Neil Vogel on Building Dotdash and the Brands Being Remembered

Jacob: I’ll be honest, beyond the work you’ve done running Dotdash I know very little about your background. Can you talk a bit about how you got started in media and what brought you to what was then About.com?

Neil: Oh, sure I thought you were going to ask me a question about the Sixers entrusting the process from our Twitter relationship, but I’m happy to give you actual background. I will tell you that running something like About.com was never really part of the plan. I was an investment banker out of college for a number of years which I liked very much but wasn’t really the life path I wanted to take. From banking I’m old at this in the late ’90s, 2000 I left banking to go to work with a client. I did a lot of media internet stuff when I was a banker, early internet called Alloy online which then became called Alloy.

We were a media marketing service business for high school and college kids and we did really well and we went public in the 1.0 boom. We grew a business like 300 million of revenue and 50 or 60 EBITDA and it’s where I learned the lesson that if you have businesses that generate cash, nobody can tell you what to do. You generally can control your future, so that shaped a lot of my future thinking. I stayed there for four or five years. I was pretty young and the guys who were in the business were also pretty young a little bit older than me, so I was never going to be the CEO.

After a couple years there we had a pretty good run, I wanted to take a shot at doing something myself. With a partner who was an old friend from investment banking we did a very small buyout of oddly an award show business, something called the Telly Awards which helped tell people what good TV commercials were, and good advertising was. We then bought the Webby Awards which was basically out of business and we revived the Webby Awards. We took this platform and put together 9 or 10 different award shows and properties and then eventually sold it to a private equity shop.

I was in onto my next adventure. I sat for a few months at a place called First Smart Capital where I have some friends. Those guys are sneakily some of the best, actually not sneakily anymore but quietly some of the best VC investors in the world. They have an unbelievable track record and I sat there for four or five months. They were kind enough to call me a venture partner or whatever. I ate all of their food and sat in on their meetings and realized that I would be a terrible VC because I don’t have that patience. I’m much more into doing things. Just from being around the internet for a long time I knew the guys at IAC.

I knew a guy named Joey Levin who’s now the CEO of IAC who called me and said they had just bought About.com from the New York Times for $300 million-ish. They owned it for a few months and I know they were looking for someone to run it and I knew it wasn’t doing as well as they would’ve hoped at the time. He called me and had me in, and I frankly thought because we were friends, I thought he was just asking me if I knew someone who would take the gig. It turned out that they had some interest in having me do it.

I looked at all the information and I could not have been less interested in doing this coming off of a fun thing I started, and a hot internet company and working for a big VC to go and run the most boring, tired thing on the internet did not have a lot of appeal. Then I dug a level deeper and obviously, IAC is Barry Diller and Joey and obviously those guys are two of the smartest people in media, I was like well they see something here so it’s worth exploring. We went deep on it together and I realized that well this thing’s been around for a really long time and what does it do? Well, it’s an evergreen site.

It obviously covers a broad range of stuff basically the mandate was cover everything in the world. The product was terrible, the user experience was terrible, but somehow or another they still had 30 or 40 million people a month using it each month. The people who were using it, the most interesting thing was I figured out or we figured out what intent meant. All these people were using About.com this relatively brandless thing to get advice on what to cook or their health or something financial, and the ads performed incredibly well, and this didn’t make any sense to me.

I’m like, oh, right they performed really well because the people advertising on About.com are understanding that people are using About.com using it for a very specific purpose so if you can put the advertising on a specific purpose that will work. I took a look and said wait a minute, this content has value, this user clearly has value to advertisers. Everything else about this is a mess so that actually seems really interesting, and plus it’s this old brand everyone’s heard of. I haven’t had a boss in a long time when am I going to have a chance to work for Barry Diller and Joey? That seems really appealing and they’re going to give me the keys.

Frankly, there’s not a lot of down side. I’m not going to be the guy that messed up About.com. You mix all that together and I decided to do it. I knew some folks and I managed to bring in some people I’d work with when I got there and we put together a really good team, a team that was way better than the business when I first got there. Then we set off to fix About.com and I can tell you that story if you want.

