Barry Diller has a word for what's happening inside People Inc. He calls it Inversion.
"We have now transitioned into true positive territory of our own traffic, with our own hands, not dependent on anyone else."
— Barry Diller, letter to shareholders, April 28, 2026
The idea behind Inversion is simple: stop selling ads next to content and start building businesses on top of brands. A recipe site becomes a recipe product. A lifestyle magazine becomes a lifestyle membership. A media brand becomes a consumer product line. The content doesn't disappear — it becomes the foundation for something you own, rather than something Google can take away.
This matters because of what happened to Google traffic. In two years, Google's share of People Inc's sessions collapsed from 54% to 24%. AI Overviews now appear on 70% of the top 10,000 search keywords People's content used to rank for. The old model — write content, rank in Google, sell display ads — is a melting ice cube.
So People Inc is doing something unusual for a publisher. It's building products.
The 19 Experiments
Diller's shareholder letter disclosed 19 separate Inversion initiatives — projects that "extend and transcend traditional publishing models." Not all are public. But the ones that are reveal a pattern: turn editorial authority into owned products and direct relationships.
Aggregates 100,000+ recipes from Allrecipes, Food & Wine, EatingWell, and Southern Living into a single platform. 3.5 million registered users, 40 million recipes saved. Launched about a year ago. This is the clearest example — the content that used to live across separate ad-supported sites now lives in an owned product with direct user accounts.
A dedicated mobile app for the flagship brand, backed by a 65-person team. 430,000 users. Sessions run 3x longer than web visits. The bet: if you can get people into a native app, you own the relationship — no algorithm between you and the reader.
A social video series that turned a digital-only fashion brand into an entertainment property. 45 million views across episodes, with sponsorship revenue attached to each season. InStyle ceased print in 2022; this is what it became.
A membership club for superfans. Sweet tea as an owned product line. Architectural plans for home design. Southern Living is the guinea pig for the full Inversion thesis — taking a 60-year-old editorial brand and turning it into a lifestyle company.
The Revenue Shift
The question with any strategy is: does the math work? Here's where People Inc stands.
That's $103 million in Q1 2026 alone — licensing deals (OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta), D/Cipher+ ad targeting off-platform, Apple News monetization, events, and the Inversion products. This revenue grew 24% year-over-year. The on-site session business grew 4%. The company is slowly inverting: the part that doesn't depend on web traffic is growing 6x faster than the part that does.
The trajectory over recent quarters tells the story more clearly than any single number:
| Period | Digital Revenue | Growth | Non-Session Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q4 2024 | $311M | +12% | ~35% |
| Q1 2025 | $234M | +6% | ~33% |
| Q2 2025 | $260M | +9% | ~36% |
| Q4 2025 | $355M | +14% | ~38% |
| Q1 2026 | $253M | +8% | 41% |
Ten consecutive quarters of digital revenue growth. The non-session share keeps climbing — from roughly a third to over 40%. If the trend holds, non-session revenue will be the majority of digital revenue within a year. That's the inversion.
The Brand Triage
Inversion doesn't apply equally to all 40+ brands. People Inc has drawn a line: 19 brands get investment. The other 21 keep running but get no growth capital.
CEO Neil Vogel's selection criteria is revealing:
"If a brand is too exposed to search and can't diversify... that's not going to get that much investment."
— Neil Vogel, CEO, People Inc.
This is the part that bites. The original Dotdash brands — Investopedia, Verywell, The Spruce, Byrdie, Simply Recipes, Lifewire, TripSavvy, Treehugger — were all built on search. They were literally SEO-first properties, designed from the ground up to rank in Google. That was the Dotdash playbook, and it worked brilliantly for a decade.
Now the company is saying: the thing that made you is the thing that makes you expendable.
The protected 19 lean toward brands with cultural identity beyond search — People, Southern Living, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Better Homes & Gardens, Martha Stewart. These are names people know, not just URLs people click. The Dotdash SEO brands that survive the cut — like Investopedia and Allrecipes — are the ones that built enough brand recognition to exist in people's heads, not just in Google's index.
The Precedent Problem
Here's the tension I can't resolve: there isn't a clear precedent for a legacy publisher successfully becoming a product company at this scale.
The closest analogy might be Condé Nast, which has leaned into subscriptions (+10% in 2025, with digital subs up 29%), events (+40%), and commerce (+13%). But Condé Nast's seven largest brands drive 85% of its roughly $2 billion in revenue. Its brand extensions are media-adjacent — events, video, subscriptions. People Inc is trying something more ambitious: actual consumer products, utility apps, and owned platforms.
Future plc, the UK specialist publisher, faces similar Google headwinds — AI overviews on 50% of key search terms, sessions down 10% — but its response has been different: tightening the existing advertising and commerce model rather than reinventing it. Revenue fell 6% to £739M in FY2025 but margins held at 30%. That's a defensive play. People Inc is playing offense.
The risk is obvious. Building consumer products is a different business than publishing. The skills are different. The economics are different. The failure rate is brutal. A 65-person team building the People app is competing with every social and news app in the App Store. MyRecipes with 3.5 million users is competing with a mature recipe app market. Southern Living sweet tea is competing with... every sweet tea.
But the alternative is also clear. Staying a pure-play publisher means staying dependent on platforms that are actively eating your lunch. Google's AI Overviews are already answering the queries that used to drive traffic. The math only gets worse.
What to Watch
Three metrics will tell you whether the Inversion is working or whether it's a corporate strategy deck that flatters the earnings call:
Sources: IAC shareholder letter (Apr 2026) · Press Gazette · AdExchanger · A Media Operator · Digiday · Press Gazette (Q2 2025) · MediaPost (Condé Nast) · Future plc FY2025 results