IAC at Oppenheimer Conference: Digital Growth and Strategic Insights

On Wednesday, 13 August 2025, IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IAC) presented at the Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference. The company outlined its strategic focus on digital transformation, shareholder value, and adapting to market dynamics. While the tone was optimistic, challenges such as managing traffic and the evolving advertising landscape were acknowledged.

Key Takeaways

• IAC emphasizes People Inc’s shift from print to digital and aims for over 10% digital growth.
• The company is exploring share repurchases and strategic acquisitions to enhance shareholder value.
• Decipher, an ad targeting tool, is pivotal in leveraging first-party data for advertising.
• IAC’s capital allocation strategy includes a $200 million stock buyback and M&A opportunities.
• Care.com and Vivvian Health are poised for growth with strategic initiatives in place.

Financial Results

• IAC holds $900 million in cash at the parent level with no debt, although People Inc carries refinanced debt.
• The company completed a $200 million stock buyback, acquiring 4.5 million shares in the first four months of the year.
• Corporate overhead is targeted to range between $80-$90 million annually, with efforts to improve efficiency.

Operational Updates

• People Inc’s rebranding focuses on digital content, with 64% of revenue from owned and operated websites.
• The company is diversifying traffic sources, reducing reliance on Google, and investing in email, direct traffic, and syndication.
• A licensing deal with OpenAI highlights the potential for LLM agreements, with blocked crawlers except OpenAI and Google.

Future Outlook

• IAC aims to exceed a 10% digital growth target at People Inc, leveraging new products like MyRecipes and Decipher.
• The advertising market shows mixed performance, with health, pharma, tech, and travel performing well.
• Decipher is expanding its total addressable market for ad sales, showing substantial quarterly growth.

Q&A Highlights

• Investors inquired about share repurchases, with IAC expressing a commitment to exploring further buybacks.
• Corporate overhead is set to be between $80-$90 million, with a focus on the lower end.
• Discussions included the value of content in the age of AI and maintaining leverage in negotiations.

In conclusion, IAC’s presentation at the conference highlighted its strategic initiatives and growth prospects. For more detailed insights, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference:

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the fireside chat with IAC. I’m Jason Halstein, head of Internet research for Oppenheimer. Very excited to have Chris Alvin, COO and CFO of IC, and the now CEO of People Inc, Neil Vogel. So gentlemen, thank you for joining us. Neil, think we’ve got you.

This is your first Wall Street event, I guess, post earning since the rebrand of people. So thank you for for being with us.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: Sure.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: We ran two people.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: Thanks for having us.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: We needed a new brand. Everyone knows the people brand. But for the Wall Street people, it was easier to digest than than Meredith Dotdash.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: And for our people, it was easier to digest than Meredith dot dash.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: The sales calls go Lot of happy people.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: People dot inc is the greatest email address of all time.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: You know, that gets back to, like, what we all should have squatted email addresses at the beginning of the Internet. So so everybody fireside chat this morning. If you have questions for our participants, please use the link on the bottom or email me at jason.helstein@opco.com. So, first, I wanna start out. Wall Street should be familiar with your stock.

So just, Chris, real quick, give us, like, the two, three minute overview of, like, IAC and its goal for kind of shareholder value creation.

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Sure. Thanks for having us, Jason. So we are a digital holding company. We have a collection of wholly owned businesses, the the largest of which are People Inc, which we’ll talk about, and Neil runs care.com. We also have Vivien Health, a leading player in in health care staffing, digital marketplace, The Daily Beast, and our search business, which continues to produce cash flow.

We also have large minority interests, the the most prominent of which are are 23 24% stake in MGM Resorts, the leading gaming and entertainment operator, and Turo where we have a 32% stake, the the number one digital marketplace for cars and transportation. We have 900,000,000 of cash at parent. It was $8.08 and change this past quarter, but essentially 900,000,000, which and no debt at parent. There is debt at People, which we attractively refinanced in June. And and then we have some smaller growth investments as well as our headquarters building that we we own free and clear of any debt.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Great. So with that, Neil, I wanna jump in. So I kinda joked a little bit about the beginning to rebrand to people. I think for most folks, it’s obvious why People Inc. Is a just better brand than Merit dot dash, which is like saying SpinCo one, SpinCo two in in Wall Street parlance.

