Barry Diller, the veteran media dealmaker, has renamed his IAC empire People Inc. and tapped Neil Vogel as CEO. This move comes amid a brutal traffic drought from Google, dubbed ‘Google Zero’ by publishers watching referrals plummet. Vogel’s playbook? Ditch dependency. Build direct ties. Ink deals with AI giants hungry for fresh data. People Inc. slashed Google traffic from 70% to 25% of its mix over two years. Sessions dropped 50%. Yet revenue climbed 15%. How? Vogel acquired Meredith and Time Inc. brands in 2021, using Diller’s couple billion dollars to stockpile 40 titles, with 10 core performers like People, InStyle, Better Homes and Gardens, Food & Wine, and Southern Living. Each runs distinct models—licensing to Walmart, events, print, digital ads, email lists, TikTok virality, Instagram shops, Apple News. No single platform holds sway.
Vogel dismisses the ‘media is dying’ dirge. ‘The narrative that media is failing, it can’t be successful, it’s structurally broken, is something we’ve never subscribed to,’ he told Business Insider. ‘We believe if you have great brands, you have what you need to build a media business.’ Google changed first. AI answers in search siphoned clicks, favoring YouTube clips, Reddit threads, summaries over publisher links. Platforms chase self-interest. Publishers must too. So People Inc. courts OpenAI and others, feeding new articles, video archives, photos into their models. Data scarcity plagues AI firms. ‘The world is currently out of data. Everything that can be crawled has been crawled,’ Vogel said. ‘And who’s making that is us. So we’re very important.’ Risks abound. AI partners might train rivals, ghost deals, hoard content without paying. Vogel concedes as much: ‘There is a chance we are a hundred percent wrong on all of this… There’s a chance that we’re a hundred percent right. The truth is probably somewhere in the between.’
Layoffs hit, $14 million in severance. Diller champions ‘creative conflict’ for sharp ideas. Vogel pushes authenticity. ‘People don’t know what’s real. They know that they don’t just want an LLM answer or an artificial experience.’ Brands endure across channels. Direct apps. Owned audiences. That’s the hedge.
This pivot mirrors broader industry tremors. Publishers face zero traffic from Google AI Overviews, forcing subscriptions, e-commerce, video bets. But People Inc. grew while others shrank. Vogel prepared early. ‘We were very good at making content people liked, and we were very good at Google. But we were so Google-dependent that we were also the first people to see Google start to change.’ Now, with Diller’s full backing, Vogel scales a ‘unique new day publishing model,’ as the mogul calls it—unlimited potential, multi-platform resilience.
And here’s the twist. While Vogel navigates Google Zero for publishers, a different ‘People.ai’—unrelated, despite the name—rebrands to Backstory amid its own AI surge. This San Francisco firm, once valued at $1.1 billion after $197 million from ICONIQ, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, shifted from revenue intelligence to ‘answers platform’ for sales teams. On April 21, 2026, it announced the change, targeting deal insights, forecasting, pipeline risks via AI agents in workflows like Claude or Copilot. Customers include Red Hat, Palo Alto Networks, Five9. CEO Jason Ambrose predicts for 2026: humans set goals, AI handles questions. Win rates doubled for some users. Gartner named it a Visionary in Revenue Action Orchestration. But critics note its data-layer focus lags application-layer rivals. Business Wire detailed the rebrand; SaaStr highlighted agentic ambitions.
Confusion reigns. Searches mix People Inc.’s media survival with People.ai’s (now Backstory) sales AI push. Vogel’s fight against Google Zero echoes revenue tech’s data wars—both sell content to AI, both bet on brand trust over platform whims. Publishers supply human-generated archives. Revenue platforms capture emails, calls, meetings for deal signals. Both thrive on scarcity: fresh data amid AI hunger.
Vogel’s empire spans U.S.-focused brands with loyalists. Backstory processes billions of interactions for enterprise GTM teams. Parallels sharpen. AI needs volume, variety, veracity. Publishers provide narrative richness. Sales AI extracts behavioral gold. Google Zero accelerates both shifts. Traffic vanishes; data deals emerge. Diller’s gamble on Vogel pays if brands hold. Backstory’s if answers beat gut forecasts. Industry insiders watch. Platforms evolve. Dependency kills. Direct wins.
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