Remember About.com? The site is the origin story for Dotdash Meredith. And — at some point along a journey that started in the Internet’s early years — it wasn’t doing very well, according to Dotdash Meredith Chief Innovation Officer Dr. Jon Roberts. 

Things began to turn around, though, once the brand started expanding and focusing in on three key goals (more on that later), said Roberts, who previously worked as a theoretical physicist making dark matter predictions.

The first brand expansion was Verywellhealth.com, launched April 2016, just before About.com became Dotdash.

“We did health first not because it was the easiest but because it was the hardest,” Roberts told the 40 attendees of the recent study tour during INMA’s Media Subscription Week in New York. “If we could prove we could launch and grow a health site, then we could prove we could launch and grow anything else. A few weeks after we launched these sites, they would double in scale because the core content we put on these sites was so good. The playbook worked because there is already an interest in the world in consumers looking for these. They knew these brands.”

Dotdash acquired Meredith, “an absolute beast” in size, in December 2021, Roberts explained, making Dotdash Meredith the largest digital publisher in the United States.

The playbook about which Roberts speaks involves three bullet points:

• The fastest Web sites.

• The best content.

• No bad ads.

The latter is an alternative strategy to most presented during the weeklong summit, with a focus on advertising and affiliated marketing in light of privacy regulations and Big Tech data policies.

The fastest Web sites

Bad ads and bad javascript mean page slowness, which kills engagement. So they fixed both.

The best content

Instead of chasing viral content, the team at Dotdash Meredith invested in its core content.

“If there was bad content, we killed it,” Roberts said. “By investing back into core content, we made sure the sites load quickly and got rid of all the bad ads.”

No bad ads

While many news publishers focus on registering and logging users to target ads based on their characteristics — a typical first-party data strategy — Dotdash Meredith took an alternative approach. Their not-quite-1-year-old in-house tool D/Cipher targets ads based on the articles people read, which means they don’t need users to be registered or logged in.

“Nobody clicks bad ads,” Roberts said. 

The content Dotdash Meredith publishes through its various brands is “never the last step in that thing you’re trying to do,” Roberts said. So the ads are part of the user experience, “taking you to the next steps.”

Roberts shared his laundry list of things wrong with traditional programmatic advertising, including: “Programmatic is complicated because of ad tech. It’s made that way so you don’t know how it works because it doesn’t.”

In May 2023, Dotdash Meredith productised ad targeting with:

• Intent-based ad targeting at scale, without cookies.

• 100% expert-written content across its brands.

• Doubled the audience size and unlocked Apple users.

• Guaranteed performance.

“In a cookie-based world, the value is in the ID,” Roberts said. “We are proving over and over again the value is in the content. And the content doesn’t live with an ad content company. It lives with the publishers.

“When cookies go away, that gives us an opportunity to move the premium from the ad tech company and back to publishing. To do that, we need to go out to the buyer side and continually hear the drumbeat that publishers know their audiences. In our case, knowing our audience is knowing our content.”

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