Earnings call transcript: IAC’s Q2 2025 EPS Surprises, Stock Falls 13%

IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IAC) reported its Q2 2025 earnings, delivering a surprising EPS of $2.57 against a forecast of a negative $0.2927. Despite this positive surprise, the company’s revenue fell short of expectations at $586.9 million compared to the forecasted $601.35 million. The stock reacted negatively, dropping 13.41% to $37.2 in after-hours trading, reflecting investor concerns over the revenue miss and other strategic challenges. According to InvestingPro data, IAC appears undervalued based on its Fair Value analysis, with strong fundamentals including a healthy current ratio of 2.7 and impressive gross profit margins of 73.2%.

Key Takeaways

• IAC’s EPS significantly exceeded forecasts, surprising the market.
• Revenue fell short of expectations by 2.4%.
• Stock price declined 13.41% post-earnings announcement.
• Digital revenue grew by 9%, driven by advertising and performance marketing.
• The company reduced its dependency on Google traffic from 52% to 28%.

Company Performance

IAC demonstrated strong performance in terms of earnings per share, far surpassing market expectations. However, the revenue shortfall highlighted potential challenges in achieving sales targets. The company continues to show resilience by diversifying its revenue streams and reducing its reliance on Google traffic.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $586.9 million, down from the forecast of $601.35 million.
• Earnings per share: $2.57, significantly above the forecast.
• EBITDA increased by 15% in Q2.

Earnings vs. Forecast

IAC’s EPS of $2.57 was a substantial positive surprise compared to the forecast of a negative $0.2927. However, revenue came in at $586.9 million, missing the forecast by 2.4%. This mixed result reflects both operational strengths and market challenges.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings announcement, IAC’s stock fell by 13.41% to $37.2. This decline suggests that investors are concerned about the revenue miss and broader market conditions, despite the positive EPS surprise. The stock remains within its 52-week range of $32.05 to $55.4.

Outlook & Guidance

IAC has tightened its full-year EBITDA guidance to a range of $247 million to $285 million. The company is targeting long-term digital revenue growth of 10% and plans to expand its Decipher Plus platform significantly. Continued investment in Care.com and exploring CTV advertising opportunities are key strategic focuses.

Executive Commentary

CEO Neil Vogel emphasized the company’s strategy to operate independently of Google, stating, "We run this business as if Google from search is going to go to zero." He also highlighted the importance of proper compensation for content usage, saying, "We believe that if people are going to train and use and display our content, we need to be properly compensated for that."

Risks and Challenges

• Continued reliance on Google traffic, despite reductions, poses a strategic risk.
• The digital advertising market is experiencing significant disruption due to AI advancements.
• The revenue miss could indicate challenges in achieving projected sales growth.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts focused on the impact of AI on search traffic and the market potential of the Decipher Plus platform. Questions also addressed the performance of the Care.com enterprise segment and strategies for optimizing the brand portfolio.

Full transcript - IAC/InterActiveCorp (IAC) Q2 2025:

Conference Operator: Hello, and welcome to the IAC Second Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Christopher Halpin, IAC’s COO and CFO. Please go ahead.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Christopher Halpin here, and welcome to the IAC second quarter earnings call. Joining me today is Neil Vogel, CEO of the newly rebranded People Inc. IAC has published a presentation on the Investor Relations section of our website today entitled Q2 Earnings Presentation.

On this call, Neil and I will provide some introductory remarks referencing that presentation and then open it up to Q and A. Before we get to that, I’d like to remind you that during this presentation, we may make certain statements that are considered forward looking under the federal securities laws. These forward looking statements may include statements related to our outlook, strategy and future performance and are based on current expectations and on information currently available to us. Actual outcome and results may differ materially from the future results expressed or implied in these statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those contained in our most recent annual report on Form 10 ks and in the subsequent reports we file with the SEC. The information provided on this conference call should be considered in light of such risks.

We’ll also discuss certain non GAAP measures, which as a reminder include adjusted EBITDA, which we’ll refer to today as EBITDA for simplicity during the call. I’ll also refer you to our earnings release, investor presentations, our public filings with the SEC and again to the Investor Relations section of our website for all comparable GAAP measures and full reconciliations for all material non GAAP measures. Now that we’ve covered that, let’s turn to the presentation. On Page three, IAC’s businesses continue to seize momentum and make excellent progress against our goals in the 2022. Dot Meredith rebranded as People Inc, a new name with a storied legacy befitting a company where people, that is human experts, create the premium content that people, our consumers and readers seek for entertainment and information.

We truly believe People Inc. Achieves that by providing superior content across superior brands using superior technology. This quarter, despite the volatility and uncertainty in both the macro environment and open web, we’re happy to report that PeopleLink returned to core sessions growth and achieved 9% digital revenue growth, accelerating from 7% in Q1 and at the high end of our guidance. We were also thrilled to complete a 1,400,000,000 refinancing of our debt at People Inc. In June, replacing the original acquisition capital structure with new bank debt and bonds at attractive pricing and five to seven year maturities.

Neil will go into more depth on People Inc. Shortly. MGM reported second quarter earnings last week and demonstrated the power of its diversified gaming portfolio with strength in digital, the regionals and Macau offsetting softness in Las Vegas. We’re particularly excited about BetMGM’s strong results. 36% net revenue growth in the second quarter and increased guidance for the full year to at least 2,700,000,000 of revenue and at least $150,000,000 of EBITDA.

The digital gaming opportunity at MGM has always been a core pillar of our thesis and it is great to see those assets performing so well. Our second largest wholly owned business care.com revitalized its product and brand in June, a key step in its comprehensive plan to reenergize growth in its consumer business. Care also unveiled a fresh new lick and launched a new marketing campaign across its offerings. As we will discuss shortly, while it is early days, we are seeing promising signs across engagement metrics. Finally, across consolidated IAC, adjusted EBITDA increased 15% in the quarter and we are guiding to $247,000,000 to $285,000,000 of EBITDA for the full year.

