Brad Barket/Getty Images for Fast Company
- People Inc., like lots of digital publishers, used to depend on traffic from Google.
- Now that traffic is going away — quickly.
- That's fine, says CEO Neil Vogel, who says he figured this out early and pivoted to new business models.
Lots of publishers are freaked out about "Google Zero" — the notion that one day, Google will stop sending them any traffic at all.
That's more or less already happened at People Inc., says CEO Neil Vogel: Vogel says Google referrals used to account for 70% of his properties' traffic, but dropped off quickly in the last couple of years. Now Google represents about 25% of its mix.
That decline is supposed to be an existential problem for people like Vogel, who spent years building sites designed to harvest search traffic. Instead, he's growing at a double-digit clip.
One reason People Inc. is doing well is that Vogel, backed by Barry Diller's IAC, bought People, along with all the other titles owned by magazine publisher Meredith, back in 2021. Turns out many of those brands still mean something to lots of people.
Meanwhile, Vogel has been happy to sign deals with AI companies like OpenAI. (Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, also has an OpenAI deal.) Isn't there a chance those companies will end up being unreliable partners, just like platforms of the past? Sure, Vogel says. But he's willing to take the chance — and the money those AI companies are providing — and figure it out as he goes.
"There is a chance we are a hundred percent wrong on all of this," he tells me. "There's a chance that we're a hundred percent right. The truth is probably somewhere in between."
You can hear my full conversation with Vogel on my Channels podcast. The following is an edited excerpt of our conversation:
Peter Kafka: You are a long-tenured media executive. Is that a good thing these days?
Neil Vogel: The narrative that media is failing, it can't be successful, it's structurally broken, is something we've never subscribed to.
We believe if you have great brands, you have what you need to build a media business. If you have great brands, it gives you the opportunity to build strong, durable audiences. If you have great brands and can build great audiences, you have a great business.
What happens between great brands and building audiences is where people get confused. We don't care and have never cared whether we are reaching people on the web, on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube, on Apple News, in print magazines, you name it.
We are ruthlessly unsentimental about how we do it or how we used to do it.
Making your sites visible to Google used to be your main job. Now you've moved on from that.
After we bought Meredith, which was Meredith and Time Inc., the knock on us was that 75% of our audience came from Google. Cut to today: We've lost 50% of our Google sessions over the last two years, and we're still growing 15%.
So it can work.
We were very good at making content people liked, and we were very good at Google.
But we were so Google-dependent that we were also the first people to see Google start to change. We saw that search page changing. At first, it was all their stuff [being featured on the search results], like YouTube. Then Reddit, and then AI showing up.
And we're like, "Wait a minute, this is not sustainable. We've got these great brands, we have this great distribution channel. We need more." So without a lot of fanfare, we built an incredible email presence. We built TikTok, we built Instagram, we built Apple News, we built all of these things. We built our own assets. We're doing all kinds of things to connect directly with advertisers and users.
So when Google really fell off a cliff two years ago. We were prepared for it.
You would think that we would be the guys that would be doing the worst. Now we're kind of the guys doing the best.
Publishers had been complaining about Google as long as there's been Google.
These platforms, they don't owe us or any publisher anything. They're going to operate in their self-interests.
What we realized a few years ago is there are platforms that our incentives are more aligned with. TikTok and Instagram need our content to attract users, more so than Google. With Google, we wanted them to send people to us. That is not in their interest.
The best thing is to be there directly. Where they come to your apps, they come to the things you're building.
This is what every publisher I talk to says: We're going to survive because our brand means something. People are going to come to us. We're going to have a direct relationship. I'm sure that will be true for a very small number of publishers. How do you make sure you're in that very small group?
We're in it. We are on the other side of it. Google's actions don't knock us around in the way they would've like five or six years ago. We don't think about that very much anymore. We think much more about making things that will resonate with humans and the different ways we can connect with them.
The upside of the Google model is that people come to your site and you can show them ads. What happens when they see your stuff on platforms you control?
Our business used to be very easy to understand: Get traffic to website, sell out. X times Y equals Z. We are not that anymore.
We are now 40 brands, and 10 brands that matter. Our 10 brands all have dramatically different business models that do dramatically different things to make money.
For instance, the No. 1 thing we do at Better Homes and Gardens is a license — we sell products inside of Walmart. That's a great business for us. Food & Wine, the biggest thing we do is an events business. Southern Living is events and old-school publishing. People looks like something you'd be familiar with. InStyle looks like something totally brand new.
If you look at a media business and you want to have one model across everything, you need to do something else.
You're moving away from Google, and you're aware of the dangers of being dependent on platforms. But at the same time, you are cutting deals with AI companies. Don't you run the same risk of being abused by them?
We're very aware. If you zoom out and you think about what an AI company needs, they need three things: They need a model. They need a lot of power. And they need data to put in that model.
The world is currently out of data. Everything that can be crawled has been crawled.
There's a little bit of new stuff created every day, but that's about it.
And who's making that is us. So we're very important.
But the worry is that so much of this is a commodity — if they can't get it from you, they can get it from somebody else, or they can get it from somebody who summarized your work. It's very possible that your stuff is not worth nearly as much as you think it is: It's your entire business, but to these guys, it's a fraction of a fraction.
Maybe it's possible. I don't think that's true based on what's going on. We produce a ton of new content every day, every month. They want that. They want our historical archives, they want our videos, they want our pictures. They need our things.
Don't you worry that they'll end up creating new products, built with your data, that will end up competing with you?
The case that you're outlining is search. And we've already lost more than half of our referrals from Google. And we're fine. If we lose even more, we're still going to be fine.
The trick for us is our content has to be good enough to stand on its own with brands that resonate and people care about. In this current environment with a lot of uncertainty, both in media and in the broader universe, people default to brands because they trust them.
People don't know what's real. They know that they don't just want an LLM answer or an artificial experience.
You work for Barry Diller. Does he really care about this stuff? I know it's his business and it's growing, but it's not sexy. Whenever I see him being interviewed, people are asking him about Hollywood, which he hasn't been working in for years. Or whether he'll buy CNN.
I can show you the inbox of my phone and tell you that he really cares. He has believed in us from the jump. He's given us a couple of billion dollars to buy Time Inc. and Meredith. And I would hope to think that he's very proud of where we've landed now — as this profitable, stable, growing media business that has brands America cares about.
Look: Every day working for Barry Diller is not Christmas. But that's kind of the good part, too. He calls it creative conflict — the encouragement of the argument, and the best idea wins.
It is not always the easiest room, but it's a fun room.