The only way I can be there for her is if we can do that. Yeah. That's his love language. That's what he is. That's his thing. It's great. All right, I think we'll get started here. My pleasure of having People Inc. this year at the conference. Neil Vogel, CEO. Thank you for having us. I have a brief bio. Hopefully, I don't embarrass you too much. Neil Vogel, the CEO of People Inc., owner of People, America's largest publisher, holder of a significant minority stake in MGM Resorts, and Turo, a leading car rental marketplace. In addition to serving as CEO, Mr. Vogel continues to lead the strategic direction and day-to-day operations of the People Inc. subsidiary, which under his leadership, has grown from what was IAC's acquisition of About.com to the largest digital and print publisher in the U.S., featuring 40+ iconic brands. With that out of the way All correct. It's great. I'm glad I got it right. Thanks for being part of the conference this year. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. I want to start big picture. Obviously, the company's been undergoing a pretty significant reorg over the last several months. But you've been part of it for a very long time. For those investors that are getting reacquainted to the story, how would you frame People Inc.'s investment narrative and some of the reorgs that's been going on? Yeah. I'll keep it simple because we'll probably get into more detail later. Yeah. We're really doing three things. We are focused on executing at a very high level at People Inc. I think we've done a pretty good job as of late. Made 11 straight quarters of revenue growth, all kinds of things we'll talk about. The second thing we're doing is focusing on the assets that matter most to us and investing behind our assets, which is People Inc. and which is MGM Resorts International, which we're very excited about, and obviously there's a lot going on around there that we can maybe talk a little bit about. Yeah. The third thing we're doing is we're taking a look at the rest of our portfolio and trying to rationalize the rest of the things, turn some things into cash, continue the integration and some saving of some corporate costs. And with all of it, we hopefully, once we're able to, we'll be buying back a bunch of shares, too. There's a real clear path to value creation. It's executing People Inc., investing in the two big businesses we believe in, getting liquidity out of the rest of the things we do, and just being opportunistic like we always have been. Pretty significant shift away from the old IAC model. Would you- It is. I think it's definitely a little bit less of a holding company. But again, if you look at MGM and you look at People Inc., it continues the vision of what Barry likes. Yeah. Exceptional businesses in markets that are big and growing and exciting, and in the case of what we're doing now, with a real focus on brands and real-life experiences, things that are hard to disintermediate in a world where everything is trying to disintermediate you. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I want to dig into some of those growth drivers. You mentioned People, as a subsidiary, has shown really impressive growth. What have been sort of the key drivers of that growth, and how would you sort of frame the opportunity to continue that? The easiest way to understand People Inc. is if you take a step back. Five years ago, we put together what was Dotdash, which was our media business with Meredith, which was a combination of Time Inc. and Meredith. At the time, we were very good at sort of like in media, the print-to-digital transition, and this was a play on let's get ourselves these iconic brands that Meredith owned, People, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Southern Living, all these things, and let's take the expertise we've learned on the internet and let's build great businesses. Back then, all your traffic came from Google. We were very good at Google. We kind of were good at sort of like the first phase of internet media, which was print to digital transition. Then we very quickly, because we were very focused on Google, saw very early that Google was changing. Google was beginning, this was even before AI, to send out less and less traffic, and we were like, well, this is going to be a problem. What we did is we focused and we very quietly invested in our own emails, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and because we had these wonderful brands, we had the power to build audiences in all these other places. So a year or two later, when AI, really commercial AI, comes around and you're like, uh-oh. We actually saw Sam Altman present ChatGPT about a month before the commercial launch, and I walked out of there with my CFO and we just looked at each other like the world going forth is going to be different. Let's analyze the problems and the opportunities. The problem is this is going to really accelerate this search disintermediation. It's a good thing we started doing these things, but we got to hit the gas on doing these new things, because search is going to be very challenged and there's going to be opportunities that we can talk about of how to make our business better. What we were able to do is build all these new businesses because our brands are great. What we call, we went from sort of like the print era to the digital era. We're in what we now call the brand era. The brand era is using the power of our brands and the ability that we have to do all of these things in all of these different places and arenas, to grow a business. That is what we have done. Zooming out, five years ago, our business was primarily a web business. 