(Reuters) – Internet holding company IAC 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)