On the capital allocation front, it was a quiet quarter following the completion of the previously announced $200,000,000 in buybacks. As our Chairman, Barry Dillard noted in the remarks included in our earnings release, we are actively pursuing M and A opportunities and hoping some visibility in the economic and trade outlook will lead to more price discovery and deal activity in the back half of the year. As always, we continue to analyze further buybacks of our shares with our corporate cash balance, while also exploring strategic divestitures of non core businesses to bolster that cash balance. Now let’s go deeper into our two largest wholly owned businesses. With that, I’ll turn it over to Neil.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): Thanks, guys. One of the things we just did, which was change our name to PeopleLink from .emeritus. I think this is a very good time for us to reset and reflect on where we sit in the market, reflect on the media markets and give you guys some context as to our strategies and what we’re doing. I think the thing we’re most excited about the PeopleLink name is Dotdash Meredith was a name of convenience for us. We put together the names of two companies.

We didn’t want to offend anybody. We wanted to live with it. And I’ll be a bit more generous than our Chairman, Mr. Dillard, who did not like the name at all. I was happy to live with it until we could really find something better, and we did.

And it turns out the name we wanted with emotion and aspiration and ambition and simplicity baked in was People Inc. It’s the name of our hero brand. It’s sort of been with us the whole time, much like great businesses like Coca Cola. We feel like the flagship brand should be the name of the business. And rather than having to say we’re Dotdash Meredith and then the first thing you say is we’re people, we can now just say that we are people.

But I think the thing that got us most excited and it sort of kicks us off into the rest of the story is what people also means. And it means that we are content made by people for people. We are very aware and embracing of AI and things other things in the marketplace. But it’s really important that experiences of our experts, our writers, our product testers are paramount to our brands. And many of these brands have one hundred year history relating to People.

And PEOPLE Inc. Felt like a fitting name. And there’s a little bit of an Easter egg in there for those of you who like watch the media inside baseball. It is a little bit of a play on the old Time Inc. Name, which again suggests some of the best brands in media.

So that was Slide four. Let’s go to Slide five. And we’re going to zoom out for a second. And there are two things that we have that we think are going to propel us into the future. One is an incredible series of iconic brands and two, that we have scaled audiences.

And it’s helpful to zoom out and look at media and the type of media that we do. So food, home, tech, travel, beauty, style, entertainment, thirty years ago, these brands were exclusively communicated in some form of print. Then that changed. And they the content and the relationships all moved online. And when they moved online, that’s when we got in this business.

And we took great advantage of that transition from offline to online. And by making smart investments and by being very disciplined in how we did things and by recognizing the power and permission of these brands, we built a really strong O and O business, owned and operated websites that really, really grew and put us at sort of like the top end of the brands in each of the categories in which we compete. Now that business was a Google driven business, right? And if we don’t go back too far, Google was 70%, 80%, 90% of the track on the open web came through Google and we got very, very good at Google. And we were very successful and we ended up buying Meredith and doing these things.

But we also noticed around coming out of the pandemic three, four, five years ago, Google started to send out less and less traffic to people like us, to publishers and to others who created content. And that is Google’s prerogative, right? So we’re like, okay, we need to figure out how we’re going to live in a world where Google traffic might not be the driver of our growth. And then add to that, 2.5 ago, ChatGPT launched commercially and we saw that. And we had a very faithful meeting where we sat and met with Sam Altman and we saw ChatGPT right before it launched.

And we said, you know what, this is going to be a catalyst for change for us. We need to connect directly to our audiences and we need to connect directly to our advertisers and we need to have leverage here. So knowing that Google is favoring Google results, doing things with Reddit, knowing that ChatGPT is coming around, there’s going to be a search answer replacement, what can we do? And if you look at Slide five, Slide five is the outcome of a process that we really started two and three years ago. And if we can go left to right, we have three large buckets of owned audiences, off platform audiences and audiences we can address.

The owned and operated audiences, the far left is what is still a very robust open web business. And we talk a lot about sessions. We grew sessions again this quarter and that is a business that is going to be the underpinning of our growth going forward. But what we have really done over the past two years is build other assets. We’ve built a tremendous email business.

Our PIN business is strong. We’ve built a big events business, a very big syndication business. And our owned and operated sites and our owned and operated assets are very vibrant. To that, we’ve really added incredible off platform audiences across Apple News and YouTube and Instagram and TikTok. And this is the process of lots and lots of investment and lots and lots of time from us.

And the way we run the business now is we look at our business and say, okay, we need to aggregate audience from as many sources as possible, an incredible diversity of audience sources. We have a term we use internally called Google Zero. What happens if Google goes to zero? What happens if Google no longer sends us traffic? Well, I think we’re going to be very healthy.

And then the third thing we’ve done is taken our most valuable asset, which is our data and the first party data that we know about our audiences and we can extend that data across the open web. And we’ve talked a lot before about our Decipher ad targeting that allows us to contextually target based on visits to our own sites. And by allowing us to take that data and spread it across the open web, so we now can target advertisements off of Dotdash Meredith. And what that does and a lot of you guys have asked is that really expands our addressable market. We are four to 5x in addressable market if we can use our data to target other people’s sites than our sites.

So you can get our quality of performance and do it around the Internet. So if you look at this slide and you say, okay, we’ve got a healthy open web business. We’ve got all these incredible new assets underpinned by our world class brands. We have these rapidly growing off platform audiences, and we have these addressable audiences well beyond our owned and operated assets. I like our pool of assets, and I feel like we have what we need, the audiences, the brands, the technical skills and the products to hit the revenue goals that we’ve laid out for everybody.

