Channels with Peter Kafka · Vox Media Podcast Network

How to Survive without Google: People Inc's Playbook

March 18, 2026·48 min·3 clips

People Inc lost half its Google traffic in two years and is still growing 15 percent.

The money question keeps coming back. Vogel describes People Inc as a company that made it through the print-to-digital shift by following audience scale and ad demand, then had to rethink the model when the open web stopped looking so dependable. The host makes him spell out the business case. This is not a warm look back at magazines. It is a pretty cold Wall Street read on where attention can still turn into revenue. For a while, eyeballs on owned sites mattered most. Now, Vogel says, the brands have to do more at once. They still need to work in programmatic ad markets around intent-driven audiences, but they also need to support apps, games, and other places where the company has more control. The open web sounds useful, not thrilling. He calls it flattish for the company, which is a careful way of saying it no longer looks like the obvious growth engine. People is the example he keeps using. The print magazine still matters, with about two million copies a week. But the bigger story is almost ten million web sessions a day, plus app sessions that run three or four times longer and game sessions that run even longer. The host pushes on who is actually using it. Vogel says the core user is not just someone left over from print loyalty; he describes a millennial and Gen Z audience. That is the bet. If a publisher has a brand with real scale, it can try to move people from a web page into an app, a game, or another surface it controls. Without brands, Vogel says, that move gets harder. The conversation stays fairly dry, but the claim is not small: a legacy media company is trying to prove that life after the open web means rebuilding around owned attention, not simply chasing traffic wherever it appears. Vogel does not pitch it as magic. He frames it as a run of adjustments, from About.com to buying the biggest print publisher in the world, all guided by a simple instinct: follow the money.

As heard by us

A sharp operator conversation on People Inc's push toward owned brands, app engagement, and less dependence on the open web.

People Inc's strategy comes through as a media company trying to rely less on open-web traffic and more on brands it can own, deepen, and monetize directly.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A blunt look at how People Inc. is reworking its playbook after the open web stops being the whole answer.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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