iac

People Inc. is offsetting a 50% decline in Google search traffic through off-platform growth and its highest digital revenue gains in five quarters.

The layoffs reflect a strategic decision on People Inc.’s part to free up money to invest in growth areas, according to CEO Neil Vogel’s memo to employees.

People Inc. – the former Dotdash Meredith – is fighting on multiple fronts to keep its business growing as Google Search declines precipitously as a source of referral traffic.

DDM reported 1% Q1 revenue growth, citing traffic downturns Google’s AI search results and soft advertising demand due to tariff-induced uncertainty.

DDM is expanding its performance-focused contextual targeting solution, D/Cipher, to third-party inventory.

Ad revenue was helped along by 9% growth in unique visitors to the top sites in DDM’s portfolio. Programmatic ad rates were up roughly 36% in Q2, spurred by adoption of DDM’s D/Chipher contextual targeting solution.

Dotdash Meredith previewed plans for how its OpenAI partnership could provide incremental traffic and scale its contextual targeting capabilities across a wider network of sites and media types.

Here’s some good news about a digital publisher (no, seriously). IAC-owned Dotdash Meredith returned to digital ad revenue growth in Q4, with a 9% uptick to $284 million.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Uncapped Streaming TV viewers know what it’s like to be hounded by an ad for days or weeks at a time. Shira Ovide of The Washington Post explores how to avoid this unfortunate phenomenon – although it’s not an encouraging report. People can jump […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Dot Dot Dot – Dash Dash Dash – Dot Dot Dot Dotdash Meredith is feeling the same pain as many others amid a pullback in advertising. And IAC’s revenue woes were compounded by soft consumer demand, which dinged its affiliate marketing business, according […]

Turns out 2022 was a bad year to merge two large media companies into one massive media company. Both Dotdash and Meredith experienced headwinds throughout the year. Traffic was soft compared with the rise in consumption during the pandemic, and the digital advertising market was unexpectedly weak. And next year isn’t looking rosy.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Personalization Delusion The ability to dynamically scale creative and A/B test dozens – even hundreds – of ad campaign permutations, all potentially targeting specific audience types, has led marketers away from making a single piece of creative that stands alone and appeals to as […]

Less is more for Dotdash Meredith, IAC’s fastest-growing business unit. When Meredith’s Health.com site migrated to Dotdash’s digital platform last week, the impact was immediate. Although the site now hosts 30% fewer ads, its pages load five times faster, and the click-through rate on ads is up by 60%.

Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel has a post-cookie plan. IAC is planning to consolidate the Dotdash and Meredith ad sales teams within the next two weeks and unify their ad stacks with a focus on contextual targeting.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. From CCPA To The Cabinet President-Elect Joe Biden has selected Xavier Becerra to lead the Department of Health and Human Services – a name that should be familiar to privacy-heads the world over. Becerra is the attorney general of California, and it’s his office […]

Mosaic Group, IAC’s global app division, is probably one of the biggest mobile app developers you’ve never heard of. It owns 40 utility apps, including RoboKiller, the largest spam call blocker in the United States; iTranslate, the translation app with the greatest penetration after Google Translate; and the hugely popular Daily Burn fitness app. Mosaic […]

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Dotdash is among the oldest continuously operating digital publishers. In its previous incarnation as About.com, the company employed legions of “experts” on topics as varied as saving for retirement, diabetes and the Middle East. Later, under the ownership of IAC, it rebranded as Dotdash and structured […]

IAC-owned About.com is losing its web 1.0 moniker and rebranding as Dotdash. Dotdash is the umbrella brand behind About.com’s slew of new vertical sites, which includes properties like personal finance-focused The Balance, as well as the health and fitness site, Verywell. Neil Vogel claimed that the vertical reinvention last year is paying dividends. Verywell, for […]

About.com grew up during the big portal-publisher era that included Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Similar to those other Web 1.0 properties, About.com, too, was acquired – for nearly $300 million in 2012 by IAC – and forced to reinvent in the platform age of Facebook. After a complete site redesign two years ago, About.com is […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. The Times They Are A-Changin’ The New York Times’ digital advertising continues to surge, seeing double-digit YoY growth and comprising 34.1% of the Times’ total ad revenue in Q4 2015. Digital revenues for 2015 surpassed $197 million, an 8.2% jump from a year earlier. […]

A year-long effort to redesign About.com and ramp up native ad formats forced the publisher to take a hard look at itself. On the plus side, there was no dearth of content onsite. “We make 6,000-7,000 new pieces of long form content every month and we have a corpus of over 3.5 million articles,” Neil Vogel, About.com’s […]

It goes something like this: While scrolling through the latest coverage on Syria, or doing research on a work project, you reach the end of an article, only to be greeted with the latest tabloid news about Kim Kardashian. With its teasing photo and promise of outrageousness, it takes all your willpower to resist. And you […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. IAC Shows Q1 Results IAC/InteractiveCorp reported strong Q1 results led by – among others – its Ask.com and Match.com businesses as losses narrowed and revenue grew. Also, IAC reported a $1.5 billion treasure trove of cash. That oughta buy a few ad technology companies […]