Brian Fitzgerald: A couple from us. Maybe more broadly on AI, as we’ve seen Google scaling up their own Search Generative Experience, are you getting any visibility in changes, if any, in terms of referral traffic to you either as AI is integrated more deeply into traditional search?
Joseph Levin: I’ll take that one. I think it’s hard to see specifically. So the short answer is, not really but I’d say long term, Google is taking more of the page and holding more traffic for themselves. That’s basically been a, I don’t know, multiyear, if not decade trend. And so I do expect that to continue.
And I think we’ve done a nice job in navigating that through our history and we actually and it’s — Dotdash Meredith site continues to grow inside of Google because we have, I think, the best content where we’ve invested more than others and do a very nice job in addressing users’ needs with the content that we’ve created. And so I think we’re in a pretty good position there. But I expect over time that Google continues to try to keep more for themselves. But we have not seen any direct impact of that yet.
Brian Fitzgerald: Got it. And then at Angi, Jeff, we wanted to ask kind of what ideas or portions of the international playbook you expect to bring to bear at Angi as you take over there.
Jeffrey Kip: So just stepping back, if you just go back a few years, 5 years ago, we had market leadership position in Europe. It was put together through the acquisition of 4 different companies, 4 different platforms, where we were losing $10 million, we had 4 different products, 4 different business models and again, the 4 different technologies.
We went through a process where the first thing we did was we pivoted our product to really be focused on homeowner choice and pro online enroll. I think the second thing we did was, we restructured in particular, our performing marketing and our unit economics, both operationally in terms of technology and we executed there.
Thirdly, we looked at the foundation of business. We refactored, rebuilt, migrated the core technology. Today, we just finished migrating the fourth business in the U.K. We’ve improved each time we’ve done one of these and we’re on a single platform with a single organization that’s much more efficient. And we’ve been able to really put our focus on the core experience, which is really the offline experience, which is when a homeowner who places a job on the platform hires a skilled pro on the platform and gets the job done well.
Effectively, I would say, 1.5 years ago, Joey, probably took a more difficult hand actually in the United States, in some ways. There was more empty calorie revenue that was both low-quality experience and low — or negative profitability in there and he’s had to pull some of that out. But he and the team have done a big part of this lift for me, so I’m lucky to come in now.
Obviously, the market’s a little different but it’s also a lot bigger and the brand and share is stronger here. So I’ve got a little more to work with. But in any case, we need to follow the same path, Joey and the team have been on. I think, basically, the key elements, the key ideas or components of what we did in Europe are in play in the right way in the United States and we need to finish the job.
And I would just add a note, which is by 2022, we turned the business north and finally growing profit after a few years of flop — finally growing revenue after a few years of flatness. We now have the business at close to 20% revenue growth in the first quarter and close to 20% EBITDA margins and God willing and the creek don’t rise, we’re going to do the same thing in the United States in good time.
Operator: Your next question comes from Dan Kurnos with the Benchmark Company.
Daniel Kurnos: Welcome back, Jeff. Joey, a little in the weeds for you, maybe but just on the D/Cipher benefits around the algo from the AI partnership. Just thoughts on incremental data signals, a shift to incrementally more probabilistic and what that kind of means in terms of driving outperformance relative to sort of the publishing peer group with that asset? And then maybe just an update on Care would be helpful.
Joseph Levin: Sure. I’m not sure I totally followed the question but let me try the first question. This is — was your question about D/Cipher, the D/Cipher’s average? Okay.
Christopher Halpin: I think it would be D/Cipher, yes.
Joseph Levin: Yes. Okay. So right now, one of the things that we’ve done with Dotdash Meredith, with D/Cipher is, we basically mapped intent across a subset of the Internet, not just on our properties but other publishing properties to understand where intent exists and measure that performance relative to what we’ve seen very closely on our own properties. And I think what the collaboration with OpenAI will enable us to do is, scale that towards a much bigger portion of the Internet, have that mapping and have those intent signals so that we can use them, bring them back and sell that to advertisers.
Again, very much all with the view of cookie-less, privacy protected and focusing on the intent of the content, not the individual user or the privacy of the user. And so what we look for there is significantly more scale. So accessing significantly more scaled inventory with the same — with good data for intent-based targeting. And if we can pull that off, we think that’s potentially a real accelerant to the business. And it is — as we said, it’s already working well so far. So we view this as — there’s only upside in that area.
Christopher Halpin: Yes. And just incremental area that excites us, which OpenAI is able to bring to D/Cipher that we don’t have the scale to do would be additional media. So beyond just text, image and video and those things that are part of a user’s experience being able to draw intent-driven linkages and monetize against them and drive performance. And we expect to have a number of those flowers bloom as the 2 teams work together.
Joseph Levin: Dan, does that answer your question?
Daniel Kurnos: It does. And then just update on Care?
Joseph Levin: Yes. Look, Care is very healthy right now from a profit perspective. I think the enterprise business is growing nicely. We’re really focused now on driving growth in the consumer part of the business. And the — we have a number of good projects in the works there, both on just optimizing some fundamentals around marketing but also on the new product side in terms of improving access to instant booking and improving the customer experience in instant booking. And so we’ve got optimism for where we think Care can go from here.
