People Incorporated Common Stock Oppenheimer 29th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference

Yeah. Thanks, Jason. It is great to be here with everybody. I have been with IAC, former IAC, Dotdash, then Meredith, now People Inc., for going on 12 years now. So I have been partnering with Neil, operating this business for a good long while. So a lot of familiarity there, getting up to speed on the rest of the business. But obviously been very close with Chris and Mark and Barry and the team. Prior to that, I spent more than a decade at American Express doing corporate development, investing, M&A integrations, a whole host of things there. And once upon a time was an investment banker, with a guy named Neil Vogel back in the 90s. So that is actually how we know each other.

Yeah. Great. So zooming out, People Incorporated is the former IAC, right? We own a significant interest, minority interest in MGM. People, the operating asset, that is what I will call it today, that is the traditional sort of publisher media business and a handful of other assets, which we will get into. Our goal right now in this incarnation of People Incorporated is to simplify the overall structure, ownership structure. And we have taken a couple steps to do that. One, identified MGM and People, the publisher, People, the media business, as our core assets. That is where we are going to allocate our capital, both through share buyback, opportunistic M&A on the People side. At the same time, we own two businesses, majority businesses, one called Vivian, one called The Daily Beast. Both are performing well. We are looking for new homes for those.

We're not in any hurry to do something that's not economically rational, but we do think that they're probably a better home and a value play for us. We own a minority interest in Turo, which is a ride-sharing company that's also doing very well right now. So we feel pretty well-positioned to continue to monetize non-core assets and redeploy that money into the core.

Yeah. I think Barry said 60 days, we expect resolution. On June 1st, we put in an offer to buy out the rest of the MGM stake. We and along with some other equity investors would do that. That's working its way through that process. There's a special committee and all. We can't say much more about that other than we've been shareholders in MGM for six years. We like the management team, love the management team, like the assets, think it's undervalued, much like the People Incorporated story, the holding company story, and we saw an opportunity to take a bigger bite. Again, we'll see where that transaction goes. If it weren't to come to pass, then we'll go back to doing what we were doing, which is continuing to buy back stock in People Incorporated and opportunistically look to increase our position at MGM.

Yeah. I would say like everyone in media these days, we are contending with the changes that AI has brought to the world. I think we have been pretty forthright in talking about it as long back as two-plus years ago, saying that the new world is going to look a lot different than the old world. Search is being disintermediated by AI, and that is going to have an impact on the downstream traffic to people like us. We even called it Google Zero almost two years ago. We do not think it is going to zero, but that was sort of the internal rallying cry.

We are at 21% today. 21% of- We are at 21% today, down from 65% back not too long ago.

What that forced us to do is really recalibrate and think about our brands and put our brands back where they belong in the forefront and develop new strategies to monetize those brands and those audiences, that those brands are unique in this kind of modern AI world, where it is still a human connection and a brand-led connection between our users and, again, our assets. What we told Wall Street, and have been telling Wall Street the last few quarters is, we think about our digital business in two parts. We have sort of this, we call session-based, so that is visitors to the .com. The session-based revenue stream is incurring and absorbing the headwinds from Google, or from the decline in Google Search, and continue to maintain revenue at about flat.

That is about, it was 57% this last quarter, and we were minus 1% in total revenue on that side of the house. The growth is coming from the other side of the house, what we call non-session-based revenue stream. That includes everything from events to social series and social audiences to our licensing business. It includes D/Cipher, our ad targeting capabilities, and that is where the vast majority of our investment is going. That 43% is growing about 20%. It grew 19% in the first half of the year. The whole sort of recalibration around this audience disintermediation is to, again, create direct relationships with consumers on that non-session-based category, that grouping of revenue streams, and grow that as fast as we can. As I said, that is where the vast majority of our investment is going.

Well, that is our rallying cry, right? We've always been, and we say around the business here, double-digits growth, everything else will take care of itself. Double-digits growth, I always add, with strong margins will take care of everything else. Right now we're in the mid to high single digits range. That's what we've guided to this year. That's what that kind of 40% growing 20% and the rest flat gets us. But our commitment and obligation to do is to continue to invest in that non-session-based revenue streams to bridge the gap. I do think we can do that. I think that takes some time. No one's more impatient than me when it comes to that, but these things do take some time to build.