But really, you know, look, you know, the goal here has been to really take these iconic brands that people have known for a long time, which were largely supported by paper, and really make them digitally perpetual brands. So really, you know, talk about kind of where we are in in that journey of kinda digitizing people and and also kind of finding removing some of the inefficiency around, you know, the print media.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: Yeah. You I mean, you said it. We we are, you know, We’re the biggest publisher in America. We’re primarily digital at this point. We have some of the most powerful household name brands, people, food and wine, travel and leisure, real simple, better homes and gardens.

You can go down the list. There’s 40 of them. There’s probably 10 or 15 that you you would call a household name. Our our name is a bit messy. We cleaned it up.

But I think the the little the the understory of why we changed the name was we thought people was obviously great because everybody knew. Everyone knows when you met somebody at a cocktail party, you said, I run dot dash Meredith, that’s people. So we’re just now we’re just saying it’s people. It makes sense. Like, Coca Cola is Coca Cola.

But the the real thing is it’s we are content made by people for people. And I think the promise of what we do and the promise of our brands is that the value and expertise of what humans can make in a world where a lot’s artificial is really our story. And by highlighting the sort of the specialness of our brands and the specialness of our relationships, we’ve been pretty successful. It’s a fun little nod back to timing for those old media heads, a little Easter egg. But in terms of where we are in a transition from print, I haven’t even had to answer that question in a while because we’re well on the other side of it.

I think when we bought Meredith three years ago, there were 12 or 13 monthly, weekly magazines. Now we have seven. The print business for us, run for two reasons. We run it, one, for branding, because it’s interesting. Our fastest growing digital brands almost all have print counterparts.

And we run it for cash flow. And Chris has said, and our CFO, Tim Quinn, said a number of times, we target EBITDA probably enough to cover our corporate expenses. So we’ve probably been targeting around 15 EBITDA as revenue goes down. We’ve probably beaten that by a little bit. But print for us is very healthy.

And we looked at print like we looked at everything else. I said print is part of a media mix of a brand. If we can make a product that people really love that accrues value to the brand, we’re going to still make it. And if we can’t, we can’t. And we have very healthy subscription business.

The print ad business is going to remain challenged for obvious reasons that we don’t need to get into, but people love getting the print books and print is in a really healthy spot right now. But what it does is what it dovetails into is we have brands. Some of our brands are north of 100 years old, and we have these relationships with people. And it is people, lowercase p people. And it is our job to always be in front of where human beings want to interact with In style and where they want to interact with people.

And if they want to interact with us on our own websites, great. If they like our app, great. If they like our new applications like My Recipes, even better. If they want to be on social, great. And I think what we’ve proven is we can continually grow audience, in economically viable way because we have these great brands, and we’re we’re very good tactically at, figuring out how to connect with people.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Got it. So is there a like, of those different, I guess, can call them channels that they could interact with your brands, are there certain channels that are more beneficial to you than others if that’s where the consumer Yeah.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: I mean, it’s fairly obvious. And you know this, for those who follow business, we the the primary way we make money is O and O sessions on our website and things that we also own, like events and things. And that’s probably 64 per that is last quarter, 64% of the economics of our business. Right? Two thirds of the economics of our business comes from our O and O websites.

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Digital revenue.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: Yeah. 64% is our digital is is of our digital revenue. Right. And I’ll I’ll jump your next question. That is the part of the business that to outsiders feels like is in the most flux.

Right? Because to get traffic and audience to your own websites, historically, a lot of that traffic came from Google, and it’s increasingly fewer visitors from Google. We’ve done a very good job with the diversity of how our brands interact with people and connect with people, whether it’s email, whether it’s our own new products, whether it’s direct traffic, whether it’s Google Discover, which is their Apple News product, whether it’s syndication to Yahoo or MSN or all these places we put our content. We’ve been really good at a healthy sessions number. And while we’ve been doing that, we’ve been rapidly growing off platform sessions.

Right? TikTok, Instagram, very importantly to us, Apple News, which we’re we’re probably the biggest publisher partner of Apple News, our healthy events business. We’ve we’re even doing some influencer stuff. So what we’re doing, and the mix is different for each of our brand, is ensuring we have this super healthy audience that loves and trusts our brands. And when you have audience that loves to trust your brands, you can do many, many things.