Jacob: That is exactly my next question. When you took that job what was the fundamental shift you saw necessary to effectively fix About.com and turn it into what is now Dotdash?

Neil: Well to be totally clear and honest we were totally wrong when we got there. We could not have been more wrong in our assessment of what we needed to do. We thought we needed to let’s clean up the site, make it usable, make it fast. Let’s clean up the content so it’s better and not so sloppy and if you dug deep the quality got really bad. Let’s clean all that up and then we’ll have this brand that everybody will know and everything will be happy, and that will be easy and we’ll sell ads and everything will be great.

It turns out that was not a working plan because baked into that plan was essentially looking around at media and doing what everybody else was doing. One of the interesting things about the team that we brought in is none of us we’d all worked in and around media, but none of us had ever been a publisher or anything like a publisher. We saw what these other people were doing with social and how they were investing and this like oh, we can do that with About.com that’ll be easy but none of it worked. We spent two or three years trying to shine up and clean up this thing and it just was not working.

We got much better at making money but it turns out that’s not the hard part, that’s the easy part. We did not get better at audience and our audience are just going down and down and down and down every month. I’m going to get this slightly wrong with direction this is right, I think we missed eight of our first nine quarters financially as part of IAC which is a public company which is not a recipe for a success nor continued employment. I do think they liked us because we were constantly trying things and we were constantly learning. After two or two and a half years of a great team and really smart people with good ideas, we came to the conclusion that we were doing the wrong thing.

We figured that publishing was a huge mess. This was the conclusion we made, publishing is a business that fundamentally cannot work unless you can get control of two things, and the first thing is your audience. What we figured out was at this point the internet had changed a lot. If you’re going to be in the consumer internet business not just publishing but anything, it could be travel, it could be entertainment, it could be anything they’re going to be algorithms between you and your user. You got to figure out that relationship and you have to put yourself in a place where you understand that you’re going to have to deal with algorithms, and you’re going to have to have a symbiotic relationship with them.

On the other side of the business at the time, mostly for them it was entirely advertising. As of now advertising’s a much less significant part of our business but then it was almost all advertising. Advertising appeared to us to be a race to the bottom, that everyone was selling audiences and you could just buy them cheaper from the next guy. There’s no real advantage you’re having if someone is just buying based on cookies or based on audience, who cares they’re just doing it on price. You basically had no control of your supply and you had no control of your demand and we were like this seems really dumb.

Unless you can get control of your supply and your demand this business is going to zero and we don’t want to be in it. It’s a particularly bad business in that context. We look at those two things we’re like well how do we get control of our relationship with consumers and our relationship with advertisers? We said we need to do this differently. First there’s the obvious thing, and this is the thing that you could see in our business, and a lot of people that weren’t us selling our business, there was no place for a general interest internet company anymore giving information that’s valuable.

If you’re sick, do you want information on your diabetes treatment from WebMD or from About.com? 100 times out of 100 you want it from WebMD. Do you want your blueberry pie recipe from Bon Appétit or About.com, Bon Appétit 100 times out of 100. We knew we had a branding problem and so the first thing we did is we took a look at our sites and said what are the areas that we are in that are commercially viable that we think we have a chance to be successful in an environment where maybe we’re not About.com anymore maybe we’re something else?

We honed in on areas that we had a lot of really, really good content and this is the advantage of starting with About.com. We had great content in health, great content in finance, great content in food and drink, great content in home, great content in tech and a few other areas. We said, we can figure out how to carve things out of About.com. We figured we can do this. We went and said, we are going to launch our own new consumer brands in these categories. We’re going to throw 80% of About.com’s content in the trash and we’re going to end up with new brands in these areas, which is interesting.

If there’s a health brand called Verywell that is all about health, and built like health, and speaks in health language that’s going to be better than About.com, that’s fairly obvious. The thing we were more focused on is something that– I don’t remember if Barry Diller said this or if Joey said this. They’re basically like, “You guys have one problem. Don’t make one problem six problems. Just doing the same thing rebranded is not going to solve your problems.” We knew this, too. This was the lead for us. What we realized is, we just had to look at what is going to work on the internet.

