"People Incorporated" Q2 2026 Earnings Call - Durable Digital Growth and Margin Expansion Offset Session Declines as Leadership Pivots to a Streamlined Model

Conference Operator: Good day, welcome to the People Incorporated second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After introductory remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of People Incorporated. Please go ahead.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Christopher Halpin here, welcome to the People Incorporated second quarter earnings call. Joining me today are Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive of People Incorporated, Neil Vogel, and Tim Quinn. After close of business today, we will complete our leadership transition, making this my last call with you all. I will pass the torch in this new chapter to Neil, who will be CEO of People Incorporated, and Tim, who will be CFO of People Incorporated. People Incorporated has published a presentation on the investor relations section of our website today entitled Q2 Earnings Presentation. On this call, Barry, Neil, Tim, and I will provide some introductory remarks referencing that presentation then opening it up to Q&A.

Before we get to that, I’d like to remind you that during this presentation we may make certain statements that are considered forward-looking under the Federal Securities laws. These forward-looking statements may include statements related to our outlook, strategy, and future performance and are based on current expectations and on information currently available to us. Actual outcomes and results may differ materially from the future results expressed or implied in these statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those contained in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and in the subsequent reports we filed with the SEC. The information provided on this conference call should be considered in light of such risks. We’ll also discuss certain non-GAAP measures, which, as a reminder, include Adjusted EBITDA, which we’ll refer to today as EBITDA for simplicity during the call.

I’ll also refer you to our earnings release, investor presentations, our public filings with the SEC, and again, to the investor relations section of our website for all comparable GAAP measures and full reconciliations for all material non-GAAP measures. Now I will hand it over to Barry.

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: Thanks, Chris. About six months ago, somewhere around then, we began to chart a new course for the company. We decided that being in the general acquisition business was not going to produce results as it had for the past couple of decades. We just didn’t think there were opportunities. What we did have were two assets, People Inc. and our investment in MGM. We then determined to slim down our corporate operations and sell non-core assets, and we’ve mostly completed that. Today, before you is the management of People Incorporated or People Inc. or probably eventually we’ll just refer to it as People. I really do want to thank Chris Halpin and Kendall Handler, our outgoing senior executives.

I’d like you all to give an official gentle welcome to Neil Vogel and Tim Quinn, who are going to be conducting these calls today and in the future. About MGM and our proposal to buy out many of the public shareholders, I got no news. We and our representatives and the special committee and their representatives, we’ve been and we continue to be in discussions. Whether it works or not is speculative. What isn’t speculative is our very long-term belief in the management, and in the business of MGM. We’re going to increase our ownership in MGM either in one swoop or slowly, and either is really just fine with us. I can’t comment any more about it. I mean, unless there’s some specific question I could comment on, which I doubt.

I can’t tell you the timing of all this, but I would say certainly within the next 60 days. I would say probably at the outset, though, of course, that could change. I really think in the next 60 days we’ll come to a resolution. With that, let’s proceed with the call. Chris, are you next with this?

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: I think I’m next. It’s Neil. Thanks, BD.

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: Sorry. Neil. We’re in two different locations, so this may be a bit squishy, but we’ll do the best we can. We’ll certainly answer all your questions. Neil, welcome to your first call.

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: It’s great to be here again. There’s no need to be gentle. I’ve been on a few of these, I can handle non-gentle. Let’s get right to it and into our presentation. We can go to page three. As Barry just said, the game plan is consistent with what we’ve been outlining for the past few quarters and again, what Barry just outlined. First, we’re going to execute at a high level at People Inc., we have another solid quarter here to detail. Second, we’re going to opportunistically deploy capital in the assets we know best. MGM, as Barry said, our publishing businesses, and should we choose, our stock buyback share repurchases. Third, we’re going to continue simplifying the non-core portfolio on monetizing assets.

To that end, we’re pleased to announce we’ve signed an agreement to sell our limited partner stake in a third-party fund to a group of private investors. We expect the transaction to close in the third quarter, generating approximately $189 million in gross cash for People Incorporated’s balance sheet. Moving on to page four. This will be familiar to many of you. People Incorporated continues to trade at a discount to the value of its MGM holdings plus cash. That means investors are getting the media business people and all of our other stakes, including Turo, Daily Beast, Vivian, as well as our real estate effectively for free. The game plan we outlined is clear, the goal is to unlock the value shown. Onto our publishing results for the quarter.