And the strength of our brands permissions us to do many things. And for us, we view it as a really exciting time. There’s opportunity in the thrashing opportunity in the change, and and we like where we’re headed.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So so to that point, I think you’ve said on earnings call, the long term goal is 10% digital growth. Almost there. I think it’s nine most recent quarter. I guess, you know, you know, you sound quite enthusiastic. I guess, like, is there a scenario where there’s, like, potential upside to a 10% and whether that’s through the creation of, like, new brands, you know, using the data around we can get into the cipher with leveraging the data, what you know about consumers.

Just just, you know, like, is it just 10% it, or is there an opportunity over time to find

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: that? Mean, look, there’s always an opportunity to exceed expectations. I mean, there’s always an opportunity to miss them too. Let’s hope that’s not gonna happen. But I think if if you break our business down into pieces, as we continue to diversify and grow different audiences, if we get some real traction around MyRecipes, which is our recipe locker, which we can talk about around the people app, around our raft of new things we’re doing to connect directly to our customers.

Some of our event businesses have a lot of momentum. If if that clicks in, that’s potential upside. You mentioned, Decipher. For those of you that don’t know, Decipher is an ad targeting tool we use internally based on our really intent driven, contextual data that we now can use to target the rest of the open web, that really opens up the TAM of how we can sell ads three, four X and opens up CTV. Also, if that kicks in, could be some nice upside.

And we’ve said that’ll be that should be mentioned off what we’re doing next year. Again, some of our licensing opportunities are really interesting. Our events businesses continue to grow. The events are a little bit smaller, but the there’s some real momentum there. And we haven’t talked about it yet, but we’re we’re probably the largest, commerce referral partner to the major retailers, the Amazons and the Walmarts of the world.

And we have really interesting partnerships with them and a lot of momentum behind those. And if those things really get going, there’s upside there too. So the the good thing for us is I think we feel pretty good about the 10 because of the diversity of, like, the potential ways we can win because you could also make a case why some of these things aren’t gonna win. But look, there there there can always And as as you know, like, look, if you’re running a media business today in the current climate, if you are not optimistic, you should probably be doing something else.

But we feel look. We feel great assets, really talented team, tons of support from IC. We feel really good.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Got it. So maybe I’ll offer, like, either of you to ask those questions. So on LLM licensing deals, you know, it would seem that your content, you know, has a lot of value to agentic search. Now yeah. And again, whether it’s like agents wanna bring the most up to date information to a consumer asking something, you know, in addition to whatever the training, right, the the history.

You know, I guess, do you have views on, like, these should be, like, fixed deals, variables? Should you be paid, like, per call? Like, if you give information, if somebody asked an agent, oh, what was the results of, the latest award show or something like that? And you generate the results, but they never leave the the search to go to you. Should you get paid something?

So how are you thinking about, like, over the long term?

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: I’ll take a shot and then Chris fill in. So you that’s actually you asked the the the right question. You actually asked it the right way. There we’ve done pack a couple of things. One, what makes a a licensing deal happen?

And two, what form a licensing deal takes? And for more licensing deals to happen and remember, have we have one deal with OpenAI that we’re very pleased with. They’ve been an excellent partner. They’ve helped us with Decipher. They’re they it’s been, I’d say, high end of the range outcome for us in terms of how it’s helped our other business.

But the other LLM producers, creators, whatever you wanna call them, are gonna have to have a bit of a change in attitude and look at the world like OpenAI does. What you said, the value of high quality content I think they’re realizing as they develop more, it’s more and more important, and they’re going to have to have a change in attitude. Second thing, and it’s not mutually exclusive from the first, is we’re going to have to have some more leverage in these negotiations. And one of the things we did around July 4 is we partnered with Cloudflare, we blocked basically every LLM crawler with the exception of OpenAI, which we have a deal with, and Google, which we can’t because Google has one crawler for search and AI.

Say what you want about that. That’s a whole nother conversation. Webcast. And and and what what has happened, and maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s not, is since then, the discussions with the major OLM providers have picked up a bit. Right?

All of a sudden now that they can’t access our quality content, which as you said, they need for grounding, they need for source of truth. You need quality ingredients to make a high quality product, right? There’s now beginning to have discussions of, okay, interesting. Some approaches to us about like different ways that people can get access to our content in different economic arrangements. Now you listed a bunch of them.

One can be, it could be all the way from the bucket of, which is pretty much clean licensing with OpenAI, all the way over to like a pay per crawl model, right? Or a pay per use, almost what you said as your last example. I’m not sure it would be, and it could even be paper output. It’s all very, very, very early. All these things are being considered to the extent that we can manufacture and make some more leverage into the extent that LLM makers realize they need us.

