“The narrative that media cannot work in the modern era is totally wrong”, according to Dotdash Meredith chief executive Neil Vogel.
Speaking at the Press Gazette Media Strategy Network conference in New York he explained how the wedding of Dotdash’s technical know-how with Meredith’s giant magazine brands had made for a successful marriage.
Former investment banker Vogel was chief executive of smaller online publisher Dotdash (then part of Barry Diller’s IAC) when it bought magazine giant Meredith for $2.8bn in December 2021.
In its third full year of trading the combined business turned over $1.8bn (up 5% year-on-year) and delivered profit (EBITDA) of $295m (up 32% year-on-year).
DDM now publishes six magazines which include giants like Better Homes and Gardens (three million circulation), Southern Living (2.8 million), People (2.5 million) and Real Simple (two million). Online brands include Allrecipes, Investopedia and Verywell. It stakes a claim as the biggest online and print publisher in the US.
[Read more: Top 50 magazines in the US by circulation]
Vogel said: “The basic tenets of media are you have to have great brands, you have to have great audiences, you have to treat them with the utmost respect and love. You will then figure out how to make money if you have these things. If you don’t have these things, and you try to do this, you will go to zero.
“This narrative that media cannot work in the modern era is totally wrong, and it’s told by people that either a) are sentimental, which is the enemy of everything, or b) have bad business models. And they’re confusing bad business models with an industry that can’t work.
“There are tons of businesses proving media can work. We’re one of them. So is Meta, so is Snap, so is Pinterest. These businesses might not look like they’ve looked in the past, but if you’re constantly staring at your own belly button, nothing is going to happen.”
He emphasised that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work when publishing multiple media brands.
“You have to understand that brands are like children. They’re all totally different. And what we do with Food + Wine, what we do with Verywell and what we do with People do not resemble each other in any way.
“The only thing they share in common is parts of the CMS and ad stack, but nothing else.”
The one change that made a big difference at DDM’s media brands
He added: “The number one change we’ve made at all of our brands, which has been the single most successful thing we done, is when we have an editor-in-chief, you are the editor-in-chief of a brand.
“You are the keeper of the vibe. You are the person who has to understand why people love Travel + Leisure, and then you have to figure out how it works on Tiktok and on Instagram and in our print magazine, and on the web and on Apple News.
“And you have to understand that you don’t make content that you want to make and then put it across platforms. You make what the platforms want you to make, what people want you to make, who exist there.”
Vogel said e-commerce, programmatic advertising, licensing and events were all big revenue streams for the company.
He added: “I am very optimistic about media. I’m very optimistic about brands. If you make yourself essential, you’ll be fine.”
DDM’s brands are focused around the key consumer verticals of health, finance, food and drink, home, beauty and style, travel, technology and entertainment. Vogel described the content as largely intent-based, meaning the articles consumers read often coincide with an intent to do something which could involve spending money.
He said: “We don’t do news, we don’t do politics, we don’t do sports. We never, ever will. And we don’t, because we don’t understand those audiences.
“We understand if you’re trying to cook something for dinner, we know what you’re doing. If you’re dealing with a kid who’s got the flu and go on the internet trying to solve that we know what you’re doing.”
When Dotdash bought Meredith it had an ace up its sleeve in the form of a plan to roll out contextual ad-targeting technology, which was launched as D/Cipher in May 2023.
This week DDM appointed adtech entrepreneur Jim Lawson to lead accelerating the growth of D/Cipher, which is now used not only to optimise ad performance across DDM’s 40 brands and 200 million-strong monthly audience but is also used to buy advertising across the premium internet on behalf of paying clients.
The launch of D/Cipher coincided with a sustained uptick in DDM’s digital revenue.
When Press Gazette asked Vogel to explain more about the technology, which works without the need to install cookie files on the browsers of readers to track their movements across the internet, he said: “We’ve always understood the power of intent…
“What we started to learn was we don’t need any data on any individual human. We don’t need cookies at all, because, based on where you land on any of our sites, and we have 40 sites, and we have 30 million visitors a day, it’s almost all service.
“We know exactly what you’re doing and exactly what you’re going to do next.
“It turns out that when you know someone’s context and what they’re doing right this second, that sort of targeting beats cookies. Materially, cookies is all backwards-looking, just trying to guess who someone is, and it’s creepy as shit.
“What we can do is, across all of our sites, you give us your target, and we will tell you exactly where to put it, and we don’t need a single cookie to do it. And it beats cookies.
“60% of our premium deals have some D/Cipher targeting in them, and it has become like the secret weapon for us. We knew that we’d be able to target on context. I think we finally productised it.”
A newer version of the product, D/Cipher+, now uses the technology to “buy the rest of the internet as a managed service” for commercial partners.
DDM currently has ten clients using the new tech two months after launch which, Vogel explained, also helps rival publishers sell their online advertising at better rates.
He said: “Right now if you’re a publisher, every DSP [demand-side platform], every SSP [supply side platform], is packaging your stuff up and reselling it. We’re going to do it and we’re going to do it better.
“We’re going to do it for better prices, because that’s what we understand. And if this works, you could grind all the way back to our original theory that if you make amazing content that delights people and you build audiences, you can find respectful ways to make money. You can sell ads in a respectful way.
“This is a way that we can use that flow of data, the most first-party data any publisher has. And we don’t need to know who you are individually for this to work.
“We just need to know what you’re doing. We’re actually helping you, not annoying you, not stealing your data. You’re not going to get retargeted two weeks later. No cookies are involved.
“So this is a really big lottery ticket baked into what we’re doing. And when we originally bought Meredith, we didn’t actually know it was going to be this, but we knew that we would end up with this crazy contextual pool of data, we’ve got publisher advantages of brand and safety and all that stuff, platform-like scale…
“Why can’t we compete with all these other guys that are hoovering up money on the SSP side? We think we can.”
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