So if we go to the next slide, this is some factual background to what we just talked about. And if you look at the left, you can see core sessions. These are sessions to our core sites. And you can see over the last three years, from 2023 to 2025, core sessions have grown, while the percentage of traffic from Google has shrank. Now there are two reasons for that.

One, Google is changing their search page rapidly to favor things Google chooses to favor. And two, that is the impact of AI. When people talk about the impact of AI on our business, they’re really talking about search for us. Because as AI competes with Google and Google puts AI on their page or someone chooses to go somewhere else for search, there’s no guarantee we get a link like the old days, like we used to get a link. So you’re seeing our traffic from Google go down, while you’re seeing our overall sessions go up.

And that is everything we talked about on the prior page. The second thing, the middle chart is off platform views. And we’ve done an outstanding job across our brands, whether it’s people or travel and leisure or food and wine or real simple of building off platform views. And this really started actively investing in this in 2023, 2024 and you can see the results so far in 2025. Now about a third of our digital revenue comes from sources that are not sessions related, that are not sessions based.

And then you can go to the far right and you can see we’ve grown digital revenue all the while. And we are very proud that as we’ve made this transition from what was a print based business to a digital owned and owned Google based business to a we have to be everywhere with these assets business. We’ve grown revenue the entire way.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: And just to add on a couple of themes there. Going to core sessions, that decline in the dark blue box from $1,000,000 to down to $600,000,000 that is partly AI and also predating that, the numerous changes that have been made to the SERP page over that time, including Reddit being heavily prioritized, as well as cluttering of the search page. So as Neil talked about, the portion of our traffic of our sessions that comes from Google Search has declined from 52% to 28% through the proactive efforts he and the team have driven at PeopleLink, we’ve increased our non Google search sessions at a 29% CAGR and believe that we can still continue to fill that hole. The second point, as Neil said, those sessions generate 64% of our digital revenue. That’s a key theme.

So when you think about the remaining Google search exposure, it’s that 28% of that 64% approximately that we’re talking about. The off platform views are a component of our non sessions our 36% non sessions based revenue along with things like licensing related performance marketing, etcetera. So we wanted to get across in this slide relative to the broader AI question, how much Google search has come down and also the diversification in our digital revenues and the various growth factors we have from here.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): We’ll talk about that. It’s a good transition to the next slide. Our three primary avenues of monetization, advertising revenue, performance marketing, approximately e commerce and licensing, All of our revenue sources are growing. Our brands are super strong. Our execution is good.

We feel very good about the advertising business. We’re very excited about our Decipher Plus business that we just talked about a little bit that allows us to use our proprietary data to help people buy across the open web. We think there’s a big CTV opportunity in there as well. Performance marketing, commerce, we work very closely with the biggest retailers online. I think in most cases, we are their largest referral partner and that’s been a really robust business.

And even in our licensing business, which this quarter has, we’re two thirds left the OpenAI deal that we signed last year. There’s a lot of strength in places like Apple News and in Walmart and it speaks to the strength of our brands. Chris, want to go to the next slide?

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Yes. Turning to Page eight. Thanks, Neil. On the next page, one topic we wanted to proactively cover today is our digital margins of this past quarter. PeopleLink’s digital margins have been steadily scaling over the past few years with higher revenue.

We reached just under 29% in FY 2024. As a reminder, on a quarterly basis, EBITDA margins increased across the year with the lowest margins in the first quarter and the highest margins in the fourth quarter due to revenue scale. And as we’ve grown digital revenue, we have expected to see incremental digital margin scale. You can see that demonstrated in Q1 where margins were up about 100 basis points year over year on 7% revenue growth. In Q2, however, digital EBITDA was essentially flat year over year at $63,000,000 while revenues grew 9%, representing a 24% adjusted EBITDA margin.

The increased cost, and this is featured at the bottom of Page eight, that reduced those margins derived heavily from the strategic investments Neil talked about across new products, technology and channels, everything we’re doing to set the business up to grow. We expect and are confident in getting ROI off those investments, including in the third quarter that we’re in this year. And so, we expect adjusted EBITDA to grow year over year. You can see the guidance on the right in Q3 on 7% to 9% revenue growth, digital revenue growth And we expect margins in the twenty five percent to 28% range and then get back to real margin scale in the fourth quarter. So with that, let’s turn to care.com on the next page, which continues to be the largest online marketplace for families and individuals looking for household caregivers across children, seniors, adults, pets, housekeeping.

The company offers its services through two channels, consumer and enterprise. The left side of the page summarizes the direct to consumer segment, where care seekers go online, sign up, post jobs and are matched with care providers. Despite some consumer revenue erosion over the past couple of years, Care remains the clear leader in the online space, holding its number one brand position with 62% of traffic coming from organic sources, primarily Direct Navigation. On the right side of the page is our Enterprise business, where employers contract with care.com to provide backup care days and employee access to care services as a benefit to their employees. Today, Care has relationships with over 700 employers covering 31,000,000 employees.

Financially, revenue is basically evenly split between the two segments, with both offerings utilizing care.com’s database of approximately 700,000 caregivers. The two businesses though have seen a clear divergence in performance recently with enterprise growing solidly as more employers provide backup care as a benefit to their employees and the employees increasingly utilizing the product. But as discussed previously, consumer revenue has declined from pandemic highs since 2022. That’s due to a combination of core deficiencies in the product experience, suboptimal marketing and some macro headwinds. Turning the page, that brings us to the care.com relaunch in June.