Going to page five, for Q2, our 6% digital revenue growth represents our 11th straight quarter of growth, our drumbeat of solid execution continues. We continue to drive momentum in the face of major changes and disruptions in the market. Our performance highlights the diversity and quality of our brands, revenue streams, and audience sources. As we increasingly shifted resources to new initiatives in the quarter, we’re able to deliver not only on our revenue goals but on our profitability goals as well. We grew digital Adjusted EBITDA by 18%, while expanding margins to 26% versus 23% last year. There are two trends worth highlighting supporting our operating efficiency. First is AI gains. We’re realizing significant benefits from AI across the company, including helping our edit team streamline content production and efficiency gains in data science, ad sales, ad targeting, and numerous other areas.

This frees up people and assets to focus on growth initiatives where we are reinvesting these gains. Second is headcount optimization, which is ongoing. We continue to reallocate our existing teams and people to focus on our growth initiatives. The next slide gives a little more color on the business evolution. Going to slide six, the trends of our recent quarters continue. Importantly, audiences and advertisers are increasingly seeking brands with high-quality content in a world that is more and more saturated with the opposite. Q2 clearly illustrates the momentum of our brand-led non-session-based revenues, which grew at 16%, as well as the durability of our sessions-based business, which were nearly flat. This is the growth dynamic for the foreseeable future. Non-sessions growth was driven by Apple News, licensing, including our AI partnerships, social programs, events, and Decipher. Non-session-based revenue is anchored in our brand strength.

We are creating more premium content in more formats more efficiently than we ever have. Session-based revenue was down only 1% in the quarter, despite 22% declines in core sessions, as our iconic brands and best-in-class sales team, ad tech stack, and ad performance continue to drive both direct sold and programmatic rate growth. Our commerce business has also proven resilient. We expect our performance to continue in the second half of 2026 with mid to high single-digit digital revenue growth for the full year. The next slide gives detail on some of our new projects. Going to page seven, we have a host of new initiatives that have recently launched or are on deck for the next quarter or so. Some of these are what BD has referred to as inversion projects. This is not a comprehensive list.

By no means is this comprehensive, and we expect a steady stream of new offerings over the coming quarters. We anticipate these projects will contribute to growth in 2027 and beyond alongside our existing businesses. For illustration, let’s look at a couple of these things. First, let’s take a look at events. They’re a meaningful driver of revenue growth for us. Our upcoming third Charleston Food & Wine Classic is on track to be one of the largest events we produce. We acquired Hot Luck in the quarter, a Gen Z-focused food and music festival that’s a real complement to our assets. It’s founded in Austin, Texas. We plan a multi-city expansion in 2027, anchoring our strategy for younger audiences. We’re kicking off our first standalone Southern Living tailgate event, also in Texas, with award-winning barbecue pit masters, live music, cocktails, and college football.

I will be there, and if you would like a drink, feel free to join us. The subscriptions business is another thing we’re very excited about. We have the subscription know-how of over 10 million print subscribers, and we’re creating fresh new ways for our communities to connect with brands they love. In July, we launched Southern Living Insiders, the brand’s first ever premium paid membership program featuring 60 years of never before available vintage recipes and a host of other benefits. We now have 4.5 million MyRecipes registered users using the free product. In August, we are launching a subscription app offering elevated features the community has been asking for. In October, we expect to launch our People premium subscription bundle, yet to be named, featuring exclusive content, special issues, games, app-only celebrity live chats and video series, and a raft of other features.

On content distribution, our original social video series have become a key part of our offerings. We now have 47 original social series, including breakout hits like InStyle’s "The Intern and The Boss," People’s "Pop Take," and Travel + Leisure’s "Travel Unfiltered," that resonate with both audiences and sponsors. More to come. We’re part of the launch, which I believe was yesterday, of short-form video on Netflix. We licensed a curated library of videos from a number of our brands. Apple News continues to grow and be a meaningful contributor. Before I send it over to Tim to do financials, I’d like to echo Barry and thank Chris and Kendall for their partnership over the past years and for making this transition as smooth as possible. Now sending it over to Tim.

Tim Quinn, CFO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Great. Thank you, Neil. This quarter continues to demonstrate the strength and diversity of our brands and revenue streams. Importantly, with 11 straight quarters of digital revenue growth at People Inc, the durability of our business model, despite the pronounced changes AI has brought to the entire media landscape. Looking at slide eight, digital revenue grew 6%. As Neil said, we delivered strong profitability and cash flow in the quarter. Total People segment EBITDA grew 5%, while digital EBITDA grew 18%, and our margins improved from 26% versus 23% last year. Ads revenue was about flat for the quarter, which is where we are absorbing the declines in core sessions. Our premium ad sales team, by contrast, is executing really well, delivering performance for our ad partners through increasingly integrated session and non-session-based tactics and campaigns.

