00:00 Speaker A
We believe we have some of the best brands in the world and the best brands in publishing. Again, People, Southern Living, Travel Leisure, Food and Wine. We have about 40 brands. I would say 10 matter. And the thing that we’ve been really, really good at is change and transition. And and when we started, our brands were dealing in the in the print to web transition. If you remember that. And we executed that really well. Then we we we realized that at the time, 80 or 90% of the traffic on the web came from Google. We got very good at Google and and and we we built these healthy brands.
00:49 Speaker A
Then the world changed again. Then Google has declined as a source of traffic, and in our case, it’s gone from 70% of our web traffic to a little bit north of 20% of our web traffic.
01:03 Speaker B
Huge shift.
01:04 Speaker A
And and and we shifted. And now we’re in, we went from from digital, from print to digital and now we’re in what we call the brand era. And because we were so close to Google, we saw four or five years ago how the world was going to change and we’ve invested broadly. So now, where our business used to be primarily web and web revenue and web audiences, we’ve never had a more diverse audience profile and we never had a more diverse revenue profile.
01:42 Speaker B
So you’re sitting, let’s say you’re sitting across from a couple of Google executives.
01:47 Speaker A
Yes.
01:48 Speaker B
What do you tell them right now?
01:50 Speaker A
I mean, I’m not sure they’re going to want to sit with me after some of the things that I’ve said. But but here’s the truth. Google for us, for a long time we had a a deal with Google, an unwritten deal, which was, you can use our content to build your search product and in return, we get sessions.
02:11 Speaker B
Fair.
02:12 Speaker A
Now, the search product has turned into an AI product by and large. and they still use our content to train their AI both in real time and in uh in in the training way. We don’t have to get into the AI terminology of it. But now they don’t share anything with us. They just take our content to compete with us. Now, we’ve grown through this and we’ve made it and and we’ve made it out to the other side and we’re still growing, we’re still doing well. But Google does something that is very interesting, which is Google uses essentially the same crawler for search, which is still 20%, 25% of our traffic, and AI, particularly the AI summaries on search. So, we can’t do anything about that. Whereas with everybody else who crawls us to build AI models, we can block them. So, because we can block most people, we’ve gotten some really productive deals. So we have deals with with OpenAI, with Microsoft, with Meta, really productive deals where people recognize the value of our inputs into their models, where with Google, we can’t. And I’m sure they know this. And there’s been some regulation in the UK and some other things about allowing us an opt out that doesn’t affect our search, but we’re not there yet. And it is, it is Google using their market power to keep us, to keep our information free. And if you zoom out and you look at AI, AI needs three things. AI needs power, and you can talk data all that’s really well talked about. AI needs engineers and models, right? Both of those things are very expensive. and AI needs inputs. We know from how much we are crawled. We are one of the most important inputs in these AI models. We’re expansive, our content is excellent. Um, but yet for some reason, they don’t seem to want to pay for our content where other people will. But the way things are set up, we don’t have a lot, a lot of leverage to make them pay for it.
04:00 Speaker B
Would you would you turn them off?
04:02 Speaker A
So, so, we’re going to make an economic decision. We obviously can’t turn them off now, they’re still an important part of our business. I don’t want to turn them off. Like, I want to get to a reasonable economic solution.
04:12 Speaker B
I think you can.
04:13 Speaker A
I think hope I’m I’m hopeful we can. Um, we have no progress now, but hopefully