70%+ of the audience came from Google. Now more than 40%+ to 43% of our business is not based on sessions. Only 20% of our web audience comes from Google, and we have grown 11 straight quarters. We have really managed to make this transition, and in many ways, we are out the other side. The Google risk is out of the business. It is down to 20% of our just web audience, and we have built these really diverse audiences and really diverse revenue streams across some of the best brands in the world, and we are a very strong and healthy business where we sit right now. That is great. I definitely want to touch on some of those non-session revenue streams and those opportunities going forward, but real quick on sort of search and the distribution landscape, how that has evolved. What have been some of the key channels for you, outside of Google and outside of search, that have been impactful for you? We look at our business in two ways. If you follow our earnings, there is sessions-based revenue and non-sessions-based revenue. Let us do the sessions first. It is easy. That is People come to the website, and we sell ads or do some commerce or do something. That was 70% Google, now it is 20% Google. That business, in terms of volume in the last quarter, was down 20%+ year-over-year, but revenue was flat. Because our brands are great, our ad execution is great. We are really good at that. That is going to be the stable part of our business. The other part of our business is non-sessions-based revenue, the new things that you talked about that we refer to. That is growing 15% to 20% a quarter, and that is events. That is all the things we are doing on social media across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. That is online video. We have now about 47 episodic shows that we run across different platforms, including something called The Intern, and some of the biggest shows on the internet we have created, and we own, and we are monetizing. D/Cipher, some of the adtech that allows us to use our incredible data to target ads around the web. Licensing, which for us is a three-pronged thing, which for us, it is content licensing, like Apple News and giving our content out to other people. Our content is exceptional. AI licensing, which I am sure we will talk about, which is OpenAI and Microsoft and Meta. As well as real product licensing, like Better Homes & Gardens is one of, if not the biggest licensee inside of Walmart, and Southern Living is a very big licensee inside of Dillard's. This business is taking advantage of the power of our brands to touch people in new ways, whether it is an event, whether it is watching something on YouTube. It could be any number of things, but that business has real energy in it, and it is just new ways for our brands to connect to their audiences. I think the interesting thing is a lot of people. This is not new to us. We have been doing this very quietly for a while, so when the world changed, we were ready. We have done a lot of things wrong, but this is probably the thing we have done most right. Yeah, that is great. Maybe touch on a little bit more detail some of those revenue opportunities on the non-session side and non-advertising side. You have talked about consumer-facing subscriptions in the past. Yeah. Obviously live events and things like that. Yeah. So events are a big deal for us. We will run 50 events. That is in that bucket of 50 events across all of our brands that we are really excited about. You just mentioned one other thing I forgot. Subscriptions. Subscriptions. We have launched two, and we are launching a third major subscription effort. Subscriptions are not new to us. We still have print magazines. We still have 11 million print subscribers. It is a smaller part of the business, but important. We have launched a subscription recipe product around something called MyRecipes, a 5 million-member recipe locker business that we launched on the web. We launched a value-added app that people can pay for. We are about to launch something called People VIP, a way to get more out of your relationship with People and get content early and get all kinds of stuff. And a super fan club for fans of Southern Living with big recipe lockers and all kinds of things. Southern Living has this incredibly loyal, active audience. Between events, between what we are doing on social, between what we are doing with video, between what we are doing with subscriptions, between what we can do with D/Cipher, the opportunities are really, really broad, and it is a really big focus for us. If you have followed us on earnings, Barry calls these things inversion projects. Taking the typical brand relationship we have had with people and inverting it. Like why can not we launch a sweet tea at Southern Living, which we are actually going to launch. Because we have been making it in our test kitchen for 50 years, and it is so good, we now want to sell it to people. And we are doing all of these things because if you look at marketing, and we spend a lot of time looking at marketing, there are three things you need to do to market something. You have to have a list, you have to have an offer, and you have to have some creatives. The offer and the creative you can make. The lists are incredibly hard to find. That is why people have to buy media. But we have the lists. That is what we do. We have millions. We send out 3 or 4 billion emails a month just to people who want emails from us, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Our ability to market these things, we're really excited about. That's great. What are some of the gating factors to launching some of those things, and what are the investment areas? Is it go to market and