As a result, we continue to command a premium and growing ad rates across our entire ads business, helping us to hold the line on session-based revenue as we grow the non-session-based revenue. Performance marketing, which is primarily affiliate commerce, grew 13% in the quarter, and licensing grew 23%. Both are performing exceptionally well. This strong growth is underwritten by our continued large investment in high-quality human-created content. Print revenue declined 18% in the quarter as we continue to navigate the ongoing secular declines in print advertising. Despite these challenges, we do expect full-year print EBITDA will offset People Inc corporate overhead, as it has by design for the last several years. I want to remind you, most of our top-performing brands have print as part of their media mix, and magazines remain an important touch point, connecting our brands with more than 10 million regular subscribers.

Overall, we remain on track to deliver on our 2026 financial goals while simultaneously investing in new products and models that will define our brands’ futures. Turning to slide nine in the deck. This addresses the strong free cash flow characteristics of People Inc. As a reminder, this is People, the operating company, and does not include the $800 million of cash held at the parent company. At People Inc, we continue to be disciplined and thoughtful about our investments, which in turn enables us to deliver strong EBITDA to free cash flow conversion. As you can see in the chart on the left, our cash position has been consistently improving over the last two years, and over the last 12 months alone, we generated $179 million of free cash flow.

Every dollar of free cash flow reduces our net leverage ratio, we expect to be under three times net levered by year-end. This once again highlights the valuation disconnect we outlined on page four, with People Inc. being valued at zero despite a building cash balance, strong and improving free cash flow, and an overall healthy balance sheet. With that, I now will turn it over to Chris.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Thank you. Moving to page 12, our corporate consolidation between the parent entity, now named People Incorporated, and our main operating business, People Inc, is proceeding well and on track. As I said before, Neil will become CEO of People Incorporated, Tim will become CFO after the close of business today, Kendall and I will leave our roles and become consultants through March of next year. As we talked about last quarter, the full consolidation process will continue through Q1 of 2027. Based on the timing of employee departures and the elimination of duplicative vendor and technology costs between corporate and People, we expect Q3 corporate costs to be in line with this past quarter, then step down to below $20 million in the fourth quarter, then down some more in the first quarter of 2027.

We reaffirm our targets of $45 million of annual corporate run rate expense and $30 million of total company stock-based compensation expense following the completion of the consolidation. The second quarter of 2027 will be the first fully clean quarter reflecting that new cost structure. Note that those numbers assume no reallocation of Tim, Neil, and other executives’ compensation from the subsidiary to People Incorporated. A reallocation of a portion of their time is likely to occur, would simply be a P&L geography change, increasing the subsidiary profitability by the amount moved up to corporate. Turning to page 13, we are adapting our definition of Adjusted EBITDA starting this quarter to present what we believe is a clearer picture of the earnings power of the business.

Historically, our Adjusted EBITDA included the impact of gains and losses from lease impairments and buyouts, gains and losses on certain asset sales, non-recurring restructuring costs, large litigation expenses for discrete legal matters, and costs related to M&A transactions.

We have received feedback from investors that this was making our quarterly and annual performance and true earnings power harder to track. We have considered for some time adapting the definition. With the simplification of the broader company through the Angi spin, the Care.com sale, and the search wind down, with Neil and Tim taking over at corporate, we thought it the right time to adapt the definition to exclude the items in the sub-bullets on page 13. We believe these items are not representative of core operating performance and affect comparability. We believe the adapted definition presents a clearer financial picture. Page 14 lays out the impact of the revised definition by quarter for both our People Inc. operating subsidiary at the top and the total People Incorporated, formerly IAC, at the bottom.

Tim will go through guidance in a moment. Page 16 bridges the impact on guidance from the adapted definition of Adjusted EBITDA. With that, I’ll turn it back to Tim.

Tim Quinn, CFO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Right. Wrapping things up, pages 15 and 16, we are confirming our guidance for the full year. Again, showing investors on page 16 what has changed under the updated Adjusted EBITDA definitions. The key takeaways are: People Inc., the operating company, remains unchanged at $325 million-$355 million of expected EBITDA, with the only adjustment under the new definition being the add back of the $15 million of forecasted Google litigation expense. Previously, the guide including was $310 million-$340 million. We’ve increased the bottom of the range for emerging and other by $5 million, reflecting the strong first half performance at The Daily Beast and Vivian. The full-year guide is now $10 million-$15 million. IAC parent corporate costs are $80 million under the new EBITDA definition, which excludes one-time costs to achieve the corporate restructuring.

We expect, as Chris said, this number to be about $45 million on a run rate basis by the end of Q1 next year. That gets us to an overall guide for People Inc. of $255 million-$290 million for 2026. With that, I think we’re done. We can turn it over to the operator for questions.