I think these will happen more quickly. There’s nothing as imminent. There’s no guarantee any of these things, turn into anything. Like, we’re sort of operating as if, as if they won’t, but I am hopeful that they will. I don’t know, Chris, if you wanna add anything to that.

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Yeah. No. I I mean, I agree with all that. I think it’s a little bit to Neil’s point where the LLM developer is in the five stages of grief

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: Totally.

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: That they have to, license premium content And that also, to Neil’s point, premium content versus trash or commoditized content in a in a constant pace of new content coming into the model is essential for what they’re trying to do. To the to the structure of the deals, as Neil said, we we very much like the structure we came to with OpenAI, but there is an element of what are the objectives of the LLM developer and operator, what are they trying to drive, and aligning incentives and and economics around that, which is a little idiosyncratic by LLM developers. So we and others are are working through that. We have real conviction of where it’s gonna end up, but it’s a question of, you know, time.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: And remember, there there are there are the major LLM, like, headline names that everybody on this call would know, but there are literally thousands of entities creating different LLMs that need a way to access our content, in a in a in a way that is economically viable for us and helps them and whether they do it through one of the existing LL. There’s there’s so much to sort out and everything’s changing so quickly, but, it’s very, very top of mind for everybody.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Yeah. Like, we all know that, like, there are models getting their results from Google. Right? So even firms who have a paid deal with Google, like, they’re not probably not being paid indirectly. Are I mean, are you willing to be litigious about this potentially?

I mean, you’ve got a nice corporate overhead budget with lawyers and whatnot or just not not wanna talk about that right now.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: I mean, I think there’s what we would say is we are going to, maintain all of our rights that, that we could have, and we we understand that we need leverage on our side. And if we feel like that is a a clear path and a a viable path to leverage, maybe that’s something we do. But, you know, again, I would say, we’ll see.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: And then maybe, you know, just talk about it and you address this on the call, but, you know, you’ve already managed, you know, something like AI overviews of 50% of searches. You know, you’ve actively managed away from search traffic. So just maybe just talk about how you’ve been able to do that.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: Yeah. And let’s frame some numbers around this, and Chris said this earlier. 28% of our, sort of like o and o traffic comes from search. 64% of the economics are, of our digital economics, are tied to sessions. So it’s it call it 18% of the full bucket of economics is really what we’re talking about.

You know, we like saying Google’s. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. We we like saying, we like saying, Google zero internally as a rallying cry, but it’s not gonna go to zero.

It’s gonna go to something. So there’s there’s some risks, some subset of of that number. We and, Jason, we’ve been talking for a long time. We we’ve been very aware, and we were doing things very early when sort of Google has always tried to keep a little bit more traffic for themselves. They very much accelerated after the pandemic.

And because we had so much traffic from Google, we were very keen to know what they were doing. We very quickly realized that Google is operating in the interest of Google, not in the interest of anybody else’s. They should. And we had to get in front of that. So we started to do two and three years ago things that felt very unfashionable.

Really do things to drive direct traffic, really do things to drive email traffic, really do things to drive syndication. And we’ve been investing, investing, investing, and it turns out that that was the right choice. Now we weren’t right about everything, but we were right about that. And as the world has evolved, we’ve been able to do all these new things and launch some of our own new products and do some other things that we’ve been able to, Google Discover, which is like their Apple News and other factor, like as the share of search has gone down, we’ve been able to plug it with all of these other things. And it’s not any one thing.

It’s a full basket of things. We are constantly trying to find new ways to connect directly with our users. I think we’ve gotten a little bit economically on our own also over that time period. So we feel pretty good about it. Again, as we talked about on the call, it’s not going to be the growth driver of our audience, but it can be very healthy.

And I think it’s gonna grow a bit. I think third quarter, again, we talked about specifics around tough comps. It might be down a bit, but, like, long term, I think it grows a bit. We feel good about it. I think what we also feel good about is the different places our brands are permitted to live.

Right? So we’ve built a really nice off platform business where we can reach audience on behalf of advertisers and behalf of our brands, TikTok, Instagram, all the social places. We’re the biggest partner of Apple News, as we said. That’s a really big licensing source for us. Again, our events, our experiences, we’re doing some influencer stuff.