I’ll take a step back and I’ll make an example of what was not working on the internet. There’s this narrative came about that publishing can’t work online. We thought that was false. Here’s why. Imagine you’re pitching a TV executive in the early days of television, and you are going to pitch them your idea for this thing called a sitcom. The sitcom is going to be great. Here’s your idea. “Sitcom is going to be half an hour long, and here’s what we’re going to do. It’s going to be 20 minutes of ads and 10 minutes of very mediocre content. Isn’t that an awesome idea?” The TV guy says, “Yes. Great idea,” puts it on TV, and then it doesn’t work and nobody watches it.

Then the conclusion is, “TV doesn’t work. TV can’t possibly work.” That’s obviously preposterous, but that’s what people were doing on the internet and particularly in consumer publishing on the internet. We said, “All right, we’re going to take a whole new approach with this. We’re fortunate to have the backing of IAC, so we’ve got some capital to try new things. We’re going to focus in on what we are and what makes us great, and not try to copy or be anybody else, or do something unnatural.” What About.com had always been is great content and great service content.

We are going to focus on being great service content, that is content that helps you, helps you diagnose something, cook something, make something, buy something. Just learn something, interpret something, anything like that, paint something. We’re going to make the very best content. The first thing we’re going to do is for every single article and every single piece of content we have on all these brands we’re going to launch we’re going to try and make the best thing on the internet. That’s going to be expensive, but it’s the only reason for us to exist because the world doesn’t need any more mediocre stuff.

We’re going to try and do the best things, and then we’re going to do two things that no one else is doing. We’re going to do this on what are going to be the fastest sites on the consumer internet because we know that speed is not a linear relationship between ad performance and consumer satisfaction. The faster things go, people get way, way, way happier, and things perform way, way, way better. We’re going to make our sites incredibly fast. What that means is, making fast simple things is very hard. You have to make very hard decisions about what you will do and what you won’t do.

That ties into the third thing we said, which is, we are going to have fundamentally less advertising than any of our competitors in any space in which we compete. We’re going to shoot for two-thirds of their advertising. There’s things we are never going to do. We’re never going to do a pop-up. We’re never going to do interstitial. We’re never going to do a pre-roll. We’re never going to do anything that gets in the way of your content because people hate that. The bet was, if we do these three things, best content, fastest sites, fewest ads, people will like that.

It turns out that we think what that will do is, that will help us get back control over our relationships with people because they will like us and it will send signals to algorithms that algorithms should favor us. We also decided that we’re not going to care about certain algorithms. I don’t care about Facebook. I don’t care about Twitter. They’re not good for our type of content. They don’t value quality content. They value virality. That’s not what we do. We care a lot about Pinterest, and we care a lot about Google, and we care about Apple News, and we care a lot about Flipboard.

On the other side, what that’s going to do is, if we can do that and we can build audiences, these audiences are going to be incredibly qualified audiences, really amazing audiences, where we give them an incredible user experience. Despite, we don’t let advertisers do a lot of the things they do at other places, the bet was our stuff will perform much better and people will be able to target contextually from us, not audience-based. In other words, if someone is coming to our site July 2nd and looking for barbecue recipes, we know exactly what they’re going to do. We know exactly what kind of advertising needs to go there.

If you’re looking to how to assemble bunk beds for my kids’ room, we know exactly everything we need to know about you, we know exactly what advertisers put next to you. If your router is too slow, same thing. We bet that we could take some leverage back from the audience-based advertising and say, “Oh, we can do incredible contextual advertising, which performs way, way, way better.” We did all these things. It is the most simple thing possible that we did. We’re like, “We’re just going to make really fast sites, that are of good content, that people like and the ads are respectful, and we’re going to do it in categories where we think we can really compete.”

