Dotdash Meredith’s rebrand to People Inc. formalizes a post-search media strategy

These are the brands that will get the investment, the protection, the long-term bets. The other 21 will keep running, but they’re no longer in the growth plan. 

As CEO Neil Vogel put it, the play is focus. In a market being reshaped by AI and endless volatility, the idea that everything can scale is being retired. The rebrand isn’t just a name change – it’s an acknowledgement that survival now depends on knowing what not to save. 

Digiday caught up with Vogel to hear how he’s positioning People Inc. for a post-search era.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Why is DDM rebranding to People Inc?

When we put these businesses together… we knew Dotdash Meredith was not our forever name. But we had a finite amount of time to close the deal, and do a million things. We basically just mushed the names together… It’s clunky and not great, and it doesn’t mean anything… Dotdash Meredith could be a law firm or an oil company.

We wanted a new thing, and so we’ve been kicking around for a while what a new name should be. Then it hit us that the best name is probably here already, and it’s People, our biggest property.

But the second thing – almost a more important thing – is “people” is a really good representation of our narrative and what we do in this world, where so much is synthesized, fake and artificial. We are real people making real content [and] experiences across these very real brands… If we’re going to have a bright future, it’s all going to be about these brands.

Why do you think People is growing at a time when so many sites are really struggling to keep their traffic stable?

The team that runs it is incredible and very forward-looking. We are ruthlessly unsentimental, meaning you cannot do what you used to do because you liked it, because it worked. 

The thing we really did was [adopt a] totally different content process – almost newsroom process. For the print magazine, that’s going to [look like coverage of] George Clooney, [who] will always do well in the print magazine. But when you get to the web, that’s Kardashian stuff… and when you get to Instagram, it’s Alix Earle. They are the celebrities of the medium.

You let the people who are the best do their thing and meet people where they want to [be met]. You have to really love your brands, but you can’t be precious about them. And we’ve done this exercise [with all our publications].

If that playbook is working for People, why can’t it be applied successfully to other sites that are seeing their search traffic decline?

We have 40 brands… 19 of them we consider core. If you look at our revenue growth, last quarter it was up… That does not say everything’s growing. What that says is more things are growing than not growing. [Not all the] brands have the ingredients to survive here – not all 40 of our brands have been [growing] so all of our resources are going to the brands we’ve talked about that have. We have other brands that we really love, but they’re really challenged for whatever reason… You just have to make these really hard decisions. Our biggest 19 brands of our 40 are the ones where all the resources are going to go. And that’s the trick. 

So what does that mean for the future of those other publications? Just let them wither away?

I think all of the brands that aren’t necessarily considered our core brands, they all have something that is still worthwhile in the universe, otherwise we wouldn’t [have them]… but they’re just not going to be part of the economic growth engine. 

If there’s a brand that is too exposed to search, that we can’t buy other things with… that’s not going to get that much investment. Because it might look good now, but it’s not going to make it.

Does this mean more investment is going to go to the People brand?

People is already our biggest brand and already gets the most investment. So I don’t think it’s going to be getting any more. It already gets a ton… It’s more about taking advantage of the brand recognition of that name and the meaning of that name than it is a signal that we’re going to treat it any differently.

I’m glad you didn’t choose a name that people would make fun of you for. Remember Tronc?

In media, everybody will make fun of you for anything.