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this is recode media peter kofka and i am here in studio live with Neil Vogel.

Neil, what's your current job?

My current job is I'm the CEO. Dot Dash.

You run dot dash, but in some number of months, you were going to run dot dash Meredith.

They're very creatively named dot dash Meredith, yes.

Which means you're going to run a series of websites that used to be called About.com,

and we can talk about that in a second.

And then you are also going to be running one of the largest magazine publishers in the world.

All true.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

This is a deal you guys announced a couple weeks ago.

$2.7 billion you're paying for Meredith, cash and debt. They're the bigger company, you're the smaller company, you're acquiring them. That's interesting. There's a lot of stuff that's interesting. One of the things I thought was interesting, I was watching your presentation when you guys announced the deal. You guys said this is something you've been looking at for five years in various forms. How did this come about? You know our story a bit. We were once about.com, which was not working. About.com had one really interesting thing about it that was like a kernel of goodness inside of it, which was it had really good content that helped people do things, like got really intent-driven users and helped them figure out how to make the router faster, how to deal with diabetes. So we took that kernel and we broke it in the size. Yeah. By the way, I was looking, we did a really good podcast about this a couple of years ago. I mean, your best ever, right? I literally went through the transcript yesterday. You can go look at it yourself, 2019, January. Neal tells a really interesting story about transforming this company, which had been owned by the New York Times, moved around a bunch Barry Dillard and IAC owned it. You run it for them.

Yeah, and so we got a model that worked, and the model that worked, just focused on intent-driven content, what used to be called being a service publisher, and we launched a bunch of our own brands very well, the spruce. Intent-driven content means I want to learn about something. I'm typing that into Google and going to that website. It means Google a lot of the time, but not all the time. It means that we haven't historically done a lot in like we don't do news. We don't do things like that. We do content that helps people. Again, like you just had a baby. You need to figure out how to paint your kid's bedroom. we're going help you do that. Like you just bought a new computer, you got it set up. We're going to help you do that. You want to cook dinner for your family. We're going to help you do that. You have like a, I don't do or need a Roth IRA for this kid I just had. We're going to help you figure out to do that. So it was all very valuable content. We had people at the moment where they would make decisions. And that's a very valuable moment, A, to build relationships with people by giving them great content. B, because when you know exactly what they're doing and you don't need cookies and things to figure it out, and that's very good for advertisers and other marketers. So we launched these brands out of About.com, we started to get a lot of traction. And then in a very IAC way, we started to figure out, well, how can we get this thing bigger?

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