All right. We can get started here. Great. Let's get started. My name's Ron Josey. I lead internet coverage here at Citi, and I'm excited to have with us Tim Quinn. Tim is a CFO of People, formerly known as IAC, as everybody knows, with here today. With us here today, there's a lot going on at People, as we all know, from portfolio simplification, transformation of operating assets and in businesses, investments, the opportunities around AI and licensing. The list goes on and on. Tim, thanks for joining us. I've got some questions. Maybe I'll kick off with one or two icebreakers here. Okay. You wake up in the morning. What's your daily driver for your list of all the publishing assets that you have to get the news flow or the insights that keep you going? I usually start with People, the magazine still, just because it's easy and it's digestible. Then I love Food & Wine. Food & Wine? Yeah. Okay. Sort of my go-to. I get the magazine. I consume it online. I consume it socially. I've started to actually pay a little bit of attention and follow InStyle too, so we'll talk about that today a little bit. I was going to ask where do you get the news? You'd said magazine, clearly online. Do you go anywhere else? I start with the People app. People app, okay. We are going to talk about today. Yeah. Yep. That is why it is most accessible. It is on my phone. It is on my kind of new desktop. There is no desktop really anymore. Then Instagram. I would say a lot of Instagram. Yep. Yep. Perfect. Well, thanks for that. Sure. Appreciate it. It's always good to understand how we use the product, right? Yeah. That's key. Absolutely. Let's see. You've been in the CFO role for a little over a month now, but you've been with Meredith IAC for more than a decade, 12 plus years. Is that right? Yep. Over the last 6 months, I just wanted to get your thoughts as People Incorporated has evolved into what it is now. Would love to hear your thoughts on just this evolution of the business, the simplification journey, things along those lines. What are you focused on? What's People Incorporated focused on now? Right. The business is People, PPLI is the ticker. It is the former IAC, so that is what most people still know it by, and we almost use it interchangeably still. Hopefully not forever. The reason we changed the name was part of the simplification strategy that you just talked about. What we set out to do more than a year ago, in partnership with Chris, former CFO, and the team, and Mark Schneider, who is here, is really start to simplify the story so investors could get their head and hands around what the future of the business is. The core assets that we hold are People, the media business, which we are going to talk a lot about today, and MGM, a 26%-27% stake in MGM. We made an offer to acquire 100% of MGM in June. That work is still ongoing. There is not going to be a ton we can talk about that here today. Putting that aside, what PPLI is today are those two core assets as well as holdings in Vivian Health, a nurse marketplace, nursing marketplace, The Daily Beast, Turo, which is a ride-sharing application, and a handful of other assets. Importantly, what we have tried to do and really embarked on doing is really simplifying the holdco structure. Presumably, part of the holdco structure is what has caused the valuation disconnect in the marketplace. We have consolidated the corporate overhead structure of IAC and the People operating business, and on a pro forma basis, will reduce corporate overhead to about $45 million by Q1 next year. So, significant simplification, selling down of assets, reducing corporate overhead, and focusing on our core businesses, which again, are People, the media business, and MGM. Got it. That is a lot going on. Yes. You brought MGM, and I know we are not going to get too much in here, but would love to hear just the latest on the proposal. I think Barry talked during earnings just maybe the benefits of increasing the ownership or at least owning the asset. But any insights on timelines from here? I thought there was a few mentions during earnings. We are now a few weeks post that. Yeah. It's been about a month since earnings. We're continuing to work through it. We can't really talk a lot about it today. We really are in a sort of a no-discussion zone on it. Other than to say, we made this offer on June 1. We think the business is undervalued. MGM, we have high confidence in the management team. In any and all cases, whether we continue in the current state or own a majority of the business, the management team would continue to operate that business as it does today. We think there's a lot of value to unlock there, and we're excited to either maintain our current position or ideally extend our position to a kind of a majority ownership stake. That's about all we can say today. Okay. Sticking with the simplification sort of focus here, let's get that out of the way before we talk about the operating assets. Yeah What's even more exciting. I'd love your thoughts on how do you balance investing in People, the buybacks, potentially more acquisitions or selling non-core assets, and of course, potential M&A. Just how do you balance the mandate here, or at least the focus? Yeah. The thing I want to highlight for folks, investors in particular, is the strength of the balance sheet as we sit here today. That'll address some of your other questions. We have about $1.3 billion of cash combined between the holding company and the operating company. We sold a venture stake late Q2 into early Q3. That deal has closed, so that