awareness? Is it more on the development side? I think it's like anything, new things are hard. Yeah. We are at a place where one of the things our organization has done is we have navigated change really well. We are an entirely different company than we were two years ago and a different company than we were two years before that. I think we do one thing in particular that really anchors people and helps us do these things. New things are hard, expanding old things is hard, new events are hard, is with everything changing around us, we really focus people on our brands. The promise of People magazine is the promise of People magazine, however it is delivered. If you look at People and you look at the woman who runs the editorial, Charlotte Triggs, she is amazing. People is ordinary people doing extraordinary things, extraordinary people doing ordinary things, focused on royals, celebrity gossip, beauty style, whatever. Her job is to figure out how that manifests itself across TikTok, Instagram, events, red carpets, you name it. The 15 things that we do. The trick is the brand is constant. When people are anchored in the brand, it makes it feel less stressful to do these new things because you always have this thing to fall back on. So we are always saying to ourselves, "Make it nice." If you are doing a new thing, it is impossible to know if something is going to work or not. But make something you want to use. Throw an event you want to go to. Make an app that you are willing to pay for. If you can do that, we are halfway home, and we have the privilege of having these incredible brands to work with, and that is really fun. So it has got to be fun. It has got to be fun, it has got to be brand-based, and you have to have people that embrace this stuff, and then you can solve these problems. Every business I outlined before has opportunities and has problems, and we can get super micro, but that would be very boring. So I will just keep it at the level where we were now. I would think in a world of increasing AI and low-quality content and things like that, the brand value and especially live events as well would increase the value. The unexpected thing of what is going on in the world, and we could talk a lot about AI, is the incredible expansion of crappy content and mediocre things created by and around AI, has helped us immensely. People, if you're cooking dinner for your family on a holiday, you want a Food & Wine or an Allrecipes recipe. If you're redecorating your bathroom, you want that article on maybe Southern Living if you're Southern, or maybe on Better Homes & Gardens. The brand promise of our brands has shined through, and you can see it in things like our ad rates. One of the things is, we noticed if you go back to our revenue, our simple, our session-based revenue, we're down more than 20% in sessions, but revenue's flat. That's simply because of ad rates. Because the content is great, people are paying a premium for brands because they know it's real, brands like it, and humans like it. There's been a true flight to quality in the market, and we've seen a lot of it, and it's benefited us remarkably. It's also, going back to your last question, it's the thing, it's the thread that runs through everything we're doing. We make more content than anybody in our space by magnitudes. It is all made by people. Now, we use AI to help processes, but this human-created, when we make a recipe, you can watch the video, you can see the thing, you can read the comments, you can get all the notes. It's an incredible advantage we have. We don't have an advantage in everything, but we have to lean in where we have advantages, and the humanity of what we do is a huge advantage. Yeah, that's great. I definitely want to touch on the advertising side of things. Just on that point, how do you balance the halo effect around the brands and increasing those consumer touchpoints and not extracting value, but monetizing those touchpoints with maintaining that level of brand quality, right? Especially as you go into data licensing and content licensing partnerships. We actually. We can talk about licensing a second. I actually think that's a false trade. The thing that makes us appealing for things like content licensing is the fact that our content is so good. The world doesn't need any more mediocre stuff. Let's talk about content licensing, right? We do a lot of content licensing. We'll put content, we're a huge partner of Apple News and all these other like AOL and whoever, you name it. But let's talk about it in the context of AI, which is what everybody wants to talk about, is our content is in great demand. Because we grew up with search, what we have content on is the most commercial stuff that people need. It's accurate, it's created, it's super high quality, and we know from crawling rates that we are among the most crawled websites in the world. We are a top crawled by Google, by you name how it works. The content's good. Now, what we've been able to do is turn that into value. Part of how you turn that into value is you make it scarce. We now have the ability to block this content for almost everyone. What that does is that it's brought people to the table who are willing to pay for our content. If you are making an AI model, call it just like a foundational model, you need three things. You need power, you need engineers and a model, and you need inputs. We're the inputs. We are incredibly important inputs to people because we are factually correct. We're great for grounding. We're great for RAG. We make more new content every day than any other publisher. Whether it's what Kim Kardashian did or the latest diabetes thing that just came out yesterday