We feel good about where the migrated Meredith sites are as we detailed in the chart in the shareholder letter. As the year progresses, we expect traffic to get to stability at some point in the second quarter and then grow in the back end. That is due to continued momentum on the migrated Meredith sites, easier comps as we move further past the pandemic and just general operational improvements. The ad market we describe right now is, sort of stable weakness. If you go back to May, June last year, that’s when the market first fell out of bed after Walmart earnings and Target earnings, it firmed up in the back to school area, but it really froze in November and December on both the premium/direct and the programmatic side. And there was really minimal spend through the end of the year.
Since the beginning of the year, is definitely firmer than it was at the end of 2022. It’s still below the high levels of spend last year and we’re dealing with some particularly difficult comps in Jan, Feb last year in categories like health, with the vaccines, finance where that was booming. So, where we are right now, as we’d say, we’re down CPMs. We feel relatively good about our CPMs versus the market, but we’re down, but it’s not second derivative negative in the same way it was at the end of 2022. Our expectation is that the first quarter will remain weak do both to add market weakness and tough comps. That will also strain our margins at Dotdash in the first quarter as it seasonally a low month, the lowest quarter of the year I should say for revenue, but you’ll see also in the ad market stability in the second half of the second quarter as we lap a weaker market than.
And then we’d look to be able to drive CPMs and improve our performance in the second half of the year. So, overall for the year, we €“ both traffic and revenues aim to get to flat at some point in the second quarter, see growth in the second half and drive to growth for the full-year. Growth and profitability will come from a couple of things. Cost actions we’ve taken, including a reorganization that we have actioned recently. And then also just scale on high margin digital revenues. We don’t see the full profitability right now of our much tighter cost structure because digital revenues are depressed, but we should continue to see margin scale throughout the year, but again, Q1 will be soft driven by the market and smaller revenues.
John Blackledge: Thank you.
Christopher Halpin: Operator, next question?
Operator: Our next question comes from Ross Sandler of Barclays. Please go ahead.
Ross Sandler: Hey, guys. One more on Dotdash Meredith and then a quick follow-up on Angi. So, just high level, we’ve seen all this explosion of new tools like Chat GPT, and Generative AI coming out, and I’m just wondering how that might impact Dotdash Meredith. On one hand, you could potentially produce content much more efficiently in the future. On the other hand, SEO traffic might be negatively impacted. So, just could you walk us through how you’re thinking about that and overall impact down the road? And then on Angi, in one of those slides, there was a stat about service provider retention being 25% or thereabout after year one. So, kind of surprised it’s that low, this kind of laid into the maturity of the Angi platform. So, how can you improve that SP retention stat? And how does that play into the sales force efficiency that you’re talking about? Thanks a lot.