Conference Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star 1 on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star 2. Our first question for today will come from Justin Patterson with KeyBanc. Please go ahead.

Justin Patterson, Analyst, KeyBanc: Great. Thank you. Good morning. Chris, it’s been a pleasure working with you. Neil, welcome back to the call. I have two for me. The first one’s on latest initiatives and actions that you’re using to mitigate the core session declines. Secondly, I’m curious to hear about just how the licensing pipeline is building up for People. It seems like there’s still more AI partnerships out there, and you’ve just started signing content partnerships. I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about that opportunity set. Thank you.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Sure. I think the second answer is quicker, let’s do that first. Licensing, when you look at licensing in our business, it’s really three things. It’s AI licensing, like our deals with OpenAI and Meta and Microsoft. It’s content licensing, like we just did with Netflix and some other things we do out there. It’s also sort of some old school product licensing, where we have Better Homes & Gardens products inside of Walmart and Southern Living products inside of Dillard’s. I think our focus going forward for the products is going to be much more do-it-ourselves, as BD has said, but that’s a material part of the business right now. I think we have nothing new to talk about now, but we’re seeing real momentum, I think, in AI licensing for us.

I think what has happened is if you look at the AI markets right now and what foundational model builders need, they need power, they need engineers, and they need inputs. Increasingly, as AI gets more and more real time, they need our inputs. I think Tim and I were talking about this earlier. I can’t think of any publisher that makes more high-quality content on the commercial topics that we cover than we do. Our new content is extremely valuable, and I think that’s been reflected in the deals we’ve done and the level of activity we have talking about new deals. The deals we can talk about, there’s two kinds. There’s sort of the all-you-can-eat deal of Meta or OpenAI, and then there’s the à la carte deal of Microsoft. There’s a lot of action around this.

That being said, we have nothing new to tell you guys, but we are very optimistic that people are understanding the value of our content. It is worth noting, people are understanding the value of our content because we are able to restrict almost everybody from using our content, using our Cloudflare blocking, and they have to pay for it. When people have to pay for it seems they’re really coming to the table. I’m sure we’ll talk about Google later. They’re not paying for it, and we’ll get into that. The first question you asked was sort of about sessions durability and how we were to maintain sessions growth. I think history is a good indication of what we’re doing here. We’ve made 11 straight quarters of digital revenue growth in a very rapidly changing market. Our brands are really our foundation of all of this.

In a world where things are increasingly not real, our brands are about as real as it gets. They have gravitas, and they have history, and they have real fan bases. We spend so much energy keeping them vibrant and putting them in new places and meeting users where they are, that we really have all these new business opportunities that have emerged from that. Whether it’s-

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: TikTok or Apple News or our own products, or Instagram or events or subscriptions, or even like I like to talk about our new sweet tea we’re going to launch at Southern Living. We have incredible opportunity in the non-session space revenue line based on these brands, and I think that’s going to fuel the growth going forward. I think we’ve also been very good, and Tim has talked about it. We’ve been very good at taking advantage of the durability of our old school web businesses, which are still performing. They’re performing, again, because we have great brands and because our ads and our marketing deals we do really perform for advertisers. We feel very good. We feel very optimistic about our ability to reach audiences in new places, and we’ve never had more ways to reach audiences and to drive revenue in new ways.

We’ve never had this many ways to drive revenue before. I don’t know, Tim, if you have anything you want to add to that.

Tim Quinn, CFO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Just to highlight a couple statistics, right? Google search traffic in the quarter was about 21% of our traffic. In the past, we’ve said it was roughly two-thirds. We’re clearly closer to the other side of it, but we’re not out the other side of it. You can see the impact of declining sessions in our numbers. They would be better but for it, but we’re still working through it. What we are doing, and we have been on our front foot on this for a couple of years, is we’ve been planning and preparing for this reality. This is not new news to us, as Neil outlined in the new growth initiatives. Those are all year plus, year and a half, in formulation, and we’re now getting to the point where we can start to monetize it.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: We’re excited about that and being closer to the other side, but not out the other side of the traffic realities.

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Okay. Operator, next question.

Conference Operator: The next question will come from Dan Kurnos with StoneX. Please go ahead.

Dan Kurnos, Analyst, StoneX: All right. Thanks. Good morning. Neil, ask and ye shall receive. You did tell The Wall Street Journal recently that turning off and blocking Google was 100% on the table. Did you want to spend some time talking about what that means for People Inc., especially given other market commentary and some of the regulators mandating that Google split their AI and search crawlers?