helped, too. We have about $1.4 billion of debt. So we're on the verge of, or soon we'll be sort of net debt neutral. Okay. We have borrowing capacity. We have revolvers. Most importantly, we are generating cash. We are generating cash at the operating company level. Over the last 12 months, we generated $175 million of free cash flow after debt and taxes. We are selling non-core assets. We are not done doing that either. Again, while we like the businesses, we think there are better homes for Vivian Health and The Daily Beast. We are excited about and hope to see an IPO of Turo in the not too distant future. The collection of all those assets would add hundreds of millions of dollars of incremental cash to the business. In addition, we have some litigation pending against Google around their ad tech monopoly. We think that can generate, we have said, nine figures of cash. You take a business that is net neutral today with a lot of borrowing capacity, you add all those sort of sources of cash as well as, most importantly, the ongoing operating business, and you have something that is very healthy that the market is valuing today at zero. That is the core investment thesis. What we will do about it is continue to simplify, continue to reduce the corporate overhead wherever we can, sell non-core assets, buy back stock when we can, both in PPLI, and if this transaction were not to go through, potentially continue to increase our stake in MGM Resorts International, reduce our debt levels, and potentially, and hopefully, do some M&A at the operating company level. It really is a strong story, a strong cash flow story, a strong balance sheet story. It gives us a lot of optionality, and we are excited about where we can take it. Most importantly, it is about executing on the core business. That is a good segue for the core business here. As we get through simplification, a lot of work to do, understood. What is fascinating is People Incorporated is in the middle of a digital transformation. Yeah. We all see the changes going on from a search perspective, from a sessions perspective as well. SEO and AI. Just talk to us a little bit more about the approaches in the business to acquire traffic to offset some of these challenges from an SEO and AI perspective. Should we expect sessions to sort of level out here? Yeah. To set the table for folks, over the last 20 years, we have got 20 quality brands, 10 really strong brands, I would say. Primarily, the business was built off of the dot-com, the traditional digital business. That paradigm changed about 3 years ago, 3 and a half, 4 years ago, when AI was introduced. I think we were early to see those changes coming. We were pretty forthright about it with investors and internally with our management team that we had to recreate this business and really kind of rethink how we were going to make the business evolve and make our brands evolve. The way to do that is to put the brands first. We talk about it internally, and I think it is a nice framing for people externally. There was the magazine era of 25-plus years ago. There was the digital era of the last 20 years, and it is going to be the brand era is what we are embarking on now. Brand era really means putting our brands back where they belong, in the forefront of the consciousness of our consumers, and building businesses and revenue products and revenue models off of those brands. We have been able to do that while withstanding the changes that AI has brought to the search ecosystem. That means over the last 2 to 3 years, our traffic to our dot-coms from search have gone from, call it, 65% of our traffic source to about 21% this last year. That is a precipitous decline in traffic. Over that same period of time, we have been able to grow revenue for 11 consecutive quarters and improve margins for most of those quarters. We really feel like we are onto something. We are going to talk, I know, a little bit today about where we go from here and where we are investing and how we are doing that. That is sort of the core of the vision, and we are excited about where we sit today. I like how you mentioned magazine era to digital era to brand era. Yeah. One of the things that I think is fascinating from a People perspective, just the newer traffic sources. You mentioned, as we started out the conversation, the magazine, online, the app, and of course, we have social media. Yeah. Just talk to us, we are now in the brand era, how do you build these brands? Maybe strategically, the importance of having a brand now more than ever. Yeah Particularly as we're in an answer engine world. Yeah. The brands are the equity of this business, right? You can't create brands out of whole cloth sitting here today. It's extremely expensive and highly risky. We have these brands that, in many cases, have lived, in some cases, for over 100 years, in most cases, over 50 years. So we're talking about People, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Southern Living, Allrecipes, and many others. So that's our core. That's our foundation on which we build. We've started to reframe the discussion for investors to say we have session-based revenue streams and non-session-based revenue streams. Our session-based revenue streams are, again, the dot-com era. That's about 56% of our business, and we've been able to roughly hold the line, give or take, on the session-based revenue streams. The brand-led era really resides in the non-session-based revenue streams. Non-sessions, in this context, means everything from Apple News to licensing deals to TikTok and Instagram, sort