Barry Diller is shaking up his company IAC, rebranding the company as People Incorporated as it undergoes a significant shift in strategy.
Diller will shift to a role as executive chairman in the move, with Neil Vogel set to become the company’s new CEO.
Diller outlined the changes in a note to IAC shareholders Tuesday, noting that going forward the holding company will focus on its MGM holdings and the People publishing business.
“We’re transitioning the necessary staff of IAC into the corpus of People,” Diller wrote. “That will significantly reduce our overhead as we concentrate on our two assets: People publishing and our holdings in MGM Resorts.
“As for me, I plan to continue to do what I have done here for years as Chairman and Senior Executive—be an advisor, instigator, stimulus, and sometimes irritant to the process,” he added. “I will also continue to oversee our MGM investment.”
The changes will mean staff reductions. In an SEC filing the company said that it expects to incur about $14 million in severance and related expenses, $48 million in non-cash stock-based compensation expense and as much as $1 million in other costs related to the plan. The company expects to see annual run rate savings of around $40 million when the integration is complete.
You can read Diller’s note, below.
Dear Shareholders,
Today’s news is that IAC is changing its corporate name to People Incorporated.
Throughout its three decades, this company has always been opportunistic. That’s the only guidewire I’ve ever followed, and I believe today and tomorrow’s opportunities will best be held in the corpus of this new corporate name.
Some backgrounding will be helpful in explaining why.
I bought into little Silver King Communications in 1995. It had about $40 million in sales, and as it evolved over the next decades, we became HSN, then USA Networks, and finally, in 2003, IAC/InterActiveCorp, and then even more simply, IAC Inc.
Those name changes were the result of our changing business model. We began as a string of small television stations, then merged with HSN, a home shopping channel, and a few years later bought the USA Networks and Universal Television. At HSN, we gained some expertise in ecommerce and interactive models in the primitive convergence of television screens, computers, and phones. And then came the internet revolution in 1995 and out of that a unique business model—buying, building and creating interactive business. Over the years, that has resulted in our owning and operating more than 200 companies and overseeing well over 100 minority investments.
By then we were the definition of a conglomerate. As we evolved, I came to believe that operating all these disparate entities wasn’t the optimum method and began a process of spinning them out into their own independent companies. Once we felt they were of sufficient size and success I thought they’d be better off on their own and sought to become a sort of anti-conglomerate, ‘spinning out’ 11 public entities.
All this activity over these past three decades has resulted in creating over $144 billion of value at peak equity prices.
In the last few years, ecommerce and interactivity valuations soared, new opportunities became fewer, and we began to scale down our acquisition activities to concentrate on the one sector we felt had the most potential in such a fast changing environment, that of the publishing businesses we’d built and acquired over the last 14 years. It was, as usual for us, a contrarian move but as I outline below, a most successful one.
As all sorts of potential disintermediation loomed in media and ecommerce we also began to search for businesses that couldn’t be disintermediated. Out of that process we began to accumulate shares in MGM Resorts, believing that there was no technology that was going to displace a customer from going to Las Vegas or any of MGM’s other physical properties. Our original 12% stake in MGM has now grown to 26%. MGM Resorts is an extraordinary operation powered by a compelling mix of iconic resort destinations, scalable digital platforms, premium brands, an expanding global presence, and, under its CEO Bill Hornbuckle, an outstanding management team. MGM owns 40% of the Las Vegas Strip—an entertainment nucleus that simply cannot be replicated anywhere in the world. MGM’s leadership position in Macau remains the envy of the industry, and its mega resort abuilding in Japan is a giant future opportunity. Its digital businesses are growing profitably, and its stock continues to be wildly undervalued.
Our major continuing operating business is now our publishing operations. We are unlike most publishers in that we began as a native digital publisher and spent a decade developing the expertise to grow into a thriving digital business anchored online. We were leaning into digital publishing with all our might when our competitors were downsizing their operations because of that digital disruption. In late 2021, we then acquired Meredith. The earlier combination of Meredith and Time Inc. boasted 30+ brands such as the iconic PEOPLE, Food + Wine, Southern Living, and Travel & Leisure, all of which had incredible heritage but lacked digital reach. We brought our digital expertise to Meredith’s brands, aiming to modernize these iconic assets and unlock their true potential.
We are now some years into that process, and the results have been excellent. As against most publishers, we are thriving. The first quarter of 2026 represents our 10th straight quarter of digital revenue growth, our EBITDA margins remain strong, and our audiences are growing rapidly across so many platforms, including social channels, Apple News, and our own live events.
We have succeeded by leveraging our knowledge and experience from across the breadth of IAC’s digital businesses and applying them to People, trying new things, not being captive to old models or a legacy approach and not being dependent on others who could disrupt our business.
We’ve built our own extremely effective AI ad targeting product based on our first party data named D/Cipher.
We recognized the coming reality of zero search traffic years ago, successfully transitioning out of depending upon search engines for our traffic to create our own ecosystem which has resulted in a broad diversity in audience sources.
We have also begun a process called INVERSION, which to us means taking each of our properties and their intellectual capital and turning them into opportunities to play a direct role in creating new products and services that we own directly, rather than the traditional publishing model of licensing brands. We have literally 19 separate initiatives operating now that are exclusive of the traditional publishing model. I intend for us to be the principal, rather than the licensor, wherever we can in the products and services that will be birthed out of our enormous reservoir of content.
I do believe we have an unlimited opportunity to build a unique new day publishing model that has no equal in its ability to grow into a large enterprise. Under Neil Vogel’s leadership, People’s outstanding editorial and business staff and 3,500 employees, we deliver the most diversified expertise across our 40+ brands and the six ‘books’ we continue to publish in print. And publish, in the old sense we still do, and profitably, to the tune of shipping 250 million magazines a year.
So, there we are and that’s why we’re changing IAC’s name to People Incorporated.
We’re transitioning the necessary staff of IAC into the corpus of People. That will significantly reduce our overhead as we concentrate on our two assets: People publishing and our holdings in MGM Resorts.
As for me, I plan to continue to do what I have done here for years as Chairman and Senior Executive—be an advisor, instigator, stimulus, and sometimes irritant to the process. I will also continue to oversee our MGM investment.
We have an excellent balance sheet with plenty of cash to pursue opportunities. It’s possible we’ll find new arenas, that’s always an option, but for now we’ll concentrate on the two we have in front of us. Each cycle over the last 30 years, we downsized to a smaller company—I like that. It gives us room and energy to be agile and opportunistic.
The corpus of People Incorporated will include the assets of a mostly virtual media business together with the very hard assets of MGM Resorts—if you like, a perfect hedge in a world that is changing so unpredictively fast.
We’ve gone through four cycles since our founding more than 30 years ago, each one seeing opportunity in the dark. I can’t tell you where the next journey will take us but can say with confidence that the base from which we start is square on solid, and…from there…we will proceed.
I’d say THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER, but that would be more than presumptuous.
Barry Diller