The outcome of more than a year of work, the new Care experience boasts fine tuned search capabilities and enhanced messaging and matching, offering care seekers a smoother experience as they hone in on the perfect caregiver for their essential job. In many ways, care.com’s biggest challenge has not been liquidity on either side of their marketplace, but instead optimizing the process for families and providers to match, connect and communicate on the platform. We feel good about where the product is today and where it is going. On the right side of the page, Care has held off on marketing over the last few quarters until the product was ready for prime time. In parallel with the relaunch, care.com has rebooted its visual identity with a new brand and integrated marketing campaign highlighting the breadth, quality and ease of its offerings.

Product and marketing have been a challenge over the last few years. Now they are working in concert to propel the business forward. In the light green, we highlight the further areas for optimization as care.com continues to refine its product, improve pricing and packaging and push more aggressively into Senior Care and Pet Care, two attractive growth areas that we’re ready to aggressively pursue now that the building blocks are in place. On the metrics front, it’s still early, but across June and July, we have seen core consumer metrics, direct navigation visits, sign ups and subscriptions achieve stability and growth really for the first time since 2022. A lot more to do, but we are moving on the right path.

Closing out on Care, Page 11 summarizes the financial picture. A major pandemic boost followed by growth in enterprise and softness in consumer over the last few years. Profitability has remained solid with $46,000,000 in adjusted EBITDA and minimal CapEx. The key for Care is to reignite revenue and generate the incremental margins we believe are possible. Turning to Page 12, we would reiterate that our discount remains pronounced in our mind.

While MGM share price has risen since last quarter, the implied value of our private holdings on the right remains negligible. As we’ve said before, we will continue to drive IAC forward to unlock value from those holdings, drive simplification and shrink that discount as laid out in the strategy overview on the following slide. Execution, capital allocation and catalysts. These are the pillars of our focus and how we believe we will reduce that discount. Turning to guidance, we have tightened the range of IAC consolidated adjusted EBITDA for the year to $247,000,000 to $285,000,000 with the midpoint relatively unchanged versus prior guidance.

At People Inc, we have reiterated full year digital revenue guidance at 7% to 10% and brought down the high end of full year adjusted EBITDA guidance from $350,000,000 to $340,000,000 while maintaining the bottom end at $330,000,000 This reflects our confidence in the revenue outlook across advertising, performance marketing and license, but with increased spend and investments in new products like Decipher Plus, MyRecipes and the People app, as well as more than $3,000,000 in higher healthcare costs hitting us in the back half of the year. For Care, we maintained guidance at 45,000,000 to $55,000,000 and at Search, brought up the low end a bit. Finally, on Corporate, we continue to make progress on lowering run rate costs and have reduced the range to 110,000,000 to $115,000,000 which includes approximately $20,000,000 of one time costs. With that, let’s go to Q and A. Operator, can we have the first question please?

Conference Operator: Yes. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. Tony’s first question comes from John Blackledge with TD Cowen.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): Thank you. So really helpful what you included in the earnings deck on sources of traffic and how they build into revenue. Could you just go into greater depth on how you see the trajectory of sessions, including Google Search and off platform views and kind of how that translates into revenue and margin? And then second question, can you just walk through puts and takes in the 2Q People Inc. Digital revenue?

And how you think about digital revenue growth and digital margins in the third quarter? I’ll do sessions first, and then I’ll let Vin Krystal do the margin thing. I think you’re going to see sessions O and O sessions. I think they’re going to be the third quarter will be down a little bit. We have very tough comp.

But I think going forward, flat to slightly up is a fair expectation for us. Again, we’re very actively investing and hustling hard to keep O and O sessions up, I think our results prove that. I think off platform, you’re going to see continued growth, probably continued growth somewhere around the trajectory where we’re growing now. Now the numbers get bigger, the percentages are going get lower. But you’re going to see real growth there, and it’s a real investment area for us.

I’ll let Chris will do the will take the margin piece of this.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Yes. And on margins, we view both on platform and off platform as generating attractive EBITDA margins. And we are capable to do that because of the technology and offerings that we have. When you I said before, last year, on a consolidated digital basis, we generated 29% adjusted EBITDA margins. We view non session revenues as slightly accretive to that margin and then sessions on a marginal on an incremental basis, session revenues are more accretive.

One of the natural questions we’ll get is all this off platform session, on session revenue being done at low margins. It is not. We feel good about the margins where we can do it and that we will continue to scale off that 29 adjusted EBITDA margin. And that includes Decipher Plus as well as off platform views on third party.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): And we’ll address the next question, which is the exposure to the off platform views. We have really good diversity across all those sessions. It comes from a whole host of different places and different sources at different points in their life cycle. So we feel pretty good about when you look at the diversity of what’s now driving core sessions and the diversity in off platform sessions, I think the diversity is a real strength for us.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: And then I think your second question, John, was about Q2 and Q3 revenue. In Q2 digital, advertising grew 5%, led by 2% core session growth and some improvement in monetization. We knew it was going to be a choppy monetization quarter as we signaled on advertising last quarter between given all the disruptions around tariff and trade. For those interested, direct was solid. Direct premium sales were solid led by health, travel and tech offsetting not surprisingly CPG, food and bev and home.

Programmatic pricing was flat for much of the quarter, but began strengthening in June and has continued currently. We’re running up about 10% on pricing year over year. Last quarter performance marketing was very strong at 14% and licensing also solid at 20%. That’s real strength in Apple News. Neil and team are doing a fantastic job there.

Also some performance at Walmart and then some OpenAI. All in all strength really from our diversification of the diversified digital revenues that Neil talked about previously. For the third quarter, we do have some tougher comps on traffic with the Olympics last year and some entertainment. So we’d expect core sessions to be slightly down. Off platform growth and improved monetization should drive advertising revenue growth despite that.