of the breadth of places where consumers either read or interact with our brands. That 44% of our revenue that comes from non-session-based sources grew 19% in the first half of the year. The future is the non-session-based part of the business. Each one of those brands has its own unique strategies, products, and business models. So it makes it a little bit more complex, but there's a lot of commonality between what each of the brands are trying to do, and that is really going to be the future, and we'll talk a little bit more about sort of what some of those specific models are here as we go. I sort of want to dig into this now in terms of the non-session based, Apple News, licensing, TikTok, Instagram, you mentioned it, wherever people are. Yep. Every brand manages it differently. Would it be fair to say, because everybody, it seems, is on social media? Yep There are Travel + Leisure aficionados, there are also People aficionados, there are also InStyle across Yep it all. My question is, how do you leverage this, and how do you build it up across all these brands so you know maybe the secret sauce of one can maybe go to the next one? Right. Yeah. That's a good question. Today we're making more content than we ever have at a lower per unit cost than we ever have. We're doing that using AI and tools and automation. Again, still 100% human-created. Right? We are then taking that content, and we are customizing it or making it specifically for each or each platform on which we distribute it. So content that goes to Apple News is separate, although it may have some commonality with the content that lives on YouTube, or content that lives on TikTok or Instagram. So you take Travel + Leisure, you mentioned as an example, again, making more content. That content, it's one of our best-performing brands across Apple News and distributed platforms. It has new YouTube series. It has a vibrant Substack community, right? Each one of those business or distribution approaches kind of puts that brand front and center in front of consumers and kind of perpetuates and continues to elevate that brand. What we have, which I think is unique, is our sales force. Our sales force allows us to do, our advertising and sponsorship sales force allows us to do, is now take those audiences, package them up, and sell them to advertisers. In the dot-com era, again, we owned the ad ecosystem. We owned where those ads resided. We owned the ad tech technology. In the distributed network, we don't. What we've gotten really good at is taking advertisers who want to reach the Travel + Leisure audience and package an event with a social amplification, with potentially some magazine or some dot-com media, put that into a package, and it's highly performant for those advertisers. That's what has allowed us to really accelerate this non-session-based revenue stream. Without the sales team, it would be virtually impossible to do. That was the revenue side that you said before, revenue growing, non-session-based. Yeah, non-session-based revenue, 44% of revenue growing 20%. Significant portion of that, again, it's a combination of licensing and ad sales. It's ad sales in, I would call it not necessarily non-traditional, but new ways. I am going to get to licensing and ad sales in the newer, call it monetization efforts. As we think about these newer brands, as we are in the brand era, and as you mentioned earlier, with Google accounting for 21% of, I think, People's traffic down from 65%, talk to us just about the debate internally of working with Google or blocking Google if that is a thing. When do you think we get to this sort of natural stabilization? Understanding there is AI mode, AI summaries, AI over, you know what I mean. Yeah. The Google relationship is complicated, it is complex. Historically, people know this, but I will frame it this way. Google crawled the internet, put results on a search page, blue links on a search page, built a giant ad business off of that model, and then the reciprocity was would refer traffic back to people like us or anybody else who provided content on the internet. In the AI world, they do not do that any longer. They now take that content, crawl the content for AI purposes, and then keep the user on the AI experience. Despite what others talk about or Google might say, there is virtually no traffic that comes from an AI experience back to the publisher or to any content creator. It puts us in this difficult position. It gives us the opportunity to create more durable models, which we just talked about. It also puts us in this position where Google is now taking this content for free and using it to enrich its own business. That gets to this question of, okay, where does it end? We do not know where traffic goes from here. I expect it will continue to decline. Our business models, our internal financial models are underwritten off of that expectation. There is that. We have some brands that are completely out the other side of it, meaning they are already, they have lost 80% of their traffic. They are some of the most cited brands on AI overviews, and yet they still get meaningful traffic from search. We do not think it goes to zero. We think it is asymptotic to something. Call it a year out, we would think we would get somewhere near there if the product experiences sort of persist as they do today. That is where we think it goes. The challenge then is what do we do about Google and its crawling of our content for AI overviews, for their AI overviews, their Gemini product? That is an ongoing debate that we are having