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Sure. I’m happy to. The last thing you said is essentially what our objective is. We would like Google to split its search and AI crawlers. For people that aren’t as well-versed in this, I can give a little background. Historically, Google obviously crawled all of our content to make its search product, and we were happy with them doing that because we received an economic benefit for the use of our content in the form of traffic. As they’ve developed their AI products, and particularly AI Overviews, which are a search replacement, we don’t receive any consideration for the use of our content. In fact, AI Overviews compete with us because we no longer, as you can see in the numbers, get the level of traffic from Google, not even close to what we used to, because they’re using our content in search.

We also know from data we use that we are a very frequently searched, one of the more searched properties on the internet by Google, or crawled rather. That’s because our stuff’s really good. Our content is excellent. It’s accurate. It’s scaled. Again, we make more content than we ever have in incredibly commercial topics. What we would like to do is we would like to be able to, like we do for everybody else, block Google from using our content in AI, just like we would to anybody else who doesn’t have a deal with us. In this case, we can’t because Google uses a single crawler for AI that they use for search. If we were to turn off AI, we would turn off search.

As Tim said, we are nearly out the other side of search being a material driver of value for us, but we’re not there yet. We’re clearly not turning this off now, but it is a tool that we can use, and it is something we will constantly be looking at. Like at the moment, scale definitely tips in the favor of maintaining the status quo, but this is a trade-off we’ll monitor. We’re not galloping on a high horse trying to make a point here. What we’re really trying to do is just get to a fair economic deal for the use of our content. We will use all the tools at our disposal to do that. We will obviously be economically sensible in how we do that.

Dan Kurnos, Analyst, StoneX: Got it. That is super helpful. Can you guys just talk about the nature of the limited partner sale? Is there any tax exposure beyond the NOLs? Are there any other potential outside-the-box opportunities like that? How much could they total? Thanks, guys.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Sure. Thanks, Dan. The interest we sold are limited partner stakes in HLVP funds, which have been a venture relationship of IAC for some time. We explored selling the illiquid stakes as limited partners. Russ Barst and his team, who lead M&A for us, worked on it for some time and were able to strike a deal to sell those to a group of third-party, basically secondary private equity investors for approximately $189 million. We expect that transaction to close relatively quickly and in the third quarter. As a reminder, when it comes to taxes, we generated a large taxable loss on capital loss on the sale of Care.com. Unfortunately, the good news is, we still have more than $250 million remaining on that capital loss, so we can more than offset the gain that we have embedded in the sale of these LP stakes.

Tim Quinn, CFO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: More broadly, we have said for some time that we are selling these other assets. There are the ones that we publicly laid out on some of the parts slide. There are also some other assets in the business, nothing of the scale of these funds interest. We talked about domains that we are selling and other assets, and we will continue to find little pockets of money opportunistically across the portfolio. Thanks, Dan. Operator, next question.

Conference Operator: The next question will come from John Blackledge with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

John Blackledge, Analyst, TD Cowen: Great. Thank you. Maybe just going to People Digital results in 2Q revenue. Digital revenue was in line. EBITDA was better, with pretty significant incremental margins. If you can just talk about the puts and takes of the 2Q digital revenue and EBITDA, then also if you could hit on how we should think about 3Q digital revenue and EBITDA trajectory. Secondly, just zooming out a little bit, if you could talk about broader ad market trends across different categories. Thank you.

Tim Quinn, CFO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Great, John. I’ll take the first one, Neil and I will tag team the second probably. Q2 came in where we expected and was led by our non-session-based revenue initiatives that Neil outlined and our ability to hold the line on the session-based revenue streams. We highlighted the non-session-based revenue drivers already, but I will reiterate them. It’s events or the social extensions and social series, Decipher, and notably, our really strong licensing business and performance. Overall, we expect the second half and Q3 specifically to look a lot like the first half and the formula remains the same. It’s grow the non-session base, the 43% at roughly 20% and continue to hold the line on the session-based revenue drivers. We do expect to see some moderation in performance marketing. In the second half, we had exceptionally strong performance.

Second half last year is about 25% growth in the second half. That will slow a bit, we expect that to be offset by some acceleration on the ad side. Just to make one point on print. Print, we expect Q3 to look quite a bit like Q2, so a lower EBITDA, not quite covering the corporate overhead cost, we expect to see an acceleration in Q4, and that’s mostly seasonality. That’s not a fundamental change in the macro outlook. You make a good point on margins. In particular, super pleased with our ability to deliver strong profitability in Q2 while we continue to invest, and I keep making that point, but that’s important, right? We’re self-funding these new growth initiatives while maintaining and in fact growing margins. With respect to incremental margins, we do manage it over the course of the year.