Performance marketing continues to be excellent, especially if you want a window into the consumer. Consumer is very strong. Prime Day was great for us in July and licensing should continue to grow led by Apple News, Walmart and other areas. All in all, we’re guiding to 7% to 9% digital revenue growth in Q3 and reaffirming 7% to 10% for the year. And then on margins, as we discussed previously, we’re guiding to 25% to 28% digital adjusted EBITDA margins in Q3.

You. Operator, next question.

Conference Operator: Thank you. That comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

Eric Sheridan, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Thanks so much for taking the questions. Maybe following up on People first. Neil, I know in the prepared remarks you made a couple of statements about the decisions, but just want to go a little bit deeper in why this is the right brand and why the team and you landed on this to go forward? And how you plan on sort of positioning the brand in the broader digital media ecosystem looking out over the next couple of years? And the second question would be, you led with the quote from Barry in terms of the press release that talked a little bit about deployment of capital and the current state.

Wanted to better understand what you look at as the M and A landscape you’re facing right now. So the alternative of returning capital to shareholders should be deploying it into external opportunities and maybe a quick update about how you see that landscape right now? Thanks so much.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): I’ll take the people thing first. So if you go to let’s talk about our goal first. Our goal for the company for People Inc. Is we believe we can have platform scale with all the benefits of premium branded publisher environments. And we needed a name to reflect that.

And again, the Dotdash Meredith name was quite simply putting together Dotdash and putting together Meredith. I don’t think either of those names had any particular resonance in the marketplace. People does. Everybody knows who People is. Again, it was always the first thing you said when you’re explaining what we did.

But what we really liked about it is it’s simple, it’s clear, it has that second meaning about what we are. We’re people making content for people. In it is energy and ambition and simplicity. And look, you can make a million jokes about it. Dot dash Meredith sounds like an oil company.

People Inc. Sounds like a media company. And if our ultimate aspiration and where we would like to end up, again, platform level scale with premium branded performance and all the advantages of these like beautiful safe environments, both online and offline. If you want to do that, you need a name that reflects that. And we wanted a name that when people are talking about the great media companies and the where we want to be like, again, we’re obviously not here yet, but you have to aspire to something.

I’d like it to be Meta Comcast people, right, Google. And it just hangs way better. I think the reception since last week across our clients and our advertisers and really importantly, employees, everybody was just really happy and really energized. And it just as Mr. Dillard said, it just fits.

It’s easy and it fits. The only regret I have is we probably should have done it a little bit sooner. I may have been the resistance there, but we’re really happy with where it’s ended up.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Thanks, Eric. On M and A landscape, we are actively working, looking at things small and large and as always through two prongs through our existing businesses, particularly PeopleLink as well as new platforms. Look, we look for ways to be creative, think differently and find assets that we have a different view on or an advantage. We continue to actively pursue acquisition opportunities through PeopleLink, looking to build on its premier brands and technology. I’d say the more we continue to as everything Neil has said and is doing to make progress there, in many ways the more opportunities we see that we have a particular advantage on.

So that’s a key area of effort. On a new platform basis, we’ve been evaluating both public and private opportunities, platform builds as well as carve out opportunities. The investment focus, we talked about this last call, can be put in two buckets, quality defensible businesses, particularly where the first one is, particularly where AI disruption or disintermediation, platform risk, everything is reduced. We’ve talked previously about experiential businesses that cannot be disintermediated, digital interactive businesses like gaming, others, where the consumer is in the moment and you can you don’t have the overhang of AI and other products. And then we’re also looking at areas where you can find AI applications to sectors that we know well.

And with the growth of AgenTik AI, you can see AI strategies in a host of sectors that we have spent time in previously at IAC or others of us in our careers and won’t get too specific, but are trying to get to reasonable values on those opportunities. We have not wrestled the right one into the boat yet, but continue to work hard and focus. And then as I said before, hopefully the macro environment will allow for more price discovery and agreement between buyers and sellers. Thanks, Eric. Operator, next question.

Conference Operator: Again, it comes from Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan.

Danny Fire/Chad, Analyst, Benchmark Company: Hey, this is Danny Fire for on for Cory. For the first question, can you comment on the current penetration of Google AI reviews? And then for the second, is there any further color you could provide on the pause in share repurchases in 2Q after the disclosing out in April? Thanks.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): Yes. AI overviews, I think we said last quarter, they’re on about 35% of our searches. As expected, that has rapidly expanded. It’s probably on more than half of the searches where our content appears. Some properties less, some properties more, but probably around 50%, 55%.

Again, we’ve run through the math that definitely depresses CTR, but it’s the reason why we’re doing everything we’re doing. And it’s the reason why we’re investing to 100 brands. It’s the reason why we are doing things like the People app and My Recipes and some more things you’re going to see from us to connect directly to our audiences and directly to our advertisers. And in spite of this, we’re holding session steady. We’re growing them a little bit.

So but yes, there’s look, we don’t again, we said we run this business as if Google from search is going to go to zero. Now it’s obviously not going to go to zero. But that is the discipline with which we are approaching our investment and how we see the future media landscape and where audiences are going to come from. And again, part of being in media for as long as we’ve been in it is, it is a constant state of change, and this is just another state of change. And we have been dealing with Google and Google changes and Google disruptions for a long time.

And there’s nothing new, perhaps the remedy is a bit different, but it feels it all feels very familiar to us.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: One comment and I’ll go to buyback just second, but one comment I’d add, we’ve seen research that estimates the step down in click through. There was a Pew report of others. Our observation relative to the decline in click down, those reports very much overstate the decline for a premium publisher like People Inc, because there’s a whole swath of searches that have been zero click for years, that never led to referral traffic from Google and are not haven’t been sources of traffic for People Inc. In our properties for years. So, I think some of those, you really need to do those studies right, normalize for what was searches, which is why when we talk about searches that are germane for PeopleLink, what are searches that produced Google SEO traffic historically and then what’s the change in that.

