Lots of publishers are freaked out about “Google Zero” — the notion that one day, Google will stop sending them any traffic at all.
That’s more or less already happened at People Inc., says CEO Neil Vogel. Vogel says Google used to account for 70% of his properties’ traffic, but dropped off quickly in the last couple years. Now Google represents about 25% of his mix.
That decline is supposed to be an existential problem for people like Vogel, who built a series of sites designed to harvest search traffic. Instead, he’s growing at a double-digit clip.
One reason People Inc. is doing well is that Vogel, backed by Barry Diller’s IAC, bought People, along with all the other titles owned by magazine publisher Meredith back in 2021. Turns out many of those brands still mean something to lots of people.
Meanwhile, Vogel has been happy to sign deals with AI companies like OpenAI. Isn’t there a chance those companies will end up being unreliable partners, just like platforms of the past? Sure, Vogel says. But he’s willing to take the chance — and the money those AI companies are providing — and figure it out as he goes.
“There is a chance we are a hundred percent wrong on all of this,” he tells me. “There's a chance that we're a hundred percent right. The truth is probably somewhere in between.”
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