That’s what we did. In 2016, we started breaking up About.com before we eventually sunset About.com and we launched Verywell in Health, and The Balance in Finance, and then we took over Investopedia, which is another IAC brand in Finance. We launched Lifewire in Tech, and The Spruce in Home and Food. This whole thing really clicked. Then in very IAC-style, if know anything about IAC, as soon as we had a model that worked, we went out and said, “What other properties can we get that we can run this playbook on that we can do our things, or we can get really good brands, and we can do things to enhance their content and make them speedier and clean up their ad stack.

Can we add things to this mix?” It’s worked. People ask us all the time, “What are the tricks?” There’s no tricks. It’s just super hard work. Work really hard making your sites really fast. Work really hard making your content really great. Spend a lot of money on those things. Don’t spend money on things that don’t have yield for you. I think the financial results speak for themselves. When we started this, that year, we did 70-ish million in revenue and lost $20 million. In 2019, we did about 167 in revenue and we made 40 in EBITDA. IAC has told Wall Street to expect 20% revenue growth from us this year with increasing EBITDA margins.

Our revenue mix is not just advertising. We’re north of 35% transactions now, so this type of publishing we do people really trust us. Now, they don’t just trust us for advice, they trust us and we tell them what router to buy, and they trust us when we tell them what credit card to sign up for. We have a really nice diversified business across all these different brands and all these different verticals. We make revenue a bunch of different ways. We sell premium, we sell programmatic, we do a lot of transactional stuff. We really like where we are. We’ve made a few acquisitions recently that we’re now integrating.

I have a super different view of publishing than a lot of people do. I’m very bullish on publishing. I’m very bullish on publishers that have a really good plan and a really good focus.

Jacob: There are many facets of the business that I’m going to want to talk about today, but I want to first focus in on that audience, and what you described as really understanding the algorithms. Dotdash’s sites are, by and large, very reliant on organic search for a decent percentage of your traffic. Can you talk a little bit more about that approach, both from how you think about content and how you’ve structured the team? Does it ever worry you, considering Google has been slowly encroaching on publisher’s ground with modifications to the results pages?

Neil: The whole idea of SEO, the way we look at it or I look at it, it’s a trap. It is a backward-looking trap, and it’s not really something that we focus on doing. What we focus on doing, and understand our percentage of traffic from search is roughly the same as other publishers. It’s an awful lot in health and it’s a lot less in food or home. I think where publishers go wrong and where companies go wrong is when they focus on search as SEO, and it’s like you have to optimize or something, because that doesn’t work. That used to work, but that doesn’t work. What works is, the way you do SEO or the way we do SEO is pretty simple.

If you’re going to write an article on a topic, you need to figure out what you think is the very best thing on that topic on the Internet. How do you do that? You have experts that write it and experts that review it, that have their opinion. Then you go out and you look at every other thing on the internet that is written about that topic, and you try and make the best thing. Which means maybe it needs a lot of words in a video, and an infographic, and a GIF, and this. You just have to work really, really, really hard to make the very, very best content on topics that you care about. For us, it’s Finance, Health, Home and Food and those things and you will be successful.

Obviously, you study what competitors are doing, and obviously you need to be technically sound in what you do so algorithms can understand you. Like if Google can’t understand you, they can’t rank you, so you have to make sure they understand you. The way that you win with algorithms is super simple. Like Google when there’s a query, they want to give the best answer to that query. The best way to optimize for Google is be the best answer for that query. Same thing on Pinterest. If you’re the best image, you’re the best something for that search, you’re going to win.

In Apple News and Flipboard, if you’re the most authoritative on that topic, you’re going to do just fine. I’ll take your second question is, which is I’m not sure if you’re asking, so Google algorithm changes, or whatever’s algorithm changes, that’s always a risk. I think we have a fairly diversified business here. We’ve got 13 different brands, and 25 or 26 different domains. When people make changes, some go up, some go down. If you look at our history since we started doing this, we’re significantly more up than down. Their algorithm changing is not a concern.

The second thing you point out with that I think you’re getting at is right now, 50% or 51% of searches that go to Google never leave Google, because Google answers them in some way. We have not seen in the last three or four years any impact on our growth, or if we have, we’ve grown right through it. Yes, look, if Google decides to not send any queries to publishers, we’re going to have to find another way to get audience. We have no illusions like Facebook or Google, or you name the algorithm. They don’t owe us anything, and we don’t owe them anything either. We all live together in this world.