There’s a lot out there. If you have the brands that have the gravitas to hold together in these environments and to thrive, you can do great. And we feel pretty good about it, but that’s that’s what we’ve done to sort of, like, fill the bucket.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: So, Chris, let me ask you to you. There’s two questions in the the chat from investors, then just we’ll get to other things. So one was folks just wanna know why the company isn’t being more aggressive with share repurchases given, you know, the kind of implied, like, you know, value in the shares today.

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Certainly. You know, we we didn’t buy back last year, and and our chairman, Barry Diller, talked in the February earnings call about, you know, we got into the other side and it was a new chapter. We bought back 200,000,000 of stock, 4,500,000.0 shares in the first four months of the year. That was very much a approach of let’s buy 200,000,000 of stock, and we did that. We we messaged tried to signal last quarter at the in first quarter earnings that we were looking again at m and a, but we were still considering buybacks.

That is the message. The the we’ve heard loud and clear from investors that they would that you would love us to continue to buy back our stock. We understand that the discount that we highlight in our own materials is even more pronounced with the way the share price has responded since our earnings a week ago. So that that value capture in buying our shares is, you know, is would be even greater. And, you know, we are exploring it.

It’s an active area of discussions. It is we hear the message of we can walk and chew gum at the same time of of both doing buybacks and exploring m and a. And we have act you know, we have multiple avenues to capital should something interesting in m and a come along. So the the cessation of the buyback, my only message would be it was driven by we the the directive was to buy $200,000,000 of stock. We did.

And it doesn’t mean we won’t buy back our stock again. And we understand the message from investors regarding the desire for continued buyback, especially given our liquidity.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Great. And then another also kind of corporate question. Just where should you know, where does corporate overhead from, obviously, you know, doing some of the parts, there’s a value of corporate overhead you have to dock. But, like, from an expense standpoint, like, where do you think corporate overhead shakes out on an annual basis after some of the, you know, changes that have been made.

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Yeah. And that was a key point of focus coming out of last year. The 24 total corporate overhead is benefited by a $10,000,000 insurance settlement that we talked about. So you can think about our run rate last year. You know, we were sort of in that 100,000,000 range.

We said we wanted to reduce it. We will continue to chip away. We had a rift earlier this year. We’ve also taken actions to improve efficiency. That is a recognition of both the the the smaller scale post Angie spin of the resource of of the companies that that pull on IAC’s resources, but it’s also just, you know, good good management in improving our efficiency.

We were about 22,800,000.0 of corporate in q two. I think the run rate we’re at would be slightly below that. We’d look to leave the year, we’ve said, in the the 80 to $90,000,000 run rate corporate expense and targeting the lower end of that and then continue to improve. We’ve also talked about strategic divestitures of our holdings that are less core. Our chairman, Barry Diller, talked about PeopleLink and MGM being core.

You can you can think about our other assets. We view them as strategic assets in their respective industries. And we’ve said going back to, you know, the 2024 that we are open to strategic transactions around them where where we view value and we generate value for shareholders. As we do that, we can continue to to simplify our corporate structure. There are there are certain functions that are just essential to being a public company that happen at corporate and at which we bear.

We could allocate them down to the businesses. Neil and team would be annoyed by that as with the other businesses, so we just keep them at corporate. But there’s some baseline, but we can we can always be more efficient, and that’s very much my goal as CFO.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Great. Thank you. So, Neil, I wanna go back just if you can comment on the ad market broadly. So were, you know, were there certain headwinds that you saw in the second quarter at all that have since dissipated? I think there’s, a general you know, I think overall, most feel pretty comfortable where the ad market is.

But, like, you know, any thoughts you wanna share around the ad?

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: I think, again, we we hit a lot of sectors, so it’s very much sector by sector. Let’s do the bad first, like, sort of like CPG, food and beverage is tougher. Some of other sectors we’re in are doing a little better. Chris can give very specific color on that. But but what I would say is overall vibe in the in the market is I think you’re I think it’s good.

Good, not great. There’s still some uncertainty. Tariffs are not great. You know, all of the commentary, on what is going on economically, the ad market’s very much leading. Right?

It’s it’s the it’s the easiest expense. It’s the easiest thing to turn on and turn off if you’re the CEO, particularly digitally, where you can really buy in real time. But I think comfortable, I think, is a very good word. I think it’s good, not great, decent, spotty. You know, Chris, you wanna add?

You go industry by industry?