There is a step down, but not nearly as big as we’re seeing.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): Not nearly as Yes. It’s almost like you have to look at it as it’s like the marginal step down. Yes.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: That’s the key element there. And again, Google Search is 28% of our traffic. So it’s 55% of 28% and then the step down there. So manageable. In terms of pause share repurchases, we tried to signal some of this last quarter.

We announced that we completed $200,000,000 in buybacks. We said we were going to focus on M and A opportunities while continuing to look at our stock price. We definitely see value in our stock and know we have the opportunity to buy it and take advantage of that embedded discount. We are actively exploring opportunities to deploy capital and create compelling returns for shareholders that way. I know our time horizon may be longer than some shareholders will want, but we believe we’ve got opportunity to do both at the same time and we will continue to analyze both.

And we definitely as we are together with our Chairman, Barry Diller and our leadership team, we are contemplating both on an active basis. Thank you. Operator, next question. Thank you.

Conference Operator: And that comes from Stephen Ju with UBS.

Stephen Ju, Analyst, UBS: Okay, great. Thank you. I think your Slide nine talking about Care was pretty striking because, I think your trailing twelve month revenue is $360,000,000 and that’s material. That’s not even 1% of the addressable market that you’re calling out of $375,000,000,000 So the optimist in me wants to think that given the white space ahead of you, you should be growing much faster. What factors are under your control and what needs to happen at the industry level?

What needs to happen from a consumer perspective and what needs to happen from an enterprise perspective? Thank you.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Thank you, Stephen. So you hit on it. It is obviously a massive market that care.com participates in, has in front of us addressable market. And when you think about the needs of families for care, both in home and out of home across children, seniors, adult care and pets, it’s a national challenge. It is something that the households themselves struggle with.

And there’s a theme of what we call the sandwich generation that sits between an ever burgeoning number of seniors who require care as well as their own children. And that is a two pronged effort and then certainly in certain cases, their pets as well. That is a demand, it’s an ever increasing drain on the financial resources as well as the mental energies of families to find and maintain care and it is a tailwind. For care.com to fully take advantage of that TAM, they need to continue to grow demand of care seekers and supply of caregivers on each side of the marketplace and then get better and better at matching those two parties and making transactions easier to execute in the platforms. What does that mean in practice?

First is drive consumers from using offline methods to find care and turn to our platform first. To do that, that is very much front and center in what we’re doing of improving the product experience to make it easier. There’s a big element of care of repeat visits, particularly for those who fulfill jobs the first time. The easier you make it, the smoother the experience, the higher the quality of the match, the more likely people are to come back and repeat either for another child caregiver if there’s turnover there or to solve their senior or pet needs after a good experience on child or vice versa. The second, and this is a key step, is bring to market new pricing and packaging that meets consumer needs where they are in the journey.

When you have the diversity of offerings, child, senior, pet, daycare, in home care, back up care, etcetera, you need different offerings on a price point, on a subscription versus transactional, etcetera, to meet the specific needs of a consumer coming to the platform. We’ve said this before, but we have 1,600,000 non registered monthly visits and Care is only monetizing a small percentage of them or only serving truly a small percentage of them. That means a lot of people are showing up and not seeing the entry point or the offering that is optimal for them. That’s the opportunity of the business. It’s also been the biggest challenge.

But Brad Wilson and team are focused on creating entree to the platform, limited time use, smaller entry, as well as upsell value packages as people become more familiar with the product and can use it going forward, things like background checks, etcetera, to offer greater flexibility and easier entry and access. And then finally, I talked about this earlier, we’ve got to continue to expand our vertical footprint outside of child care, which is our predominant category today. Senior care is a burgeoning marketplace and this next generation will be much more comfortable using digital to line up the caregivers for parents. And then Pet Care is a massive area of spend. We have liquidity there.

It’s really around putting and we’ve improved the product. It’s really around making the investment there to drive growth. So in sum, Cares never lacked for growth opportunities. The hurdle has been our product and marketing. We feel good about where we’re going.

It’s going to be continue to make progress every day and build the business. Thank you, Steven. Thank you. Operator, next question.

Conference Operator: Thank you. That comes from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer.

Jason Helfstein, Analyst, Oppenheimer: Hey, thanks for taking the questions. Two quick ones. Neil, how are you thinking about long term revenue growth for people? And I guess, how do you get there from the 9% we’re doing today? Just if you could kind of maybe bridge it to the aspirational goal.

And then second, any thoughts on expanding licensing revenue beyond OpenAI as it relates to other LLM companies who I’m sure are using your content? Yes.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): I’ll do the long term revenue. I think we’ve said and we believe long term goal for us is 10% revenue growth. And I think it’s a combination of what we can do on our O and O properties. We’ve talked about where monetization continues to get better as well as all the growth we have off platform and in events and all the other things we’re doing. So 10% remains our North Star goal, which we feel pretty comfortable with in the long term.

In terms of licensing revenue, it is something we are obviously very interested in. I think there’s two things going on in the market to make more licensing deals happen. Sort of one of these two things is going to have to happen, and they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. One, you’re going to have to see a change in tenor or change in approach from the LLM creators. And two, we’re going to have to manufacture some more leverage for ourselves.

And you’ve seen that in what we’ve done with Cloudflare, where we’re now blocking almost all AI crawlers other than OpenAI, where we have a deal and Google where we can’t block them because they use one crawler for search and AI, which is a different discussion. But what we’ve seen in the last few weeks, and again, nothing is imminent, but we have seen some of the larger players approach us and come back to sort of reignite some discussions around how these things would work. There’s lots of different ideas and lots of different economic models. We are very, very active here. You’ve obviously heard Mr.