or all these trending avocado recipes, we're what people need. So we've been able to get deals done with the foundational models, which are very much sort of like all-you-can-eat deals. Increasingly, there's a lot of interest on pay-as-you-go models. We have a deal with Microsoft and a couple other smaller guys who are trying to put this together. But one of the most surprising things for us was when AI started, in quotes, everyone was saying, "Oh, content's worthless. Content's worthless." All of the content in the world has been crawled, and it has made our content incredibly valuable. Yeah. Because the new stuff we make that is on these super commercial topics that is very accurate, is incredibly valuable for both RAG and training. If in a consumer way at least, AI is going to be search replacement, we're in the exact right spot. Yeah. We're the answer. Yeah. It's been a really interesting time for us to be focused. Exactly what you said, make it nice. Everything's got to be nice. The world doesn't need mediocre. We're not mediocre. Our brands are premium. What we do is premium, and we're getting premium pricing. Now, we have a different issue with Google because they use one crawler for search and for all their AI, their search AI. We can't block them, so we don't have any leverage with them, but that's going to resolve itself in some way. Yeah, I was going to say, there might be some updates on the regulatory front. Yeah. For those of you who do not know, Google uses one crawler for search and for AI, and if you opt out of it, you will lose search. 20% of our web traffic is still from Google, so we cannot really opt out of it yet. There will come a point we can, but I do not want it to get that way. I want to get to an economic deal with them, or whether it is on their own or whether it is because something forced them to. We would like to get that solved. I think you bring up a really interesting point. There has been this realization of where the value is in terms of these content licensing partnerships, whether it is for the back end backlog for training purposes, but really most of the value going for that inference, that new type of content. Yeah. It is a really interesting thing. In the pre-AI era, our most valuable content is not what our most valuable content is now. Now, it is in some cases. In health content, it was incredibly valuable then, and it is incredibly valuable now. But things like longer tail finance content was worth a lot prior, is not worth much now. Where that Kim Kardashian what she did last night article probably did not have that much worth in a prior world, that is now incredibly valuable. Doing these things at scale on topics that humans are interested in is very valuable. Doing it at high quality and doing it like we do, where we make thousands of pieces of content a day, it can be a very valuable thing. We will see. Yeah, that is great. I want to touch on the advertising industry and health of the advertising ecosystem. I think on your last call, you framed it as sort of asix out of 10, right? That is really just driven by, you are very diversified in terms of the industries that you touch. Maybe just frame for us the health of the advertising ecosystem and the outlook. That was not that long ago. I think we are still a six out of 10. Yeah. I think from a macro sense, it is okay. Good, not great. Good enough for us to do our job, good enough for us to hit the goals we would like to hit. It is very category by category, and that it can be very week by week. The political environment is very unsettled, so that has been bad for anything inflation-related, gas price-related, CPG, consumer, all the stuff in the supermarket is bad. Travel is bad for obvious reasons, because of what is going on in whole parts of the world no one is going to or coming from. There are other things that are super strong for us, like health is super strong. So it is a very mixed bag. Having diverse sources of revenue for us is really helpful. I have been giving the same answer now on this for two years. The advertising hates uncertainty, and we live in nothing but uncertainty. I think people are getting increasingly comfortable in uncertainty, then something gets even more uncertain. We'll see what happens. I think heading into the back half of the year, I think as of right now, we're fine. Can you talk- Unless. Fair enough. Can you talk a little bit about what's inside of your control? Some of the improvements you've been making to the underlying adtech stack, the targeting and measurement improvements. Yeah, it's a good frame. We frame a lot of what is in our control and what is out of our control. I'll give the biggest in our control is how we use AI and new things to make our org better. The easiest thing I can say that's in our control is we make 50% more content, which includes a whole more types of content than we did two years ago at the same aggregate cost of two years ago, and it's arguably of a better quality. That is entirely us internalizing and using AI-type advancements to help our people, to give them tools to make things. The easiest example of what's in your control is, we make a lot of recipes. We have, whatever, 40 or 50 test kitchens in Birmingham, Alabama, and we have recipe developers who will make a new recipe for Food & Wine or for Serious Eats or for whatever it's for. It used to take them a week to research, get the ingredients, test, make the recipe, shoot it. We can now do two or three in a week. When you can do that, you're like, "Whoa, that's a major improvement." What we've done is we have not used that to, well, then we only need three, same number here. We make more. That allows us to really have