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This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka.

That is me.

Happy New Year from Vox Media headquarters in New York City. I'm sitting here with Neil Vogel. Hi, Neil. Hi, Peter. I want to call you CEO of About.com. I can't do that anymore. I'm like two years behind. You can. A lot of people still do. What's the current company? The current company name is dot dash. Thank you. Dot dash is the thing that used to be called about.com.

That dash is that.

If you're very old, you'll remember about dot com. Used to be a fundamental part of the internet. We argue you still are. Yes, we still are. I would argue that we were, we weren't, and we are again. We'll do the whole setup. the way I want to set it up. I often write in stories about things like Verizon deciding they

don't want to own oath anymore or own Yahoo and AOL anymore, that everyone knows that you cannot turn around a consumer Internet property.

Once it is peaked, it goes away.

No one's ever done it.

One exception is price line.

You can kind of argue that wasn't really a consumer internet business.

Entered Neil Vogel, who says, I wanted to do this with this thing called about.com, and I have succeeded. Oh, no, no, I didn't want to do a turnaround. It just was so bad the first couple of years we had no choice. But you've taken an old slash faded internet property and said, I want to fix it. Or I'm trying to fix it. Yes, we did.

This is the premise of this discussion. No, no, yes. If it's not true, you should tell us. No, no, no, no. It is actually very true. Yeah, we, I got there almost six years ago now. Time is flying. And what I signed up for ended up not being what I thought was going to be. you know the team at IAC, Joey, and Mr. Diller and the whole crew. They bought About.com from the New York Times. We'll pull way back because there's terms here that old people like ourselves know. But IAC... Oh, IAC is Interactive Corp. Let's skip what it's called. It's IAC, right? It's a conglomeration of internet properties, many of which you've heard of, some of which you haven't controlled by Barry Diller. Correct. Who was a key guy in building up the media entertainment complex. The biggest pieces are Match, which is Tinder and Match, all the dating properties. Barry Duller is someone who made his fortune and name in Hollywood and then eventually moved to the internet.

And it's still a very big deal. But I think if you're under 40, maybe less familiar with him than... I don't know, he might not be familiar with him, but you're familiar with his stuff. Yeah. We've watched Fox. You've watched Fox. You've seen movies. You've been on Tinder. Yeah. So he's got this big conglomeration of internet properties,

one of which became about... He bought about...

He bought about. Yeah. So he's got this big conglomeration of internet properties, one of which became about.

He bought About.com.

From the New York Times.

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