In late April, Dr. Jonathan Roberts, the Oxford-trained Chief Innovation Officer of DotDash Meredith – publisher of People, Better Homes & Gardens, Real Simple, and Travel & Leisure – went on The Media Copilot, an relatively obscure podcast run by a former Coindesk comms exec, to crow about his company’s new partnership with OpenAI and the future of personalization. Not exactly blockbuster stuff, but Roberts, squirming in his inevitable black t-shirt, didn’t actually describe personalized content products. He described a massive corporate divestment from taste.
Personalization is a word used almost exclusive by people who operate at an impersonal scale. The word describes how recommendation algorithms reverse engineered from engagement data supposedly make users feel. The word also describes how digital platforms – led by Meta, and Google – went from roughly .36% of U.S. ad spend in 2005 to 78% in 2024. They sold relevant audiences rather than proximity to relevant content. For a company like DotDash Meredith, AI-driven personalization offers a somewhat plausible path back to relevance. But when relevant audiences rather than aspirational content become the product, sophistication becomes an obstacle rather than an output.
Targeting data makes culture into a diagnostic rather than project, driving down – in a very real financial sense – the value of the sort of curation most DotDash Meredith brands (People aside) were created to do.
Roberts cheerfully provided an example of how this “transformation” was leveraging data from DotDash Meredith’s self-reported 10B annual hosted site visits[1]. Company researchers using AI data tools had found unexpectedly strong correlation between reader interest in Investopedia mutual fund explainers and Travel & Leisure articles about Mediterranean cruises. Rather than just serving mutual fund ads against mutual fund content, the company was now serving the ads against cruise content – also, steak content from Food & Wine. Roberts argued that this was good news for travel and food editors because it justified editorial budgets. What he chose not to dwell on was the rather obvious fact that it justified bigger budgets only so long as those budgets were allocated to serve specific correlated tastes – and not tastes correlated to knowledge of travel or food.
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