we think is now really table stakes for most employers to offer. It's really around getting the consumer marketing and sign up and product to where we want it. But it's head down, and we feel optimistic about the future there. So, last part, and we can go into a two-part question, 'cause there were a few questions online in the chat about the MGM stake. So - and obviously, the question on the MGM stake is, you know, why does it make sense to keep it? And, you know, you have talked about, you know, you think it is an undervalued asset. But work the logic of the MGM stake into, you know, potential M&A. You've talked about sweet spot being $300 million-$700 million. You know, what's the likelihood something gets done in the next six to 12 months? And then, you know, how do you think about, like, using the MGM stake to fund acquisitions versus, you know, other sources, et cetera? Okay, well, so, you know, across the whole IAC family, there's $1.7 billion of cash at IAC parent, $1.1 billion. Obviously, that's a real capital source right there, and one we look to put into investments, acquisitions. The MGM stake, we view the company as highly undervalued. The market reaction to their earnings now two weeks ago, we think was fully overdone in a reaction to one statement about F1 pre-bookings, and $30 million at risk of a company with $4+ billion of EBITDA. So, we thought it was undervalued before, and the implied value on, you know, incredible assets in Las Vegas, which has further cemented itself as the entertainment and leisure center of the U.S., but also the world. It's, it's an extraordinarily low value, and one we see opportunity there. We have a variety of assets beyond our cash to fund future M&A. And you know, both. We have sold assets like Mosaic that we consider non-core and are not meeting our capital return thresholds, and then debt financing, all those associated with an acquisition. So we've got, we've got firepower. We're really focused on finding, identifying, and buying a company or companies that we think will create real value for IAC shareholders. Okay, I think we're out of time there. Thanks everybody for joining us. Thank you, Chris. If anyone has any further questions, feel free to email us, and appreciate the time, everybody, today.