We do see some acceleration in investing in the back half of the year. We’re not going to deliver the 60%-70% incremental margins again, but we do expect to continue to have strong margins. Certainly, we’ve been targeting 30%-40% incremental margins overall for the year, and I think we’re on track to deliver that. Overall, really happy with the performance on both sides of the ledger, particularly on the margin side, and we’ll continue to be thoughtful about it and balance investing with margin expansion.

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Broader ad market we can go through quickly. Again, I think last quarter we said 6 out of 10 if you had to rate the whole market. I would again say 6 out of 10. Tim will get into some of the categories that are performing and some that are more challenged.

Tim Quinn, CFO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Yeah. I think we’re continuing to see strength in health and pharma, beauty, media, and entertainment. We’ve seen some pockets of advertisers pull back. We saw some in Q2, Q3 that are more exposed to either geopolitical or inflation, specifically in categories like food, beverage, and CPG. We’re continuing to sort of manage through it. I think that the overall market is good to very good, there are definitely pockets of caution, that’s where Neil comes up with the sort of 6 out of 10. We’re continuing to see strength, and we think that the back half will be good to very good on the ad side.

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: 6 out of 10. We don’t give sevens. It’s a six or an eight. We put it as a six.

Tim Quinn, CFO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: 6.7. Operator, next question.

Conference Operator: The next question will come from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Jason Helfstein, Analyst, Oppenheimer: Thanks. I’m gonna try one on MGM and then just a business question on People. I think at the time, Barry, that the deal was announced, the math that we were doing is something like the transaction implied something like three and a half times core EBITDA, which is something like a 50% discount to where peers are trading at. Understand the logic of why you think MGM as a portfolio is undervalued. If you are not successful in this, I guess maybe, how do you think MGM on their own can narrow that gap, right, relative to what the fair value? That’s, I don’t know, maybe you can comment on that.

Just second, Neil or Tim, can you just talk about what is the glide path to get back to kind of double-digit digital growth at People, and how long do we think it takes potentially? Thanks.

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: Well, the way for MGM is to do what they have been doing, which is operate the business as they have been extremely well. They have, as you all know, bought back a huge amount of the capitalization over the last several years. It’s smart capital allocation and it’s excellent operations, and they’ll continue to do that notwithstanding anything.

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Okay. The math on the glide path is pretty easy. You guys can see it. We have 40% of the business, 40+% that is a non-session based revenue, which is growing nicely. We have a little less than 60% that we’re maintaining, which is a sessions-based business. To the extent we get real momentum, and I think we will, in all of our efforts to really grow the non-session based business at a rate that the math works to get us above that 10%, that is a goal of ours. I don’t want to give you a timeframe of when it’s going to happen, but you can see all the investments we’re making, all the quote, inversion type projects, all the new projects, all the brand extensions, all the licensing deals. We feel like we have good momentum.

We’ve got a good amount of confidence here. We’ll see. I don’t know if Jim wants to add anything to that.

Tim Quinn, CFO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: The only thing I would add is that each one of the projects that we outlined and the projects that we will be launching in the coming weeks and months are important to the brands themselves. If you look at any one brand, the growth that they contribute to those brands would be meaningful and impressive. We think we can ladder those up to something that’s meaningful for growth in 2027 and beyond for the company. That’s sort of the play, is to take that high single digits formula that Neil outlined at the top and start layering in these new growth vectors. That’s how we get back to 10+%

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Thank you. Just one clarifying point, Jason. MGM stock, when you go back, by their own math, was trading about three and a half times EBITDA. EBITDA obviously is a higher number.

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: Yes

when you capitalize rent. Okay. Operator, next question.

Can I add to the previous question?

Sure, go ahead.

Thank you so much. I would just tell you all that I can’t pinpoint this in time, but I’d be very disappointed, all of you should be disappointed. We’d be very disappointed if we didn’t get above that mark. Again, relatively soon, without a pinpoint in time, but of course we should. You can go to the next question.

Conference Operator: The next question will come from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Eric Sheridan, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Thanks so much for taking the questions. Maybe two, if I could. Just turning to Turo, even though you have more of a minority interest there, any update in terms of the operating performance in Turo and how you think about the prospects for that business over the medium to long term? The second one would be, you saw some very strong revenue growth in emerging and other. Can we unpack some of the drivers of that as well? Thanks so much.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Sure. Thanks, Eric. Turo continues to execute well. We talked about it last quarter. They had a strong second quarter. Revenue grew 17% year-over-year with strong performance across trip days, GBV. They are scaling on EBITDA margins. We talked about last quarter, EBITDA positive, free cash flow positive. When we look at the public rental car comps, and we would argue Turo is more than just rental car, but we know they’re growing faster than what we’re seeing for those players, and outperforming the broader travel market. Marketplace fundamentals remain healthy. Growing supply, which is always what we look for in terms of attractive ROI for hosts and geographical diversity. It’s a very solid story. BD, anything you would add on Turo or

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: I would only add the following. The business is now solid and growing. I urge Turo to go public. I think that’s the best form for that company. I hope it happens. I can’t predict it, but I hope so, which would give us liquidity. This is not a long-term asset for this company. We’re certainly not going to do anything with it until we get the fullest value. Which I think most likely, unless somebody comes over the horizon, will be achieved by the company going public. Which its record and its future really indicates it should.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Thank you, BD. Then the second question was emerging and other, Eric, right?

