IAC narrowly beats Wall Street third-quarter revenue estimates

People Incorporated

07/11/2023 21:05

Nov 7 (Reuters) - Internet holding company IAC  IAC.O 
beat Wall Street third-quarter revenue estimates on Tuesday, as
the owner of publisher Dotdash Meredith saw traffic growth
return for core brands.
    IAC owns Dotdash Meredith, America's largest digital and
print publisher, as well as brands such as the Daily Beast and
care services platform Care.com. 
    Revenue fell 15% to $1.11 billion, narrowly beating analyst
estimates, amid a challenging advertising market. Revenue at
Dotdash Meredith, its biggest business, fell 11% to $417.5
million, with digital and print revenue declining 4% and 16%,
respectively. 
    However, those performances represented the best
year-over-year result since the first quarter of 2022, according
to the company.
    Consolidated adjusted EBITDA grew 83% year-over-year, with
adjusted core earnings growing at home services platform Angi
and Dotdash Meredith.
    "We've stopped the slide in Digital revenue and don’t expect
any further decline from here as traffic growth on the core
brands has returned," said CEO Joey Levin in a letter to
shareholders. 
    For the quarter ending September 30, IAC had $1.4 billion in
cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities, and $2
billion in long-term debt. 
    IAC is one of several major media companies that are
publicly raising concerns about the possible impact of
generative artificial intelligence (GAI) on the publishing
industry. 
    GAI is a type of artificial intelligence that generates new
content or data in response to a prompt, or question, by a user.
    In October, lawyers for IAC and Dotdash Media submitted
comments to the U.S. Copyright Office, in response to the
office's study of the copyright law and policy issues raised by
GAI.
    The companies wrote of the "existential threat" that GAI
poses to digital publishing, "and by extension to the health and
vitality of the Internet itself as society's predominant
information ecosystem, and ultimately to the public that it
informs."

 (Reporting by Helen Coster in New York and Manya Saini in
Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri)
 ((helen.coster@thomsonreuters.com))