You hear publishers sometimes complain about algorithms, but you can’t complain about algorithms just because you probably didn’t make great decisions about something. The risk with Google is a risk you point out for some reason the number of queries then the publishers go down. We haven’t really seen that. Look, if you’re a publisher that is what is Jacob Donnelly’s net worth, that is not a sustainable business. If it’s very complex answers to people’s questions on what to do with this specific shelf bracket, or how to treat this chronic condition, I think we’re going to be in fairly good shape for a while.

Jacob: Moving to the second part of the strategy you described, it’s about building that streamlined tech experience, or making the sites really quick. When you started really building out the CMS, and the websites, what were some of the core features that you knew the tech stack had to have for you to deliver that great content to your audience in as an efficiently possible way?

Neil: This is an interesting thing. I’m saying this is not to be provocative, but it’s true. None. There was nothing that we had to have. The thing that we had to have was we had to be lightning fast, and lightning fast in that there’s a million different speed tests, and tests Google puts out in the world, and tests we can do ourselves. We needed to be 90% plus green light, whatever the measure of that test we had to be, and then we would work backwards. There was no things that we had to do because our take was the number one thing we have to have is a happy, engaged, growing audience then we will figure out how to make money secondarily.

Now, we had an advantage that we were part of IAC, and a big public company, and the year first year we made this transition, we were permitted to lose a whole bunch of money that I talked about before. There are no sacred cows for us in any of this stuff. We have a real aversion to ad tech, and anything really complicated that slows you down because everybody can show you a 10% lift from their product. What they don’t show you is the nine other things that go wrong that gives it right back. If you used every tech product in the world, your business would go up by 300%, but it just doesn’t work that way. We just said speed is first, and then we are going to build any of our infrastructure based on speed and simplicity. Speed and simplicity for us trumps everything else.

Jacob: Now, let’s move on, and talk about the third part, which is the advertising component, or the business model overall. To start, with a comparison to many other not-so-true statements, you are an advertising-first profitable media company. What is the strategy for advertising at Dotdash?

Neil: Again, everything begins with an audience, and begins with performance. Look, when we had to restart our business, nobody knew what our brands were, right? No one knew what Verywell was, nobody knew what the Balance was, nobody knew what the Spruce was. When we bought a few brands, people know what our brands are now when there’s Investopedia and Birdie, and Brides, and Serious Eats, and Simply Recipes, people know these now, but so no one knew us. We knew that we had to get in the door, if we were going to get in the door and take real premium ad dollars from people that our advantage was going to have to be audience and performance.

The good news for us was that aligned with everything else we were doing. We knew we were building this great content, and we were building this machine to get these intent-based users at scale. If we can convince an advertiser to do a buy with us, or a test buy or get us on the buy, we knew that we would keep them, because our performance was just unbelievable. We knew this because the first brand we launched was Verywell our health brand. When we had some carryover ad deals from About.com onto Verywell, our clients called us, and they’re like, “Basically, what are you guys doing? You’re cheating.

Your performance just quadrupled on this new thing. What is going on here?” We’re like, “No, no, no, here’s what we did.” We have found that our way in is different. We didn’t get in the door with amazing content studio idea. Now, we have better content suite as anybody else, but that comes out of being able to invest in it. We got in the door by saying, give us a shot, and we’ll outperform anyone else on your plan or nearly anyone else on your plan. It’s worked. IAC talks a lot about us because we’re part of a public company, and we’re quasi-public. There’s actually a lot of data on us out in the markets if you want to go find it.

I think I’m going to get this wrong, but for the last six, or seven quarters 23 of our top 25 advertisers have come back every single quarter. These are really big-name advertisers. That’s not because we’re winning new campaigns every quarter. It’s because our stuff performs so well that they need us. That has been our strategy to get in the door is performance. We also knew that given what we were doing with content, and with speed, and with fewer ads that lead to performance like this, we also knew that if we can actually pull this off, we think we have a real competitive advantage here.