Eric Sheridan, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yeah.

That’s correct. Just the strength there.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Yeah. Two elements. The Daily Beast, the management team there, Ben, Joanna, Keith, and their colleagues continue to execute really well in, I guess what we’d describe as a multi-channel media news business. Their innovation and expansion into podcasts, into video, into new categories, combined with strong monetization, strong content, and good product, has led to the exceptional results there. Not just strongly double-digit revenue growth, but scaling margins and we feel great about the performance there. Then Vivian is one where for a while, Bill Kong, the CEO; Parth, the Chairman and Founder; and Eric, their performance was masked by a challenging macro as the nursing segment really just had so many headwinds while healthcare companies cut back on their spend.

During that time, they would be the absolute tip of the spear across our portfolio, but also within their industry of implementation of AI into their products, into their marketplace matching, into their clinician servicing, and they are really benefiting from it on the other side as the headwinds abate and then their position and superior product and also clinician liquidity with 2.7 million clinicians, I got it right for once. Right on the way out. 2.7 million clinicians puts them in a very special spot, both for health systems and staffing agencies. Their EBITDA margins are scaling because they have fantastic gross margins and real OPEX scale. Two good stories there.

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: Yeah. I would add, though, that these are small businesses, and neither of them are core to us, and neither of them will be part of us in the future. At what point? We can’t say. We are, as we’ve said and consistently have done so, we’re going to sell all of our non-core assets over time.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Yeah. Great. Thank you, Beaty. Operator, next question.

Conference Operator: The next question will come from James Heaney with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

James Heaney, Analyst, Jefferies: Great. Thank you, guys. I think just a quick modeling question from me. Just how should we be thinking about corporate expenses going forward? Anything you can share there would be helpful. Thank you.

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: They’re going to come down. That’s what we can share with you.

James Heaney, Analyst, Jefferies: Okay, James. Thank you.

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: Over time, they’ll come down much more than we’ve already stated. That’s what’s going to happen to the model.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Yeah. For modeling, we were about $20 million this quarter. We said roughly around the same next quarter. Below $20 million and dropping in the fourth quarter, down even more in the first quarter of 2027. That slope is as corporate employees depart and are consolidated across that period. The biggest period of departure is the first quarter of next year, after we file the K and the tax return and the audit. Below $20 million in the fourth quarter and then down again in the first quarter of next year. The second quarter, we said we’d be clean at $45 million run rate. You can think about it simplistically as $11.25 million a quarter at that point.

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: Yeah. It will be much less.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Then $7.5 million. Yeah, fair enough. Thank you, James.

Conference Operator: The next question will come from Stephen Ju with UBS. Please go ahead.

Stephen Ju, Analyst, UBS: Right. Great. Thanks, guys. Chris, enjoyed working with you over the years, and best of luck with the next gig. Neil and Tim, I was wondering if we can talk about the content creation that lives in print versus the digital side of things at People Inc., and what plans there may be to house all of the expenses in one segment, particularly as the print segment EBITDA dollars are now down to single digit millions on a quarterly basis now. I guess another way to ask the question is about the transport of content from print to digital and digital to print, et cetera, for consumption, and how seamless that might be now. Thanks.

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Yeah. Let’s talk about print for a second, then we’ll talk about the editorial side of it. As I said at the outset, our best brands have a print element and sizable paying audiences. We have 10 million subscribers. They pay us over $150 million a year. We have a healthy subscription business that is remarkably stable. The challenge with print is the advertising side of the house. I am of the belief that the subscribers we have for print are one of our most valuable assets as we make this transition to the future. They are our super users. They consume our content and our media across print, digital, social, and all other mediums. I think that’s going to be an asset that we leverage going forward.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: As it relates specifically to content, a couple of years ago, we put all of our content operations under one editor-in-chief for our main brands. We think that that was an important decision then. It turned out to be a good decision to really unify the brand and get people to stop thinking about the fiefdoms that they live in and all of that. For the most part, our magazine content still lives in the magazine. It’s not as-

Tim Quinn, CFO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: It’s fairly distinct

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Yeah. There are distinct cost structures in each. For now, we’re going to live in these segments, I think as the world evolves and as we start to leverage these subscribers in new ways, there’s a potential to start to see it all as one business. Ultimately, our goal is to grow total revenue, not just digital revenue, but total revenue. I can start to see that path now as the print advertising dollars become relatively immaterial. Now, again, we have to manage through all of that. It’s not a tomorrow thing, but that’s how I kind of crystal ball. That’s how I see the future. I don’t know if you have anything to that, Neil.

