At Dotdash Meredith, CEO Neil Vogel remembers sitting around with his management team, after $2 million in “incremental” ad revenue appeared, and wondering, “Have we hit peak Dotdash?”

“We had a really great formula: make incredible content, make really great sites and experiences, and have fewer ads that work better,” Neil said.

Which brings me back to late 2021, because that’s when IAC plunked down $2.7 billion to buy the storied Meredith brands: People, Entertainment Weekly, Better Homes & Gardens, InStyle. It was something of a minnow swallowing the whale, and indicative of the prevailing winds of publishing that were moving against glossy brands and toward performance workhorses. 

“We had this incredible ability to serve users and to make advertisers happy because we had lots of intent,” Neil said. “What we were lacking was brands.”

Of course, soon after the deal took place, Jerome Powell decided he’d seen enough with the normalization of $7 coffee and started hiking interest rates. The repricing of markets isn’t fun. And the now re-re-re-rechristened Dotdash Meredith has been no different. As it has integrated the Meredith properties, it has also dealt with a soft ad market it can do little to mitigate. You are not going to sell as many mortgages when interest rates are high. In the first quarter, Dotdash Meredith revenue declined 23% year over year, including 15% in digital advertising.

“We bought at the frothiest point in the market,” Neil allowed. “The market is going to go up, the market is going to go down. If you look out at a long time horizon, it doesn’t matter.”

Neil and I discussed the deal (“I would do it again in a heartbeat”), the demise of the third-party cookie (“We don’t need cookies to deliver scale and performance”), and WTF AI (the whole market is going to change).