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Yeah. I think, you know, we’ve said, health and pharma has been solid. Tech and travel, tech is is one that’s been in a bit of a winter for for a number of quarters, couple years coming off of the pandemic froth, but but that we’ve seen strength there. Travel, I think, you know, a number of the brands are looking to or players are looking to spend more to drive to drive more demand as as a bit of that cycle has turned. Retail is spending.

Again, you know, looking to drive into back to school in the holiday period. As as Neil said, CPG, food and beverage, tough home. And home’s been tough for a while, but, you

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: know And is is auto been weaker also?

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Auto is is is kind of weakish, but it’s a small category for us.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: You would have a huge auto exposure.

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Not endemic. It’s it’s it’s more just, you know, comes and goes in small a small player.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Right. I mean, to that point, like, you know, there’s a there’s

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Chase, one other point because we’ve talked about this point before between premium direct and programmatic, and I think your audience would care about that. Where we saw the real softness post Liberation Day in early in early April was in the programmatic market where we’ve been up, say, 15% plus in pricing year over year. That quickly fell to flat to up a few percent. That that has come back. It’s it’s it’s we’ve seen some strength in July and August, and, you know, hope to to see that continue into you know, I think the words we use are fairly healthy.

Yeah. I could see that continue. And then premium has has remained solid, but it does go sector by sector.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: And roughly what percent of digital is programmatic?

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: It’s about 30%, you know, 25, 30% of revenue.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Got it. So, I mean, the the CPG category, you know, it’s funny. In some cases, like, there’s blaming, you know, tariffs. In other cases, it’s just consumers are focused on value, and therefore, they may you know, they’re chasing generics and, you know, kinda house brands. So what’s interesting is just you know a lot about consumers and CPG just at people.

Right? Or just or

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: at the people at people large. Right.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: At people large. So, I mean, just given what you’ve been doing with Decipher, which is really about, like, understanding audience and, like, it just seem that there’s a huge opportunity to leverage that and help these massive CPG companies to do off platform advertising as, like, almost like a standing up an ad tech business.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: Well, we agree. And, again, to to simplify this, Decipher allows us to take our what is probably our best asset that that was that was always powered our own ad business, but now draw a straight line into real value that this data can create. We we believe we have as good, if not better, first party data than anybody in our business, because it’s not like, we have a cookie or an individual identifier that that is guessing what you want based on some history you have. This is real time data. We you know, if you’re on how do I get my kids fever down content on very well, or you’re on how to make an apple pie on July 3, we know exactly what you’re doing.

So it’s real time. So when when you know that and you can take that URL or that web page and you can map it to any other page around the internet or map it to a household and connect it to CTV, you have real, real insights. And it’s why we created Decipher. So what Decipher allows us to do is, again, we can we get from a a good partner. They spend a $20 CPM super simply, and they buy a whole bunch of ads around us.

Well, they also have a bit of that budget that is always gonna be for reach. We can say, give us that budget too, and we’ll make it perform very similarly to it performs on our sites, but we can do it much cheaper and we’ll go out and we will buy that inventory for them and we will resell it to them at a very good margin. And we open up three to four X the TAM for us to do this. We’re very optimistic about early results. I mean, the numbers are small, but the percentage growth is really substantial quarter over quarter.

We think it’s going be a meaningful contributor next year. But as you said, for us, it’s a bit of an ad tech challenge. Right? It looks a little bit like a DSP. It is a DSP in some ways, but it is I’m glad to it.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Listen. There are some DSPs that trade a pretty big multiple.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: Oh, we’re listen. We’re happy to be a d s we’re happy to be a DSP. Right? Right now, we have some DSP partners. We we can use a day like, again, being you and I could set up a DSP today for $300,000.

That’s not the trick. The trick Mine wouldn’t work too well. Maybe. The trick is to to put the real value in the d s

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Well, the ad would go on oppenheimercom.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: Right. The trick is to put the ads in the the data in that DSP that makes it effective. And we’re increasingly optimistic. And, you know, we hired a guy named Jim Lawson, who I think you know, who ran a small public company called Adherent, who did something like this for a long time. We are investing heavily behind this.

Look, we really believe in, if you go back to that investor deck we did where there was like on platform, off platform distributed, like the ability to use our data to target distributed content across the open web is really substantial. And, we’re in the game now, and we’ll see where it leads.

