Dotdash Meredith CEO Talks Google AI and Adtech Acquisitions

Almost three years exactly after the digital media company Dotdash acquired Meredith Corp. in a $2.7 billion tie-up, the resulting business has finally hit its stride.

After a complex, 18-month merger, the combined organization has now notched three consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth and boosted its profitability by streamlining its print operations, chief executive Neil Vogel told ADWEEK CEO Will Lee during a Mediaweek panel in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday.

“Whether it’s TikTok, a print magazine, Instagram, or whatever, if you have a brand that delivers value, and you can assemble high-quality audiences that love what you’re doing, you can solve for the rest of it,” Vogel said. “That’s always been our plan.”

In their conversation, Vogel shared how he and Dotdash Meredith’s executive team are navigating a period of immense upheaval in the digital media landscape. 

In particular, Vogel pointed to three main areas of focus: the delicate diplomacy of partnering with artificial intelligence firms, his plans for strengthening direct distribution and monetization, and the importance of unsentimentality when it comes to the media business.

Fair and unfair AI

In September 2023, Barry Diller, the owner of Dotdash Meredith parent company IAC, exhorted the digital media community to work together against AI companies scraping their content. Then, in May 2024, the digital media firm turned on its heel, announcing that it had signed a licensing partnership with OpenAI. 

Vogel has explained the rationale for the about-face previously, and he expounded upon the decision again on stage. Through the partnership, Dotdash Meredith is compensated for the use of its content as training data, is cited in summaries, and has the ability to collaborate with OpenAI on new technologies.

The real story, according to Vogel, is the lack of similar collaboration from Google, which is also ingesting publishers’ content to train its large-language models and using the material to produce answers to search queries.

Unlike OpenAI, Google has been uninterested in striking any kind of partnership with publishers. 

“They take our stuff, they read it, they steal it, and they produce an answer that competes with us,” Vogel said. “We’ve approached them a number of times to do a deal, and they tell us to go fish. So there are a number of people that feel like this is going to come to a head.”