I don’t think a lot of other publishers can make this shift unless they’re willing to have the transition period that we had in 2016 and 2017, where they lost a bunch of money, and made a huge bet that this would work, and then it worked. I think right now, we lead depending on the advertisers, they already know us and know our performance, that we’ll lead with creative, and we’ll lead with ideas, and we’ll lead with our brands. Our brands are really, frankly, they’re amazing now. We got in the door originally with performance.

Jacob: In 2019, Axios published a story about the launch of the Spruced Best Home Paint line, which was in partnership with Masco. This was one of the first major forays into the owned commerce business. How does Dotdash think about commerce as a line of business, and where do you see the most growth coming across the various verticals?

Neil: We love commerce. I think as we got into this, and we are a true classic service publisher, we’ve learned that of all the stuff we’ve talked about, or you’ve gotten me to talk about here, trust is the thing that underpins everything. The ultimate manifestation of trust is putting your name actually on something. We started with paint, with the Spruce. We’ve done some stuff in pets for the Spruce. We have a national rollout coming very shortly in one of the really big, big box retailers of an amazing line of products also, ordered the Spruce name, and then a second rollout in the spring also ordered the Spruce name.

We obviously, started with the Spruce. What we have realized is being able to get real-life presentation of what your brand means in a tangible way is great. Again, we are much more concerned with the branding of these product things than we are in the P&L impact. I actually didn’t think there’s going to be some P&L impact for some of this potentially, but it’s really us for branding. We want you to go to your favorite retailer, and see a bunch of square feet of stuff that has our brand on it. It’s been really, really interesting to us. It’s interesting to see how retailers think about our brands. The Spruce is the biggest home and food site, virtually the biggest [unintelligible 00:30:30] home and food site on the internet right now.

We have a lot of reach with a lot of ability to move product and our paint. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to give up numbers, but our paint has been incredibly successful. It’s one of the biggest launches in that category in a really long time, which way outdid anything we anticipated it would do. Again, it’s not a big financial impact force, but it just says what is the power of the brand, and what is the power of the media when people trust you and come to you for advice? It can really be impactful. You’re going to see a lot more from us in that. The second question asking is well what about commerce?

I think the other thing we found out is, people want our recommendations. I’ll go back to the Spruce again. If they’re on the Spruce Eats or they’re on Simply Recipes or their own Serious Eats and they need a blender they want to know what these editorial teams think is the best blender. Our editors will help pick the best blender. Then if someone buys a blender, we make a little bit of money. We have total editorial integrity. Our editorial people have no idea about any economic deal behind any of the recommendations they make, but it’s become– it’s now commerce and people trusting us is now it’s going to be 30, I think last quarter it was nearly 40% of our revenue. It’s a material thing that we do and we’re excited about.

Jacob: I want to talk about Investopedia for a second. There’s a product on there called the Academy, which are effectively courses that you sell around how to make good trades and things like that. This is premium content. Do you envision this premium content as something you could introduce on other verticals whether through a subscription or just selling one-offs?

Neil: We could. I think it’s particular to Investopedia because of it must be like roots in education. There’s definitely an education DNA in there from whether you work on Wall Street or whether you’re a student learning about this stuff. Some of the courses have been successful. I think we’re looking at different things in different verticals. I’ll take what you said and say is there a premium content opportunity? There is definitely a premium content opportunity, but in our world if you’re going to ask somebody to pay for content, that’s a whole different thing that frankly we don’t have great expertise around.

We’re playing around on Investopedia to try and learn how to do that and how to deliver things. These are more one-off sales of courses and content we’ve developed than traditional subscriptions. I think subscriptions are trickier and we haven’t really figured that out yet. I’m not totally sure we’re trying to figure that out either. It’s something that we’re doing and I think we’re playing around with it.

Jacob: We’ve talked about audience, we’ve talked about technology, and we’ve talked about the business model and IAC and Dotdash you want to acquire other sites to help you continue growing towards your objective. We’ll talk about the future in a few minutes. As you continue to grow are there other verticals that you’re looking to move into, and expanding on that, if you could craft the perfect acquisition what does it look like?