internally. We think that it is unfair that Google continues to crawl our content without compensation back to us. Others pay us. OpenAI pays us, Meta pays us. We have foundational model providers who recognize the bargain, yet Google does not. What makes Google unique is they formerly did. That puts us in this interesting challenge, and we can go deeper into that if you want, but that is the debate that we are having now internally. So maybe let's take that, I don't want to get in the debate too much on Google, but you do have the licensing deals that you mentioned with OpenAI and Meta. Is that the framework that you're using for others? Help us understand what is that framework. The framework we're using is Content is a critical raw material to AI, full stop. As critical as electricity or compute or the models themselves. AI can't live without content. Yet, for some reason, there's a position amongst some that they do not have to pay for that content, or there should be no commercial relationship for the crawling of that content. We think that that is wrong. We have good and valuable partners who are paying us, as I mentioned, OpenAI and Meta and others. That's sort of in the foundational model peer set. We think the foundational model guys can pay folks for the crawling of their content and the learning that they're doing on that content. Then we see a second side of the marketplace evolving and developing that we're excited about, which is much more of a pay per use model, a kind of a tolling model. It could be a CPM model. But something that says, "When you crawl our content and show our content in an AI Overviews or in some sort of AI answer, then we and others who were the raw materials for that answer should be compensated for that answer." There's a positive, and, I think growing movement to recognize that. It was precipitated by about a year ago, we and others started blocking crawlers, and the AI company started to recognize that when content providers block them, especially at some scale, there's deterioration in the performance of the products. So that's where we think it's going. Naturally, as a CFO, I am impatient. I want it to happen faster. Sure. The market. The market. Yeah, exactly. That is where we think it is going, so we think it is sort of bifurcated 2 parts. Foundational model guys can pay a license to kind of consume your content, train your content, build their giant businesses off your content, then pay as you go for rights-cleared models, not dissimilar to maybe how the music and record industry evolved. It is an interesting comment on the pay as you go. I think we understand on the learning, the training, the consumer side on the licensing. The pay as you go is a little bit different and something that I guess Google hasn't ever done before, meaning that it is always sort of been sacred that the results are the results. They can still show the results, but now if they have to Well, I think that I would put Google in the category of foundational model. Yeah. I would think of the pay as you go guys as think about the application layer that is going to be built, is being built right now. I am sure there is billions of dollars being invested in this application layer that is going to reside off of AI, both open and closed AI models, right? For people to build those applications, especially B2B applications or any real application, they should want, and we think they will want rights-cleared content. They cannot just take the content, just like you cannot. That is not how the world works. For rights-cleared content that, let us say Bank of America or GEICO would want to use in their models or their applications rather, they should pay content providers for access to that content. That is what we think. We do not think it has got to be zillions of dollars, but on just a couple of pennies per transaction, it will add up very quickly, and it will keep the ecosystem vibrant. It will keep the content ecosystem vibrant, and that, as I said at the outset, that content ecosystem is a critical raw material to the overall health of the market. That is very different than surfacing results from P eople links. Correct Table of brands. Correct. Got it. Let's talk a little bit, you talked to revenue per session growth accelerated in the quarter. I think we're growing 28%, if I'm not mistaken. A lot of that is just across digital ad targeting. I want to understand the drivers that's driving that growth because we're driving the revenue, we need that session to sort of, we're looking for sessions to stabilize for everything we just talked about. Yeah. Would love more thoughts on how is that happening. Yeah, I mean, increasingly revenue per session is becoming a little bit bifurcated from the story, and that is because of the sort of session non-session framework Yeah that I outlined before. If sessions are going down and yet you are continuing to grow revenue, definitely your revenue per session is going up. How are we growing revenue becomes the more important question, and we are growing revenue by growing this non-session-based revenue. Let us just unpack that a little bit. Yeah. Non-session-based revenue, the fastest growing, biggest contributors to that are content licenses. Not AI licenses, but actually content licenses. Distributed licenses where we distribute our content to Apple News, to Yahoo, and AOL, still to NewsBreak and people like that. Again, that comes back to the fact that we are making more high-quality content today than we ever have, and I think there is a bit of a flight to quality. That is one