People Inc CEO Neil Vogel has said the publisher won’t be blocking Google yet despite falling referral traffic.
Vogel told The Wall Street Journal last month that “blocking them entirely”, in reference to Google bots crawling its content, was “100% on the table”.
He has now clarified that People Inc is “clearly not turning this off now. But it is a tool that we can use, and it is something we will constantly be looking at.”
Google made up about 21% of all traffic to 19 core People Inc brands in the past quarter, compared to roughly two-thirds at its peak.
Vogel told an investor call on Tuesday that “at the moment, the scale definitely tips in the favour of maintaining the status quo” because of the amount of traffic still coming in from Google.
“But this is a trade-off we’ll monitor. Now we’re not like galloping on a high horse trying to make a point here. What we’re really trying to do is just get to a fair economic deal for the use of our content. We will use all the tools at our disposal to do that. We’ll obviously be economically sensible in how we do that.”
Vogel said People Inc “would like to” block Google from using its content in AI products like AI Overviews and AI Mode “just like we would to anybody else who doesn’t have a deal with us”.
But although the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has told Google to separate its search and AI crawlers, and the platform is testing doing so, this is not yet flowing through to US publishers.
Votgel said: “So if we were to turn off AI, we would turn off search… we are nearly out the other side of search being a material driver of value for us. But we’re not there yet.”
[The prisoner’s dilemma: Why UK publishers are signing Google AI deals]
Total People Inc revenue was down 2% year on year to $416.7m in Q2, with digital revenue said to be up 6% to $289.9m and print revenue down 16% to $132.6m. Adjusted EBITDA was up 5% to $73.3m.
Some 57% of People Inc digital revenue is still reliant on website traffic while 43% is what is described as “non-session-based revenue” such as events, subscriptions, licensing (up 23% in Q2, including AI deals, short-form content for Netflix and products) and AI-powered ad targeting product D/Cipher+.
Sessions-based revenue was down just 1% last quarter despite a 22% drop in sessions across the 19 most significant People Inc brands because, Vogel said, “our iconic brands and best-in-class sales team, ad tech stack and ad performance continue to drive both direct sold and programmatic rate growth”.
Chief financial officer Timothy Quinn said that although traffic is down, People Inc is benefitting from a “flight to quality, which is there’s a decreasing supply of quality content on the web.
“That which is quality is commanding a premium. We’ve always commanded a premium in the programmatic market. That premium has increased and is growing…
“While our sessions are down, our rates are up significantly…”
People Inc rolling out three major subscription launches
Non-session-based revenue grew by 16%. Several digital subscriptions products are now rolling out and were cited by People Inc leadership in the latest earnings update.
Southern Living launched its first paid membership offering, Southern Living Insiders, last month. Benefits include 500 vintage recipes online for the first time, a special edition of the annual cookbook, a members-only newsletter, an extra print magazine, partner discounts, and money off and early access to events.
People Inc launched the MyRecipes app, aggregating more than 100,000 recipes from across its brands, in June last year and it now has 4.5 million free registered users.
A paid version will launch this month, Vogel said, “offering elevated features the community has been asking for”.
And Vogel teased an as-yet unnamed premium subscription bundle for the core People brand to launch in October ” featuring exclusive content, special issues, games, app-only celebrity live chats and video series and a raft of other features”.
Vogel said they are “creating fresh new ways for our communities to connect with brands they love” and using the “subscription know-how” of People Inc’s ten million print subscriber base.
He also described events as a “meaningful driver of revenue growth for us”, citing the upcoming third Charleston Food & Wine Classic, the first standalone Southern Living Tailgate event, and the newly-acquired Austin food and music festival Hot Luck.
Vogel also cited 47 original social series across People Inc “that resonate with both audiences and sponsor”, for example including People’s Pop Take launched a year ago.
Separately in the earnings call People Inc chairman Barry Diller appeared to confirm a recent Axios report that the company is exploring a sale of The Daily Beast, which is now profitable.
Also referring to healthcare career marketplace Vivian Health, Diller said: “These are small businesses and neither of them are core to us and neither of them will be part of us in the future. At what point, we can’t say, but we are as we said, and consistently have done so, we’re going to sell all of our noncore assets over time.”
The Daily Beast’s revenue was up 53% in Q2 to $20m, having grown by 36% in Q1.
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