advantages over everybody else making content, in that we just have so much good, high-quality content that in a very good way, we can flood the zone on things. So far it's working. We are punching way above our weight or maybe punching at our weight now of where our content can go and what it can do, whether it's episodic shows on TikTok and Instagram, whether it's things on YouTube or whether it's just having the nth recipe that somebody really wants. It all really matters. That's a very in control thing in a world where AI feels out of control. When you combine that with, we have brands, we're getting better, we're getting more efficient, then you have room to make some mistakes, and then you got a puncher's chance to come out the other side in a way that is very productive. That's great. What are some of the investments that you are making to help facilitate that? Is it licensing of third-party models to be able to facilitate that? Is it more internal investment? It's a little bit, I think at this point, we're not like a bleeding edge technology company. I think for us, it's more cultural than anything. We can buy all the tokens we want from name the model. We made a decision that we weren't going to have a central AI czar. We have a team that helps facilitate and teach people things, but everybody in every group is responsible for AI in their world. Even if you're not using it for work, like I'm burning up tokens because I made for my son this trading card storage grading propose a trade, should we do it for all of his basketball and football cards that we've vibe coding, and it's amazing and really fun because we need people to get comfortable with this and in their day jobs. The things we are producing by people you would've never thought would produce this stuff is incredible. Nothing revolutionized the business, but every single one of those things moves you one inch down the field and one inch down the field. It makes people not fear the future when they understand the future, and that's a very big part of what we're doing. That's great. Going back a little bit to the advertising business. You talked a little bit about D/Cipher, but what did that do for you and what's that outlook? D/Cipher is a product, for those of you who don't know. It's an ad product we developed. We did it. The best products are products you develop for yourself. D/Cipher was how we targeted across our own sites, which is very simply, if somebody lands on a page on Real Simple, "What color do I paint my kids' bedroom?" We know from where they go next pretty much everything about them. We know they just had a kid. We know that obviously correlates to buying kid things like formula, but you very likely need a new car, a new house, new credit card, all the things that come with having a new family. What that allows you to do is when Fidelity is an advertiser, you can put Fidelity on that piece of contextual content, and it performs incredibly well. This is the crux and the underpinning of how we built our on-site ad business. What we learned was, we can go around the open web, we can look at all the other URLs, and we can say, "Well, what URL does that match to on our site?" We go, oh, the performance there is going to look like the performance. It's not going to be as good because it's not branded, but it'll be really good. Can we use our data to help people buy the rest of the web? That's what we did, and we launched this product called D/Cipher. It's a little bit more complex, but you basically get the idea. What we do is we will go out to a third-party site, and we can buy their ad for $1, and then we can resell it to somebody with our data on top for $5, where it would cost $9 if they bought a like thing on our site. It performs in a way that's interesting. It's not branded, but it really, really works. We're a couple of years into this, and we're really learning the use cases for this. This is very strong for political advertising, right? We don't take political ads on our own sites, but what those guys need to spend a lot of money in a short period of time against very high profiles, we can really do that. It's very good for CTV. It's very good for health and pharma, and we're learning, and it's growing, and it's a very exciting thing for us to do. It opens up the TAM of the web. The one headwind in that is, as we've talked about, the open web is not growing like it once was. It may not even be growing at all, but the sentiment around the open web isn't great. That's a bit of a headwind. But what we're finding is we're finding these veins of people where this is a real capability that can really help them, and we're very excited about it. It's a big piece of our growth going forward. It's a big piece of what we're doing. Very important to the org, we built a real piece of adtech that really works, and it proved to a lot of people that we can do new things, and that was really important for us. How much of it is based on contextual advertising versus more first-party data, especially as you increase the touch points with your end? What we say is our contextual data is first-party data. Yeah. It is just not data on a person. Yep. Our data is we 100% know how that page performs and who is going there based on first-party data. We just do not need to know who it is. Yeah. That's actually helpful for certain advertisers like pharma that can't target individuals and do things like that. But it has been a big unlock for what we think is a pool of really incredible data. That's great. I have to ask and maybe touch the third rail, but around MGM Resorts International. I know you're somewhat limited in what you can say there, but Not third rail. I think Or more so limited