Neil: Those are two very good questions. I think the verticals we’re in now, so the interesting thing about our business is people ask us like “Oh my God you guys are so big. You’re 100 million a month on comps now, and looking at you you’re way bigger than that. What are you going to do?” We’re not the leader, we’re still true challenger brands in basically every space that we’re in. In food, we now have the Spruce Eats and Simply Recipes and Serious Eats and liquor.com. All recipes is still twice the size of us, right? Twice the size of any one of those brands. In Health we have WebMD and Healthline, are three times the size of Verywell or whatever, two times the size of Verywell.

Going down the line like the organic growth we can have in any of our verticals is really exciting. There’s two ways to do that. There’s we grow ourselves or we make acquisitions. I think we are excited about both outcomes. I think that we’re investing an awful lot. I don’t really know. There’s probably a few publishers that are investing in or around the level that we are but there aren’t many which is a real advantage. Some of the things we bought have been real catalysts. Again, to get back to your verticals we love health, we love finance, we love food and drink. We love home. We love beauty and style. We are learning tech. We’re in tech.

We actually we do fairly well in tech but we’re learning. We’d like to scale there. That’s pretty much where we’re focused now. I’m not saying we wouldn’t do something else, but you’re probably more likely to see us do things within those verticals like we just did in food a few weeks ago and like we did with liquor. The one vertical we really wanted to get into is beauty and style. We bought our way in with Birdie and Brides. In the home space we have the Spruce and we have My Domain we’d like to do a little bit more there too if we could. We’re a little bit– this is like a very Wall Street but it’s a little bit of like a platform and add-on, bolt-on acquisition strategy which we’ve got these platforms, and now we’re looking for bolt-ons for the most part.

The ideal acquisition I don’t know if there is an ideal acquisition. I can say the ideal acquisition is one that works. The thing we just did a few weeks ago where we bought Simply Recipes and Serious Eats is a pretty good blueprint for the things that we like. We did that and the next day I got a call from this investment banker, I know who I actually like very much and who was helpful to us. He was like “Wow guys, that’s really interesting what you just did. It’s really off the radar.” I was like “Who’s radar? This is our radar. If you understand what we’re doing this is exactly what we should be doing.”

What we were able to do is buy two brands that are not broken. We’re not into buying broken stuff. We’re not buying real vibrant living brands. We pay a fair price for them. These brands in particular are great but they’re part of a smaller media company, and it’s very hard to be a small media company. We can take Simply Recipes and we can take Serious Eats. Simply Recipes is one of the original food blogs online, a very down-the-middle food site. Serious Eats is a very Brooklyn-based foodie food science site that’s– I personally have admired for years and years and I’m thrilled. We got to own it.

We get to do our thing to them which we get to invest, we keep full editorial teams. Their editorial teams do what’s right to do the best stuff in their point of view and we get to really grow them. Then we get to put them on our platform so the sites get faster, and the ads gets better and we can help them sell things. Those are pretty down in the middle for us. We’re looking at pretty much everything that’s out there. Our deals are hard. We look at a lot more than we do, but I’ll be disappointed if we can’t do some more, if we can’t buy some more things.

Jacob: Where do you see Dotdash in the next three to five years? I suppose more specifically, is there a future in your mind where DotdDash could be its own company similar to how IAC spun out all of its dating websites?

Neil: That’s not really up to me that’s really up to IAC. What I would say is we love being part of IAC, right? We have enough capital to buy things. We have all kinds of creative ways to pay and compensate people. Their leadership’s amazing. They let their CEOs run their businesses. If you can have a board of directors, it’s Joey Levin and a guy named Mark Stein and Barry Diller that’s about as good as it’s going to get. We’re pretty happy there. Going out to run a public company doesn’t really feel all that appeal. It feels very difficult. Maybe one day we’ll be big enough where we can do that.