Diller and me and Chris and pretty much all of us talk consistently about what we believe. And we believe that if people are going to train and use and display our content, we need to be properly compensated for that. And hopefully, we’re heading in that direction, but we will see.

Jason Helfstein, Analyst, Oppenheimer: Just can you clarify, the 10% for people, is that total or digital? I was asking digital, but if you want to give both,

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): that’s fine.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: 10% for digital. And we’ve said print will continue to secularly decline. The good news is as a weighted average percent of our total revenue base, it continues to decline. We’ve driven low single digit total revenue growth the last few quarters. I think that should continue as we drive 10% plus digital.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): And what we’ve always said with print is print will offset our corporate expenses and we very much manage that business for cash flow and for the branding, marketing value of having print in the world, which is fairly material.

Jason Helfstein, Analyst, Oppenheimer: Yes. Thanks.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Thank you, Jason. Operator, next question.

Conference Operator: Yes, thanks. That comes from James Hurney with Jefferies.

James Hurney, Analyst, Jefferies: Great. Thanks, guys. Search revenue came in a little bit lighter than expected. Can you just talk about when we should see stability in that business? How much of that is an intentional pullback versus more market related weakness?

Thank you.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Yes. On Search, we manage that business for margin. And there are a number of different revenue streams that we are operating in at any given time. And within the broader Google search ecosystem as well as search on other platforms, there are different trends, different competitive dynamics. You can see in our Q2 print, despite coming in below our revenue guidance, we came in above our adjusted EBITDA guidance and we raised the midpoint of our full year adjusted EBITDA.

That’s a reflection of identifying some higher margin channels that we were able to pursue in the quarter. And again, we’re coming back to essentially gross profit on the search activities and advertise we’re driving and then running that against our OpEx. I’d say, it’s been a multiyear decline in search that’s been pronounced on the top line and that has flown through to EBITDA over the last few years. We are seeing stability. It’s been second derivative positive over the last few quarters.

The market is hopefully finding some level, but again, the Google search ecosystem is always volatile. We will feel good about it at one point and then it will switch again. That’s the nature of what we’re doing with. We do feel good about our ability to maintain margin and profitability there, and on our guidance for adjusted EBITDA.

James Hurney, Analyst, Jefferies: Thank you.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: James, any yes, go ahead.

James Hurney, Analyst, Jefferies: No, thank you. That’s all.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Okay. Thank you, operator. Next question.

Conference Operator: Thank you. That comes from Dan Karnos with The Benchmark Company.

Danny Fire/Chad, Analyst, Benchmark Company: Yes, great. Thanks. Good morning, Neil,

Conference Operator: this

Danny Fire/Chad, Analyst, Benchmark Company: is Chad again. Maybe just going back to Jason’s question, if we just think about the Cipher Plus, maybe a good time to kind of refresh how you’re thinking about the TAM since you alluded to new potential markets like CTV and kind of how fits in this decreasing signal loss, but increasingly self selecting environment, especially if agentic browsing picks up? And then, Chris, kind of your point on AI industry reports, I mean, a lot of the recent data actually suggests the traffic and click through quality has been improving for certain brands. So maybe just more of a question for you guys on where you sit on the data and analytics side, if you’re kind of in a good position to track this evolution even as you guys prepare in case things get worse from a Google perspective? Thanks.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): Well, I’ll do D plus and then Chris can pick up after that. So we’re really pleased with Decipher plus Jim Lawson, who is an experienced executive we brought in to run and he’s doing an excellent job scaling. I think we’ve said this before, and we believe it is going to be a it should be a material contributor into 2026 numbers. And right now, over quarter, the numbers, albeit small, they look really good. And what we’re seeing is, again, for those less versed in the story, what the Cyber Plus does, it allows us to use our first party intent based contextual data, understand the relationship between our content, use that to target ads on other sites off platform.

So we can go and understand that inventory, buy it and essentially resell it to our pool of advertisers. This obviously greatly expands our total TAM. We did some work since our last call together because a bunch of you guys have been asking for this. We think it’s four to five times our the existing market size that we have on platform and it doesn’t actually include CTV. CTV is very interesting because we found a way to combine our signal with the identifiers needed on a household level to target CTV.

We’ve actually run a few of these deals. They seem to be working really well. It’s too early to make a call, but we feel very good about the CTV opportunity. You said it CTV targeting for many reasons we don’t need to get into today is fraud. It doesn’t really work that well.

It’s a little bit messy. This is a very clean way for us to use our data to target CTV. And if we can add it, that’s just that TAM number is going to get bigger. I think this is a really important strategy for us, Decipher Plus, because it’s very much in line with what we do. We are extremely good at getting people to our owned assets, them websites, be events, be apps, be my recipe things, be platform places.

And we’ve always had this data product that we use to target our own ads. What this is, is a great unlock to take what we think is the best first party data potentially in media to this real intent driven contextual data and use it to target across the open web. And if this performs the way it performs, we’re very excited about the future.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Thank you. The Dan, when you talk about click through, there’s we been running our searches. This is the data we’ve been reporting about frequency. There’s it’s less clean on traffic that comes via attribution within an AI overview versus a consumer just skipping the AI overview and going down to the SEO links. What we’d say is, it is in many ways just a continuation of the cluttering of the search page that’s been going on for a number of years with greater SEM, sort of thrusting Reddit directly into the top of the search results and doing there, YouTube, e commerce.