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: There’s one massive point too that that makes this possible, which speaks to the to the challenges of broader open web, which is we talked about how high our percentage was of premium, which is a credit to the performance of our inventory, but also to our direct sales force. These other open web publishers have pivoted massively to programmatic because they’ve had to. So we can see because of all the signal Neil has and because of the proprietary, you know, clustering and insights of what is most performant relative to a behavior pattern, we know that inventory is being mispriced on the programmatic markets on a purely cookie basis. So where we can guarantee and realize performance on price versus where we can buy it creates a what we would view as supernormal margin relative to broader ad tech and is why we view this as highly accretive both on a revenue growth but also profitability basis for for peep PeopleLink.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: And our challenge now is look. The question is, well, why wouldn’t everybody do this right away? And right now, it’s an execution question. We have to get the word out. And, the way people buy ads in ad tech, as you know, is not a very efficient market.

There are a lot of people that have a there’s a lot of things forcing behaviors. We gotta break through some of that. And at at the end of the day, decisions follow the money. And if we can do a good enough job, we’re gonna get this worked out, and then we feel pretty good about

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Great. Okay. I wanna spend we have five minutes left. I just wanna hit on a few non people points. So care.com, $50,000,000 EBITDA business, Chris, potentially much bigger.

Take us through the path to get there.

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Sure. There are two key parts, two segments to care.com, the consumer business, the enterprise. When IAC bought Care in 2020, it was heavily, heavily a consumer business, that is a direct to consumer, predominantly subscription product across child care, senior care, pet, and others. We built up the enterprise business, including through a great acquisition in 2021 that was made that really increased the size. The two businesses are the two segments are now fifty fifty on a revenue basis.

Enterprise, they both had huge pandemic tailwinds. Enterprise had it earlier had had the reset earlier, is is doing well. That is a key tailwind. It’s about executing, adding logos, growing within those presence, and continue to scale. Very good business.

Consumer had a huge pandemic tailwind that masked some core deficiencies in the product. We brought a new CEO in there in 2023, Brad Wilson. He got in and and and identified that deficiencies in the product as well as marketing were really negatively impacting both retention and new and recapture and new subscriber addition. That team has spent a lot of time, including with some some new executives, rebuilding the product, the platform, payments. We have we relaunched it in June.

It is all about as and in parallel with that, launched a rebooted marketing campaign and more active presence. That is very much increased funnel, conversion, retention, bring in value added services, recapture of lapsed subscribers because someone will go into care for childcare, will want to come back either for new childcare or for senior care or pet or to find daycare center as their lives evolve and their needs change, continue to bring them back in and recapture. The goal is to get consumers really been we’ve had declining users declined subscribers and revenue there since 2022. We’re seeing it’s early, but we’re seeing green shoots from those activities, and our goal is to get to revenue stability in consumer and eventually growth by the time we exit ’25 to set up for overall growth in ’26 and beyond. That business should be growing 10 to 20%.

As you said, it’s EBITDA positive free cash flow generative today, but margins long term should get to 1520%. It’s all really in the four corners of of the care business. It’s just about us executing.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: And then last thing, Vivian, most folks don’t really talk about it, know that much about it, but how big is it today and kind of, you know, where do we see it going?

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Sure. Know, Kinvian is a strategic asset in health care staffing. We on the platform, we have 2,000,000 nurses and clinicians. They it’s almost like a LinkedIn for for nursing. We sit as a marketplace on the one side between the nurses, on the other between the health care systems and staffing agencies.

They grew rapidly in the in the pandemic boost in travel nursing, etcetera. It’s been a sort of a nuclear winner in that space for a couple years. We kept growing, slowed down. We’ve had stability. The business is EBITDA and cash flow positive now.

You know, think of it in the mid 8 figures for revenue. It is it is really a strategic asset with what we view as perhaps the only or maybe one other player which is proprietary to an agency has our scale of active nurses on the platform. They have instituted AI in a way into their plat into their processes, workflows, user experience that no one else has. We think they have the opportunity to revolutionize health care staffing and fulfillment. Parth and the management team there are executing and driving it forward.

Jason Halstein, Head of Internet Research, Oppenheimer: Great. So, with that, I think we’re getting to the end. I wanna thank you, Neil, and Chris for the time. If anyone has any other questions, feel free to email us, and we can connect you with the company. Have a great day, everybody.

Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc: Thanks, Jason. It’s fun.

Chris Alvin, COO and CFO, IAC: Thanks, everyone.

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