I’ve heard Joey and Mr. Diller say all the time success is independence. When you get big enough that you’re too big for the nest then it’s time to get free. Then we’ve all done our job right. If it happens one day, great. If it doesn’t, great. It’s not particularly up to me. I’m also not particularly lobbying for it. I like where we are now.

Jacob: I want to wrap up with the same two questions I ask every operator that I speak to on this podcast first.

Neil: I’m happy you call me an operator at this point. I do so little real work that I’m honored. I’m happy that someone calls me an operator of anything. I’m more I’m an annoyer. I just annoy people,

Jacob: I’m going to assume that you still have to have somewhat of an operating background because your media business is profitable. That in my mind is a big driver of your ability to be an operator, is the ability to operate a profitable business. Throughout your media career I’m sure you have made mistakes, and we talked a little bit about the mistake with trying to stick with About.com versus breaking it up into smaller more successful brands. What is a mistake that you have made individually that you obviously wish you hadn’t? What did you learn from it?

Neil: Oh, man there are so many mistakes. I don’t know. I think one of my– I don’t– everyone has good traits and bad traits. I think my very good trait is a short memory for mistakes or you lodge it but you don’t dwell on it. I think the mistake that we made here and we made it consistently for two years or two and a half years is, we were doing a lot of things right that now are the underpin or the infrastructure of our business now. We spent way too much time worried about what everybody else was doing, and I was as guilty of that as anybody.

These guys would get a lot of press for this thing they were doing and we would scratch our heads, and intuitively we knew that it wasn’t right, or even or that’s really dumb. Then we would go and do it anyway, or do something like it anyway. It took us a little bit of time. It took us a year or two to figure out that no, that’s a mistake. We have to understand what our uniqueness to the world is. In our case I used to work with service content. If you’re going to be service content you have to run your business in a very different way than someone who’s doing news or somebody who’s doing sports, or someone who’s doing gossip or someone who’s doing style.

It took a long time to get the confidence to be like, you know what we’re not doing that. We’re doing it our way. We’d rather like if we’re going to win or lose, let’s win or lose on our terms, not terms dictated by somebody else. Blocking out the external factors is really hard. We got good at it, but I think we took it to such an extreme that you’re in a meeting with very smart people, and they’re all asking you why your traffic’s declining from Facebook. We’re like, well, we don’t care about Facebook. They’re looking at you like you’re insane. Like your business is shrinking, your traffic is shrinking.

You’re telling me you don’t care about Facebook, but it turns out that, in that case, we were right. The mistake is like the shiny thing trying to follow the shiny thing, particularly in media is like death. That’s what I think we rescued ourselves from in the nick of time.

Jacob: Second, if you could give other perspective or current operators some advice, what would it be?

Neil: Oh, this the advice to young people question, or just advice to anyone question?

Jacob: Anyone looking to get into media or already running a media company, young, old.

Neil: I think if you’re going to run a media business in some way, and it’s something that it took us a long time to figure out and lucky for us, we had a public company behind us. You have to figure out your reason to exist. The thing that we say all the time to ourselves is, “If this brand or if this site, or if this piece of content disappears from the internet forever, will anybody care?” If the answer is no you need to do something differently. Obviously, that’s too extreme. The answer is if we’re going to have a health site called Verywell that’s going to spend tens of million dollars a year on content and really compete with the WebMD and Healthline and have a very distinct point of view, when we launched it.

Could we have said, “If this thing goes away tomorrow, will anybody care?” The answer is no. If we launch that today and it goes with the internet, a lot of people are going to care. That means we’re doing something right. It goes to the world doesn’t need any more mediocre stuff and that goes to content. You can’t do okay content on an okay site with too many ads, it’s just not going to work. If that is what you’re doing now, I’m sure there’s a nugget or a kernel in your business that you can find that can be the cornerstone of the thing that you should be doing. There’s a lot of guys in media that are doing a very good job now, and some really interesting models like Axios and Morning Brew and Complex and Healthline.

It goes down the list of guys that are like all the guys at Red Ventures, really smart people doing really smart things that not enough people are talking about. There are models that totally work, and you just got to figure out how you can be one of them.