People Launches First App, With Other Dotdash Titles To Follow
People magazine has been a staple of grocery store checkout lines for decades, reaching over 125 million people via print, web and social media. But the brand, purchase by Meredith by Dotdash in 2021, has never had an app.
Until now.
The People app, set to launch after two years of development, will have its own unique visual identity, be heavy on the swiping and include its own exclusive content. It is the vanguard of what Dotdash Meredith hopes will be a series of apps for its others brands that will look to cater to readers of its other well-known titles like Entertainment Weekly and Brides.
“We want to create something that is appealing to a different audience, something that is really, really visual, and we’ve learned a lot from—particularly Tiktok—and our strategy there how to serve visual content,” Leah Wyar, president of the entertainment and beauty & style group at Dotdash Meredith, told AMO.
The offering will be super video-heavy, an area they have invested in greatly—in fact, they had almost 4 billion video views across platforms last year, with Wyar crediting new and exclusive experiences for the high number of views. And while the app keeps the general coloring and font from the magazine, it’s “a step beyond that, and so everything looks slightly different, but always like People,” Wyar said.
Once the app has launched and kinks worked out, the company will have a model of a brand new product that it can iterate on for various brands and roll those out. Entertainment Weekly, for example, could build an app around fandom—sky’s the limit.
“We can create for a variety of brands, different things with this type of technology and tweaks down the road. So this is really the stake in the ground to figure out how to make it, absolute ideal state for this audience,” Wyar said.
Gen Z, Baby
Elf Beauty—the leading makeup brand among Gen Z—is People’s launch partner for the app, which will be free and depend on advertising for revenue.
“We have many, many, many, many millions of Gen Z fans that follow us on various platforms that we can target just based off of our current followers and our current readers,” Wyar said.
Among the new offerings, People will introduce a docu-series called The Fourth Wall, coming April 24. It’s an exclusive behind-the-scenes reality show revealing how the biggest stories at People come to life with confessionals, staff meetings and all. The videos will be three to four minutes long and go on the app exclusively three times a week.
“It’s a parallel experience to understand how that stuff gets made, and you can only see it on the app, and so we’ve built a real roster of things that are totally app exclusive to drive interest and daily use,” Wyar said. The app will also provide shareable content, save features, see exclusive cover reveals and soon, the Puzzler game suite.
The work on the app has helped change the culture and mindset at Dotdash as others seek to also innovate. Designers, for example, have been encouraged to push the envelope, to experiment.
“There’s always been excellent innovation at Dotdash. That’s never been a shortcoming for us, but it’s a little bit different right now, and people are very, very excited,” Wyar said. “There’s this spirit of innovation that starts to really trickle out, because there’s teams from across the company that are working on this stuff, and they get everybody else really excited.”
The company’s not focused yet on target numbers of downloads, and instead on creating a product that will keep users coming back.
While People has secured partnerships already for this launch, questions surrounding the ongoing geopolitical turmoil being seen during U.S. President Donald Trump’s second administration are giving some companies pause. Wyar said she spoke with various partners this week in Los Angeles about the matter.
“It’s still too early for people to know exactly what they’re going to do in response to this it’s so volatile,” Wyar said. “My conversations have been like, it’s too early, it’s business as usual, right now. Does that change next week? Maybe.”