in what you can say there. Yeah. You've outlined a potential to increase your investment there, but maybe just talk about what the outlook is. I obviously can't say a whole lot. We, Barry, and we believe MGM is undervalued, as we've said. We believe that more control on our part can help unlock value. We're very optimistic, and as Barry said on our earnings call, maybe we get above 51. In the event we don't, we're going to get there. It's just going to be more slowly. We're going to buy it more slowly. We're big fans of MGM. It's a core investment for us. It's along with the thesis of People Inc. These are real-world things, real brands, and real fans, and are real assets, and it fits the profile of what we do and what we're good at. Barry looks at, and we all look at, we want great businesses in vibrant, scaled industries that have real moats. Vegas and MGM, they have that with their brands and their properties. We think we have it with our brands, too, and that's where we are, and we'll see. Great. Similar with Turo. Oh, I did a good job with the third rail. That was great. Didn't mean to frame it as a third rail. More just limited in what you can say, so I recognize that. Not to put you on the spot. Similar with Turo. You have that minority stake as well. What's your path to realized value? I started out, before I got the job, as a very happy Turo customer. Yeah. Turo, couple of really good quarters in a row. Double-digit growth, free cash flow, NPS scores. People really like using it. I think Turo's challenge now is they just got to get more people to use it. We've said, and Barry has said publicly, we'd love it to go public as a way of getting liquid. We're obviously not in a control position. We can't force that, but we would encourage that. We're very happy with Turo, and I'd say the same thing about some of the other assets. You have Vivint and The Daily Beast. They're performing. I think those two, in particular, would probably be better in another home, but everything is performing right now, and we're not in any rush to do anything that's not optimal. We have said, and we've been very clear that we'd like to monetize the balance of this portfolio and free up the cash and the capital. How do you think about, as you take a step back and look at the portfolio of assets that you have, and maybe what might fit into your broader thesis around live events and premium users and things like that. Is there anything out there that might fit that bill, not from a specific name standpoint, but more about industries or use cases that you think about or? Yeah. I'll start with People Inc., and then we can talk about the whole thing. I feel like we've done a couple of very small acquisitions that are a little bit of a head nod to where we're going, and one is we bought a food influencer network at the end of last year called Feedfeed, which is strategically important, not big, and earlier this year, we bought something called Hot Luck, a Gen Z barbecue event. These are real life, real branded things that can accentuate things we're already doing. I think going forward, our deals would be a bit bigger. We're going to try and move the needle. We're not a small business. In terms of PPLI overall, we're going to continue to invest behind People Inc. We're going to continue to invest one way or another, behind MGM. We're going to try and unlock value in these other assets. We've got a whole bunch of corporate savings that are going to run through in the next year, and we're going to hopefully shrink the shareholder base over time while we can. Now, we can't now with MGM going on. We think there is a ton of value creation ahead for us. How would you frame those investment priorities and the balancing of leaning into making some of those investments to drive growth versus maybe realizing some of those corporate overhead savings? Well, the corporate overhead is going to come from the consolidation. Yep Of the changes we made where we went from IAC to PPLI. I think we're just going to be opportunistic like we always have, and we are going to deploy capital in the way that we think is the best value. Buying back shares is the best value, great. If doing something for People Inc., the publisher is the best value, great. If it's MGM, great. There's a very good chance we do all three. That's great. Only a minute or two left, maybe bring it all home. Hopefully, you'll be part of the conference next year. Hope so. If we're sitting here in 12 months from now, what do you see as the biggest opportunity to execute on the next 12 months? Then as you look out more broadly, what are you most excited about the business? Again, I'll do People Inc. the publisher first, then I'll do the whole thing second. We are incredibly excited at the publishing business with the power of our brands. We talk a lot about planting seeds and growing trees. We have planted so many seeds. We should see a lot of these things start to sprout next year, whether it's some of the subscription things we talked about, whether it's our events growing, whether it's our content business, whether it's more AI licensing deals, whatever it is. I think we feel really good and optimistic about where we're going. For the larger entity, PPLI, I think we're just going to be really disciplined on our plan of value creation, and it's People Inc., MGM, buy back shares, monetize stakes. All of a sudden, there's a lot of very obvious value to People that can close what is some of the parts discount to the market value that we see now. That's great. Very compelling. Well, thank you so much. Cool. Thank you. This was really fun. Please join me in thanking People for being part of the conference this year. Thanks.