IAC CEO Joey Levin on partnership with OpenAI

On the heels of your earnings of report, you wrapped up your earnings call not too long ago. But before we get to earnings, I want to talk about this AI partnership. What does this partnership look like with Open AI and what do you get out of it? Yeah, we’re pretty excited about it. It’s basically three elements. One is we are putting our content both past and ongoing on a on open AI in ChatGPT we’re going to have attribution for our content. So we hopefully we get some incremental audience from from chat GP TS fast growing user base, I think they’re at like 100 million users a week. So getting those users to be able to see our content and get to our content through through their properties. And then the the thing that we did that I think is pretty unique and and hopefully a a leading concept is we’re collaborating now on dot Dash, Meredith’s new ad product called Decipher and that’s a intent based targeting solution. And using Open a Eyes tools is I think really going to help us scale that business to reach more advertisers and and reach more audience for our advertisers. So certainly I can understand how using Open AI technology will help you grow your ad business. But talk to us about this new revenue stream from Open AI and potentially other AI companies given that this is not an exclusive deal. Are you getting compensated based on the volume of content you’re ingesting into them? How much growth in terms of traffic or revenue do you expect to see as ChatGPT directs people back to the likes of People magazine or are you concerned that that might actually cannibalize traffic? We are right now our view is that this is incremental. So we’re we’re absolutely getting compensated that that is incremental earnings to our business. But we think that the audience should be incremental to our business and the the way that we’re talking about it collaboratively is how do both companies win. And I think that’s a a a huge thing for dot Dash Meredith as the leading publisher and publishers in general and a huge thing for Open AI is, is how do both parties win. And and getting our content in there, getting attribution for our content, getting links to our content and to our properties in there is I think a a win for potential incremental audience. How big? I don’t know. It’s nice to be in front of an audience or to to shortly be in front of an audience that big with with the right attribution. But how big it gets, we’re not sure, but we do expect it will be incremental and and the the compensation in the deal is certainly incremental, yes Sir and certainly better for Open AI to not be in a lawsuit situation like they are with some other publishers. I want to hit on some themes from your earnings now even though your overall revenue decline dragged down by Angie, you did see an increase in the dot dot dot dash Meredith business and you’re forecasting 10% growth in coming quarters. What’s behind that advertising growth? Is it just about a broad based rebound in digital advertising or is it more about things that are specific to your business? I think it’s a little bit of both, but certainly the the market feels a bit healthier than it’s been over the last couple of years. But the the really there’s two things in our business that have driven this. Stating the obvious, it’s it’s a mix of price and volume and we have both of those things growing and and when we talk about volume, one of the things that we’re excited about is it’s incremental users. It’s not so much putting more ads in front of users which we see a lot happening in the market right now. If you’ve used a lot of these products you’ll see a a heavier ad load. What we’re doing is we’re growing users and then we’re also seeing a price improvement and also price improvement is not so much a decision that we’re making to raise the prices on our product, but it’s the market lifting the prices of our product because of performance. So in the channels where where the the prices sort of set by a free market of of bidding our prices continue to rise because what we deliver at dot dash Meredith which is unique is a cookie list intent based targeting solution. So you don’t need to to breach privacy walls. For our our content to work, you need to know what a user is looking at and that’s what we’ve mapped all our content to know what users are are looking at on our our properties and that drives intent, that drives performance for advertisers and that seems to be working and that seems to be how we’re outpacing the market in terms of growth now.