We agree with you that the step down in click through is, I said it before, nowhere as dramatic as these reports are citing. It is something, but it feels like more of a page knock rather than or page fill up rather than a significant change in the search behavior. I would say, and I’ll turn it back to Neil in a sec, but I would say there is an element of the underlying content that the consumer is looking for. So the more commoditized that content is a la historical SEO, the better AI overview will answer and be the endpoint of that search versus what we tend to do in the core of our or the foundation of our core brands is much more in-depth premium content where you want to go to the actual reference page source and learn more. And so, as we’ve said before, the decline in our click through may just be fundamentally less than other publishers that have been heavily SEO.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): We’ve been out of the commodity content business essentially for some time. This is not a new phenomenon. Remember, Google was doing things like Answerbox that was knocking some of the stuff out years and years ago. And again, I just go back to the math that Chris shared earlier, right? It’s Google Search and Coors, 28% of traffic overviews to keep the math easy, call it on 50%, it’s a little bit more than 50%, but 50%.

And then we lose depending on the search somewhere from a very little to 20, 25%. But the baseline? Yes. The future of the baseline, it’s lower than that. We’re it’s very well boxed.

And the sort of content we’re making is moving away from what is being disintermediated is the point.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Got it. Thanks guys. Appreciate it. Operator, next question. Thank you.

Conference Operator: And that comes from Matt Condon with Citizens.

Matt Condon, Analyst, Citizens: Thank you so much for taking my questions. My first one is just on the core decipher product. Do you still believe that there’s an opportunity to improve yields in your O and L properties, just do algorithmic improvements or whatnot? And then my second one, just on care.com. Understood the enterprise segment lapping a more difficult comp there, but still declined 7% quarter over quarter.

Can you just talk about trends you’re seeing on the enterprise side of that business?

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): Yes. The answer to that is yes. The yield opportunity is still there. The smarter we get about our audiences and the smarter we get about targeting, the better Decipher gets on platform, the more we’re going to be able to do. Also, as the value as we increase the value of our brands and the value of our contents and the value of our content, I think we’re seeing the ability to increase value on O and Os was the first question.

And Chris, that was the I’ll let Chris handle the second Okay. Question

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Yes. I mean, on enterprise, I think the 7% you’re referencing is a sequential decline quarter over quarter. There are elements of seasonality when you think about flu season or sickness in the winter produces more usage of backup days and then it similarly goes up in the tends to go up in the summer a lot when kids are out of school, those types of things. Then again, in many ways on a sequential basis, Q2 is our lightest revenue quarter. Any given quarter, there are different elements.

Basically have a subscription and a utilization element in that business. The utilization, you’ll have peaks and valleys depending on where different employers are and the pace at which their bank of backup days get used. So long term, the sectoral tailwind of backup care and access to platforms like care, we view as increasingly a table stakes employee benefit, but there will be some ups and downs quarter to quarter. Okay. Thank you.

Operator, one last question.

Conference Operator: Thank you. And that comes from Ygal Arounian with Citi.

Ygal Arounian, Analyst, Citi: Hey, good morning guys. Just one follow-up on Care and one on

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: digital gaming.

Ygal Arounian, Analyst, Citi: Neil, in some of the press articles, when you rebranded people, you talked about, we’ve got 40 brands and don’t think all of them are going to last. Can you just expand on that a little bit? And understood that the core sections are driving most of the growth, but does that create any sort of headwind to top line, if we think about that transition? And the investment here you’re talking about in this quarter as you rebrand and next quarter kind of going back to normal, is there a chance that you would need more investment levels as we transition around Gen AI search? And then with MGM and the digital gaming, you talked about that performing well and that being a core part of the thesis with MGM.

Are you guys actively involved in that as 25% shareholders? And kind of maybe you could expand on that strategy a little bit. Thanks.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith): I’ll do the people question first. No, for the purposes of these numbers, the brands I was talking to and that are sort of the brands that aren’t part of the core. So that’s anything that’s fully baked and fairly it’s going to be in a steady state where is now. It was more of a way to explain to people that are the which you guys have known for a long time. Our biggest invest brands are carrying the water around here and they’re getting all the investment.

The second question is, Gen AI or whatever going to require more investment? I think we are at a point now where I think we made some really smart investments. I think they’re going to pay back in measured in quarters, not years. And as Chris said, I think we’re going to follow the margin profile Chris outlined earlier, if that’s the question. I think we’ve been doing this a long time, and we’re very good at investing behind success, not ahead of success.

We’ve never been an invest ahead of success person. We’re going to see that these things are working, we’re going to invest. So I feel very comfortable with the margins Chris outlined, and I don’t think there’s going to be any outsized investment going forward that would affect that.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Yes. And just a couple of things I’d add on that. Core sessions now generate 90% of total. So we’re sort of in that path to non core becoming less and less relevant. The that vein and the only thing I’d say is relative to the investments that we made in Q2, the spend associated with those are baked into the guidance we’ve done in Q3, well as our full year guidance.

So we have ramped up that investment. That’s a little bit why the top end of the range came down. Also, as I said before, there’s $3,000,000 plus of incremental healthcare costs due to high cost claims that have flowed through and we are booking in the second half. We will look to optimize that going forward. On MGM, we own 24.

We are big supporters of the management team, Bill Hornbuckle, Jonathan Halkyard and others and also of the BetMGM management team in joint venture there of Adam and Gary and others. We have humbly sought to provide our perspectives through Barry Diller and our former CEO, Joey Levin, who is on the Board on ways to drive revenue, optimize performance and along with the Chairman, Paul Salem and other Board members make BetMGM as successful as possible. We had a former joint employee of IAC and MGM, Gary Fritz, who’s gone into MGM full time and leads their digital and strategy efforts and we feel great about his contributions and are thrilled he’s working so closely with Bill. So, we are active Board members, but really support the management team in their strategy. Thank you.

Any other questions, operators? I think that’s it.

Conference Operator: Yes. I would like to return the floor at this time to Chris Halpern for any closing comments.

Christopher Halpin, COO and CFO, IAC: Thank you. Thank you to all for being on and the questions and have a great day.

Conference Operator: Thank you. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.

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