big part of it. The second part is events. We talked about sort of bringing the real life, the manifestation of our brands to advertising partners and consumers, then packaging those experiences in a way that it benefits the advertiser, that amplifies the advertiser's messages. We were going through an example this morning of Guinness 0 and their launching of a non-alcoholic product at one of our events, amplifying those events across all of our social channels, across their social channels, creating content for them, YouTube, all of that. That is the new model, example of the new model. We are excited about that. We are creating more social series, social video series. That is going to be a meaningful multimillion-dollar contributor to growth this year. We created a programming called The Intern, for example. You ask, "Where do I consume my media?" And why InStyle? This is sort of the joke. I am not a natural InStyle consumer necessarily, but The Intern is a very, very funny show that you can find on Instagram that has had, I think it is in its 20th season. A season is kind of five or six short episodes. Super popular with advertisers and has rejuvenated a brand that used to be a big fat book of pictures 10 years ago, thick book of pictures. Those are all the non-session-based revenue streams that we're building today, and we think are the foundation for the future. I think we're going to talk a little bit about sort of like inversion and where we go from here. But we're continuing to grow sort of in this mid-single digits, mid to high single digits range, despite the traffic constraints. We think by kind of continuing to invest in these brands, we can get that back to sort of 10% growth, which is our sort of long-term goal and aspiration. To that inversion side, I think subscriptions are a part of the business as well. Brand partnerships, I think you just talked about Guinness 0 as example. The question we get is, as you expand the monetization set of the content assets you have, just how big is a non-traditional advertising approach? Or how do we think about subscriptions and the brand partnerships? Yeah, we think it can be meaningful. Again, it takes some time to build. The example I'll give you today is we launched a product a year ago, last June, a little over a year ago, called MyRecipes. MyRecipes is a web experience, formerly a web experience, where you can store all your favorite recipes from across all of our collection of brands and more broadly. That product has 5 million registered users today. Okay. From next to nothing 14 months ago, has a highly engaged and active user base, a user base that is contributing more content to it every day, so there's real switching costs. Last month, or 3 weeks ago, we launched a MyRecipes app. The MyRecipes app is meant to be an upgradable subscription model where you can take the MyRecipes experience, the sort of recipe-saving experience. Now you can apply it to Instagram, TikTok, social, you can do meal planning, prep, other things. So it becomes kind of your recipe hub. The idea was to take an ad-supported model of the last year, grow the subscription base, or grow the member base or the download base, the user base substantially quickly using 100% our own internal assets, and then migrate it to a paid application or a paid product. We see that analog, and we see we can apply it in different areas. We are excited to do the same thing for People. I said I consume the People app experience on my phone as part of my daily routine. Today, again, that is a free ad-supported product. We are excited to launch something that will be more of a subscription product later this year. Another example, Southern Living Insiders? Yeah. Southern Living Insiders is another great example. Yeah. Southern Living, one of our most popular brands, I mean, huge following in the South. What we did is in that example, take a package of basically a membership model where you can get access to historical content, a recipe vault, special issues, some swag, because everyone loves some swag, and create a membership model off of that. And we can see that that sort of can evolve again over time. So each one of these are seeds that we are planting. We think that what they ultimately will be direct relationships with our consumers that are going to create a much more durable model for the future. One thing we get questions on is D/Cipher overall. We have been talking a lot about the brands, but let us talk a little bit more about what D/Cipher is doing and really the intent-based platform, I think, that is underneath it. Yeah. D/Cipher is an ad targeting capability. It uses first-party data of ours. Again, our brands have always commanded a very significant premium in the marketplace because our advertising performs real content made by real humans, consumed by real humans, in a respectful ad experience, usually very high-intentioned users. What we thought we could do is take our first-party data, both our user data and our traffic data, or our content consumption data, and apply it across the broader web. You take an ecosystem that is definitionally contained today because of the declines in search traffic and say, "Well, I no longer have to be constrained by that. I can find for you, GEICO or Guinness," in the example we used before, these same audiences off platform. That is an exciting sort of opportunity for us to extend, to take a constraint away of our business that does now exist in an AI world and unconstrain it. We are out using, again, that valuable ad sales team to do that. We have had notable