And there was really minimal spend through the end of the year. Since the beginning of the year, Market is definitely firmer than it was at the end of ’22. It’s still below the high levels of span last year. And we’re dealing with some particularly difficult comps in Jan Feb last year in categories like health, with the vaccines finance were that was booming. So where we are right now is 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 ’22. Our expectation is that the first quarter will remain weak due both to add market weakness and tough comps. That’ll also strain our margins at Dotdash in the first quarter, as it’s seasonally a low month, the lowest quarter of the year, I should say for revenue.
But you’ll see signs also in the ad market of stability in the second half of the second quarter as we lap a weaker market then. 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 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 will be soft driven by the market, smaller than this.
John Blackledge : Thank you.
Christopher Halpin: Thank you. 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 ChatGPT 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 if that’s low this kind of late 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.
Joseph Levin: Sure. So starting with AI, every new technology is a threat and an opportunity. And we certainly think about them in both ways. I think on the Dotdash Meredith side, one of the things we’re really happy with is the, in the context of Generative AI, and ChatGPT is that we did the combination with Meredith. And the reason I say that is because brands really mattered, trust really matters, voice really matters. You can you can ask the bot questions and it’s amazing at answering those questions, but it doesn’t have a voice, it doesn’t have experience, and it doesn’t have a brand that stands behind those results. In fact, it sort of goes out of its way to not stand behind those results. And I think that’s really important in areas like cakemaking, which we’re doing with in a literal sense with food, but also in travel and, and home and things like that, like creating new tastes and creating new content around that is really important to have a brand and have a voice, which is what we have at Dotdash Meredith.