Tim Quinn, CFO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: No, that’s perfect.

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Thank you, Stephen.

The next-

Operator, next question.

Conference Operator: The next question will come from Youssef Squali with Truist. Please go ahead.

Robert, Analyst, Truist: Hi, this is Robert on for Youssef. Thanks for taking our questions, and congrats, Chris, Neil, and Tim. On the session-based revenue, the implied session, the monetization, the revenue per session is a pretty remarkable number. I know you guys spoke about it a little bit on the call, but hoping that we could just unpack it a little bit more. Thanks.

Tim Quinn, CFO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Yeah. On the session-based revenue, the way to think about it is a session creates an ad impression. That ad impression gets monetized through the programmatic markets. That’s what we lose when we lose on the volume side. What we gain and what we’ve gotten good at is packaging our session-based and non-session-based ad assets and programs and campaigns with growing rates. Basically, we’re saying to the advertiser, you get the session-based, the web, and you get social and you get events, and you get all these other assets. That’s really been a key part to the future. The second part is a flight to quality. We like to think of as a flight to quality, which is there’s a decreasing supply of quality content on the web. That which is quality is commanding a premium. We’ve always commanded a premium in the programmatic markets.

That premium has increased and is growing. The shorthand answer is our rates are up. While our sessions are down, our rates are up significantly. Our rates are up as a function of the quality of our content and the performance of our sales team.

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: It’s important. I’ll just add one thing. There’s no tricks in that. We’re not overloading pages with ads. It’s pure rate. As Tim said, value is accruing to these brands that are meaningful in a world where people are looking for clarity of meaning in their content, and it’s really helping us.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: All right. Let’s go to the last question, please.

Robert, Analyst, Truist: Okay, great. Thanks.

Conference Operator: The next question will come from Tom Champion with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Tom Champion, Analyst, Piper Sandler: Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Question for Mr. Diller. You referenced the old acquisition model is no longer viable in your introductory remarks, I’m just curious if you could elaborate on why that’s the case and maybe what’s structurally changed in the market. Then maybe for Neil, can you just remind us the timeline ahead or the goalposts we should keep in mind in the Google litigation upcoming? Thank you.

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: This company was really built on being very early at virtual models and internet life, that field was fertile for at least 20 years. Building, buying various entities, all in areas of e-commerce, et cetera. In the last years, obviously, there’s just like any area where you’re there at the beginning of the revolution and participating through it, less opportunities. The opportunities that we saw were, I felt, overpriced, just nowhere as interesting. We spent really a couple of years really scouring, trying to chart a new acquisition path, a new growth path based on investing, et cetera, decided that it really wasn’t there for us.

We then, I think, took this very dramatic, strong pivot to two companies that we knew well, that were, in our opinion, forever assets, scaled down the company appropriately, off to executing, particularly as you’ve heard, the excellent management of Neil and Tim and all of the people who work at People who’ve outperformed their industry in large measures and have big opportunity ahead of them, creation of whole new businesses where I think there is virgin territory. That’s sketchy, it’s the reason why we decided we would really change our trajectory, we have. Thank you all for being with us on this kind of first official call of this new area for what is now People.

Very hard for me to lose the word IAC in my vocabulary and in my emails and in all other parts where I’ve been somewhat identified with IAC over the last years. We’ve changed actually our name since the very beginning as Silver King. We’ve changed it, I think it’s four or five times. Each time has been the kind of beginning of a new successful chapter. Anyway, there we are. Thank you. Unless my colleagues have anything else to add, we will address you in the next quarter.

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Yeah. Let me just answer really quickly. I’ll answer your Google question.

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to cut.

Neil Vogel, CEO (effective after close of business), People Incorporated: Let me get quick. It’s an easy one. That estimates will resolve in 2027. Again, we believe we’re relying on government findings that Google engaged in anti-competitive practices in the ad tech business. There’s no material updates in this past quarter, but we believe the settlement could and should be material, and we expect it to resolve next year.

Tom Champion, Analyst, Piper Sandler: Thank you.

Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, People Incorporated: Thank you. Thank you, operator.

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive, People Incorporated: All right. Thank you, all.

Conference Operator: The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.