success so far in CTV and extending our capabilities to CTV, an area we would not be in today. Political advertising, we expect and hope to have a strong quarter, strong next 60 days on the political advertising side. That is an example of sort of taking a capability and applying it again. That would be non-session-based revenue. Yeah. That was the next question as we think about sessions and where that is going. We have about 4 minutes left. Is there any questions from the audience? We have one here. I do not know if there is a mic or mic is coming your way. What happens to Barry Diller's shares he has control of when he dies? What will be the policy that will govern values? Barry's stake is largely held in trust with his family. It will pass, economically, it will pass to his heirs. Sorry, the second part of the question was? Barry's a great builder, but if you get MGM, the back end is going to sell at a phenomenal discount. The question is, what is the policy for the shareholders of PPLI to realize value as opposed to being trapped at, who knows what Barry's successors want to do? I think IAC has always been, and PPLI in new incarnation has always been, particularly clever, I think, as you know, in monetizing assets that don't naturally fit together on their own, right? Creating structures or spins or what have you. We'll see what the future holds with MGM. It's a little hard to know right now. If the transaction were to come to pass, I have to envision, and we all envision, that it will look something like IAC has done for the last 5 or 10 years. We will find the right home for each asset to maximize the value of each asset. For a period of time that might mean cohabitating, so to speak, and over time, splitting. Ultimately, I think from a governance perspective, you rely on the board of PPLI and the board of MGM Resorts International to make sure that we're doing what's in the best interest of our shareholders. And How much do you care from a financial perspective if there's a decision of whether the models can train on your data versus whether they can actually cite the data directly? What is the financial implication of that decision? If it's they can train on it, but they can't cite the view of a food critic, but they can train on what critics look like, how critics write. How much does that impact litigation and other potential? Again, we think that the training is, not that it has happened, it's not over, but it's happened in the large part, right? That's where we want to go get paid properly. We want fair restitution from the foundational model providers, right? So that's going to be the OpenAIs, the Geminis, the Anthropics, the Metas, the Xs of the world. The citation model is a little bit more what I was saying before, where you say, "If you're going to use our content to specifically answer a question," generally speaking, you say there's 3 to 6 citations per AI answer. If we are one of those 3 to 6, then we should get paid one-third or one-sixth or some derivative portion off of that answer. Our sites, the collection of PPLI sites, of People Incorporated sites, sites, are cited top 5 or 6 in the world, based on all available metrics, and there's increasingly more metrics available for the citation. So we think we should be paid either or both from the foundational model guys or on a pay-as-you-go citation basis. We're working very hard to make that a reality. Again, it takes time. There's a lot of disparate interests. Of course, no one wants to pay for something that they get for free today. That's where the blocking comes in. The more we can block, the more leverage we have. We'll see how that all plays out. Great. There is a quick one up here. I have got one wrap-up question, too. We are coming to time. Yeah, quickly here. As you think about maximizing the value of each asset and structurally improving profitability across your brands, what is People's AI playbook to either automate certain functions or just eke out initial efficiencies? Yeah. We have done an amazing job on the content side specifically in this last year. That is where I would say more content and lower cost per unit than we ever have before. Still human-created. That is really like workflows, research, that type of thing. I think the next year or so, it is going to be a lot more about RFP ingestion, response, targeting, ad targeting, using our data, consumer marketing, all of that. That is a little bit more of an optimistic view. I do not think it is all just that we all get automated to zero or something as humans. There is a lot more we can do and a lot of projects we are going to. We are now seeing, unlike a year ago, where it was theoretical, it is now practical. It is now happening. With that, maybe a quick wrap-up here. You are 12 years into IAC Dotdash Meredith. Talk to us about what just gets you excited, what gets you out of bed every morning. Yeah. It is reinventing ourselves every day. It is creating these durable models that we are talking about at the operating business. It is solving for the value disconnect at the parent company. It is working through the complexities that we just acknowledged around AI and our position in AI. It is getting educated about MGM. I started out doing some gaming investment banking 15 years ago with our CEO, Neil Vogel. 15 years ago, maybe 30 years ago. Now we are back full circle to Everything builds on each other. That is right. back to where we started. It is never dull. It is really exciting. Well, that is great. It is a great way to end it. Thank you very much, Tim, for your time. Thank you all.