In May 2023, Dotdash Meredith — a company known for People Magazine, Food & Wine, and Better Homes & Gardens — launched an ad tech platform. Not a partnership with someone else's platform. Not a reskin of an existing product. A proprietary, AI-powered contextual targeting system built in-house, designed to replace cookies with content signals.
They called it D/Cipher.
Two years later, it accounts for half of People Inc.'s direct-sold digital revenue. Deals that use it average 50% larger than those that don't. The company offers a money-back guarantee — if D/Cipher underperforms cookies, they'll rerun the campaign at no charge. To date, no guarantees have been invoked.
This is the story of how losing Google forced a magazine company to become something else entirely.
The Logic
The premise is deceptively simple. When someone reads an article about "best running shoes for flat feet" on one of People Inc.'s 40 brands, that reader is expressing intent. Not vague, behavioral, inferred-from-a-cookie intent — actual intent, embedded in the content they chose to consume. D/Cipher reads the content, maps it against billions of interactions across the portfolio, and serves ads matched to that intent without ever identifying the individual.
No cookies. No personal identifiers. No tracking pixels following you across the internet.
"We always knew intent targeting would outperform cookies. The world is finally moving to us."
— Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc. (Adweek)
That's the sales pitch. Here's what makes it structurally interesting: it only works because they own the content. A pure-play ad tech company can analyze the page a user is on, but it can't understand the relationships between that page and hundreds of thousands of other pages across 40 brands in food, health, travel, home, and entertainment. People Inc. has the first-party signal graph. D/Cipher is just the machine that reads it.
The Evidence
| Metric | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Lift vs. cookies (skincare case study) | 3.8× more lift | Adweek |
| Incremental sales vs. cookies | 4× higher | Adweek |
| Share of direct-sold digital revenue | 50% | AdExchanger |
| Average deal size premium | +50% vs. non-D/Cipher | AdExchanger |
| Money-back guarantees invoked | Zero | Adweek |
| Performance marketing revenue (Q4 2024) | $101M (+17% YoY) | AdExchanger |
Those are real numbers from a company that, five years ago, was entirely in the magazine business. D/Cipher didn't just work — it worked well enough that advertisers started asking for more inventory than People Inc. had to sell.
The Expansion
And that's where the story turns. D/Cipher's success created a new problem: People Inc. couldn't supply enough premium inventory to satisfy demand. Their own pricing was too high for some advertisers. The platform was constrained by the very thing that made it work — the proprietary content network.
The answer was D/Cipher+.
Announced during the Q4 2024 earnings call and expanded to third-party publishers in early 2025, D/Cipher+ takes the intent signals learned from People Inc.'s owned properties and maps them onto the open web. The idea: if D/Cipher can identify "someone researching mid-century modern furniture" on Better Homes & Gardens, it can find that same intent pattern on comparable sites across the internet — and sell ads there, too.
The TAM Math
IAC COO Chris Halpin told investors that D/Cipher+ expands the addressable market to 4–5× the existing on-platform opportunity — and that doesn't include connected TV. If D/Cipher currently drives ~$100M in performance marketing revenue on People Inc. properties alone, the theoretical ceiling for D/Cipher+ across the open web is measured in the hundreds of millions.
Source: AdExchanger, Q4 2024 earnings call
To run this expansion, People Inc. didn't promote from within the magazine business. In March 2025, they hired Jim Lawson as President of D/Cipher. Lawson co-founded AdTheorent, a machine-learning-powered demand-side platform that he grew from a 2012 startup to a NASDAQ-listed public company before it was acquired by Novacap and merged with Cadent in 2024. His entire career has been building cookieless, ML-driven ad targeting systems.
They hired a public-company ad tech CEO to run a division inside a magazine company. That's the tell.
The Architecture
The OpenAI partnership, announced in May 2024, isn't window dressing. OpenAI's language models give D/Cipher the ability to understand content at a granular level — not just "this is a food article" but "this is a recipe for a weeknight chicken dish optimized for a family of four with a 30-minute time constraint, written for someone who already knows basic techniques." That level of semantic understanding is what lets D/Cipher+ map intent across properties it doesn't own.
The team has grown to 50+ people, led by Lindsay Van Kirk (SVP, previously at Xandr and AppNexus — the programmatic ad exchange acquired by AT&T for $1.6B) and Jon Roberts, PhD, Chief Innovation Officer. The internal org restructuring tells its own story: People Inc.'s legacy print media agency, M&I, was folded under D/Cipher's management and pivoted to digital, opening new distribution to independent agencies and political advertisers.
D/Cipher isn't a side project. It's eating the company from the inside.
The Irony
Here's what makes the D/Cipher story worth watching: it exists because Google destroyed People Inc.'s search traffic.
Google-referred visits dropped 63% in two years. AI Overviews now appear on nearly 70% of the top 10,000 search keywords. Google's share of People Inc.'s core sessions fell from 55% in Q1 2024 to 25% in Q1 2026. The traditional model — write SEO content, attract Google traffic, sell display ads against pageviews — is collapsing.
Most publishers responded by cutting costs and hoping the bleeding stops. People Inc. responded by building a platform that doesn't need pageviews to work. D/Cipher monetizes intent, not traffic. If you have fewer visitors but better data about what those visitors want, you can actually charge more per impression. And if you can extend that data model to other publishers' sites, you don't need your own traffic at all.
−63%
Google traffic (2024–2026)
+8%
Digital revenue, Q1 2026 YoY
Traffic down 63%. Revenue up 8%. That divergence is the D/Cipher thesis in two numbers.
What to Watch
Scale beyond owned properties. D/Cipher+ is testing with select advertisers now and expanding throughout 2025–2026. The question is whether intent signals learned on People Inc. sites actually transfer to the open web with the same accuracy. Vogel has projected 2–3% contribution to overall revenue growth in 2026 — modest, but it's year one.
The CTV play. Halpin explicitly excluded connected TV from the 4–5× TAM expansion figure. If D/Cipher+ works on CTV — targeting streaming ads based on content context rather than viewer profiles — the addressable market grows by another order of magnitude.
The Google lawsuit. People Inc. is pursuing "hundreds of millions of dollars in damages" against Google, with $15 million in litigation costs expected in 2026. A settlement or favorable ruling would provide capital to accelerate D/Cipher+ expansion. A loss would underscore why the platform matters even more.
The identity question. At what point does People Inc. stop being a publisher that also has an ad tech division, and start being an ad tech company that also publishes magazines? They hired a NASDAQ ad tech CEO to run D/Cipher. They folded their legacy media agency under it. It's their fastest-growing unit by headcount and revenue. The answer may already be forming.
Sources: Adweek · AdExchanger · Press Gazette · Digiday · People Inc. newsroom · Adotat · people.inc/dcipher