Real talk: I made the decision to keep this long, reported essay outside of the paywall, because I want to keep as much Culture Study freely accessible as possible. But this post is the result of many hours of labor \u2014\u00a0and without your subscriptions, there\u2019s no free Culture Study. If you believe in this project, <\/span>consider subscribing<\/a>: <\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Subscribing gets you access to the weekly <\/span>Things I Read and Loved<\/strong> at the end of the Sunday newsletter, the massive links\/recs posts, full Garden Study access, and all the weekly threads, like yesterday\u2019s extremely useful thread on <\/span>Clothes Maintenance and Repair<\/a> <\/span><\/strong>(how do you repair kids\u2019 blasted-out knees in pants? what do you do about moth holes in sweaters? how do you keep linen in good shape without becoming a full-time iron machine? how do I get the blood out of my hoodie sleeve?) and<\/span> <\/strong>Friday\u2019s<\/span> <\/span>expansive discussion of kids\u2019 allowance<\/a><\/strong>. <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019ve been obsessed with <\/span>People Magazine<\/em> since I first understood what a magazine even <\/span>was<\/em>. My family didn\u2019t have a subscription but I would stare at the cover every time we went to the grocery store and paw at the old, worn copies in the doctor\u2019s office. <\/span>Highlights<\/em> was kid stuff; <\/span>National Geographic <\/em>and <\/span>Time <\/em>were boring; I knew about <\/span>Tiger Beat<\/em> but never knew anyone who had an actual copy; <\/span>Weekly World News<\/em>, with its black and white newsprint and incessant bad boy stories, was terrifying. <\/span><\/p>\n But <\/span>People<\/em>! <\/span>People<\/em> was filled with the average yet extraordinary. There were pictures of Princess Diana, of course, but also pictures of someone who\u2019d given birth to triplets on an airplane, and an elderly lady who made cakes shaped like every fruit in the world. It was like my favorite book of fourth grade (<\/span>The Guinness Book of World Records, 1990) <\/em>but with better pictures and much longer stories (and, once a year, the Sexiest Man Alive, which was somehow always Richard Gere). <\/span><\/p>\n When I got to grad school and eventually started my dissertation on the history of celebrity gossip, my favorite chapter was about the founding and accumulated power of <\/span>People<\/em>. As a Time Inc. publication, it mixed the established journalistic rigor of <\/span>Time<\/em> (everything went through fact-checking! they hired real journalists!) and \u201cextraordinary stories about ordinary people\u201d whose subjects could range from Gerald Ford (who appeared in a pool for the cover of <\/span>the fourth issue<\/a>) to \u201ca zookeeper who lost a finger to his favorite anaconda.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n By 1977, <\/span>People <\/em>had reached three million in guaranteed circulation \u2014\u00a0an absolutely wild number just three years after launch. <\/span>People<\/em> held that number for more than two decades, with massive (and massively profitable) direct sales at the newsstand. In the late \u201890s, guaranteed circulation hit 3.5 million; in the second half of 2002, sixteen consecutive issues of the magazine hit 1.5 million in newsstand sales alone, and total circulation reached 3.6 million. <\/span><\/p>\n If you\u2019re looking for in-depth citations of these figures and the anxiety <\/span>People<\/em> and its knockoffs produced, you can find them in my <\/span>dissertation<\/a>. But the reason I\u2019m still interested in <\/span>People Magazine<\/em> is the same reason I was interested in it as a kid <\/span>and<\/em> as an academic: it was stories about <\/span>people<\/em>. More plainly, as Stolley put it back in 1974, \u201cwe\u2019re getting back to the people who are causing the news and who are caught up in it, or deserve to be. Our focus is on people, not issues.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n NOT ISSUES. Not political realities. Just people\u2019s personal stories. And with that framing, you can put a president on the cover and claim it\u2019s \u201cnot political.\u201d You can put <\/span>Ellen<\/em> on the cover and not say gay. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n Or you can put Lance Bass on the cover and <\/span>say<\/a><\/em> gay<\/a>, but not talk about the politics of homophobia that contributed to being \u201churt by rumors.\u201d You can feature royalty without talking about the wages of empire, and you can talk about Michael Jackson and Madonna like\u2026\u2026this: <\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n The excavation of the political from the personal is always worth studying, which is part of the reason <\/span>People<\/em> has always been <\/span>such a rich text<\/a>. But today\u2019s <\/span>People<\/em> <\/span>Magazine<\/em> is thinner, less glossy, and generally less <\/span>substantive<\/em> than its heyday. There are so many reasons for the magazine\u2019s declining influence, most of them related to its own stubbornness when it came to online content in the early 2000s, the ill-fated Time Inc. merger with AOL, the rise of the \u201cnew\u201d unsanctioned scandal press in the form of upstart gossip blogs, the spread of celebrity social media, and the ongoing contraction of print media and print advertising. <\/span><\/p>\n And yet: the <\/span>People<\/em> brand is still incredibly lucrative. To understand why, we have to do a little industrial history. In 2017, the Meredith Corporation purchased the suite of Time Inc. publications, including <\/span>People, Entertainment Weekly<\/em>, <\/span>InStyle<\/em>, <\/span>Real Simple<\/em> and <\/span>Travel<\/em> <\/span>& Leisure<\/em>. In 2021, Meredith was acquired by the media conglomerate IAC Dotdash, which rolled all of the online and print publications together under a subdivision called Dotdash Meredith. <\/span><\/p>\n If you\u2019ve never heard of Dotdash, you\u2019re not alone. But you\u2019ve almost certainly found yourself on a Dotdash site after typing a question into Google. There\u2019s The Spruce (food and gardening and households), VeryWell (health), TripSavvy (travel), Lifewire (tech), The Balance (personal finance), ThoughtCo (education)\u2026.and so many other ambiguous but professional-sounding titles. <\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n The first time I found myself on one of these sites, I spent a solid five minutes trying to figure out if it was a legitimate source or a weird SEO farm. I worked in media! How had I never heard of this thing! Here\u2019s the truth: these are real sites, with real articles written by real people. And they are also <\/span>absolutely<\/em> SEO farms. <\/span><\/p>\n The Spruce, along with the rest of those millennially-named and branded sites, is the current manifestation of what was originally and aptly called The Mining Company. The Mining Company was founded in 1997 to provide reliable online information in hundreds of different subject areas; in 1999, it changed its name to one you\u2019re more likely to recognize: About.com. 1990s era About.com was a mix of AskJeeves, Wikipedia, and Encarta, and years before what we understand as anything close to \u201csearch engine optimization,\u201d people understood its value: the publishing conglomerate Primedia paid $690 for it in 2000 at the peak of the dot-com bubble before selling it off to the <\/span>New York Times<\/em> Media Company in 2005 for $490 million. <\/span><\/p>\n Under the <\/span>New York Times<\/em>, About.com used ads on its various \u201carticles\u201d to increase its revenue to over $100 million. But the financial crisis (and the ever-changing norms of the internet) tanked revenues, and by 2012, the Times Media Company offloaded About.com to IAC. (It was nearly sold to Answers.com, a tidbit I include simply to delight you). <\/span><\/p>\n When I mentioned IAC above, I called it a conglomerate, and that\u2019s right. But it\u2019s also Barry Diller\u2019s conglomerate, and Barry Diller is a certain sort of conglomerate mastermind. He was one of the first movie executives to understand the potential to exploit video game I.P.; he launched the Fox Network; he repopularized the WWE during his tenure at USA; he saw the early value of Expedia and online dating sites like Match.com and Tinder. <\/p>\n Diller understood that internet properties\u2019 value centers weren\u2019t their content. It was their capacity to transmit ads. So when IAC acquired About.com, it put Neil Vogel in charge as CEO, and fiddled around with making it less ugly and more accessible on mobile. Still, year after year, it kept losing money. So in 2017, <\/span>Vogel made a radical change<\/a>. About.com and its one million articles would cease to exist. In its place: The Spruce and its millennial-branded siblings, now named DotDash, which would house reformatted and updated About.com content and branch out into shopping guides packed with referral links and Wirecutter-like reviews. <\/span><\/p>\n Dotdash took the heart of a \u201cservice\u201d publication (advice, buying guides, how-tos) and made it into evergreen exploitable content. It significantly increased the amount of text in each article (which made it seem more substantive in Google\u2019s ratings) and decreased the number of images and videos (which helped make the site load faster). Vogel\u2019s <\/span>corporate mantra<\/a>: \u201cthe freshest content on the fastest sites with the fewest ads.\u201d <\/span>By 2020<\/a>, Dotdash was home to more than 250,000 \u201csuper articles\u201d on a dozen individual sites that reached 90 million Americans every <\/span>month<\/em>. <\/span><\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t matter if the brands themselves were bland and forgettable, or if you glanced at the author name beside an article and never thought of it again. The package itself \u2014\u00a0the font, the absence of intrusive auto-play ads, the <\/span>review board descriptions<\/a> \u2014\u00a0underlined the sites\u2019 legitimacy. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n At this point, Dotdash had already acquired Byrdie (a beauty site), <\/span>Brides.com<\/em> (from Cond\u00e9 Nast), Liquor.com, Treehugger, Serious Eats, and Simply Recipes. Vogel called the strategy \u201ca Netflix approach to content creation,\u201d which explains the 2021 decision to shell out $2.7 billion for Meredith and the more than 30 magazines and brands under its umbrella. That\u2019s <\/span>Shape, Southern Living, Allrecipes.com, Parents, Health, Food & Wine, Diabetic Living, Better Homes and Gardens, Health, Every Day with Rachael Ray<\/em>, plus all of those Time Inc. titles Meredith acquired back in 2017. Including: <\/span>People<\/em> <\/span>Magazine<\/em>. <\/span><\/p>\n \u25cf<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been on the <\/span>People<\/em> email list since 2010. Every year, I get more and more emails; the content is always fascinating, in that bewildering <\/span>what is culture <\/em>sort of way. I wake up and wonder: what does <\/span>People<\/em> care about today? Well, this past weekend, the answer was almost entirely Kate Middleton. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n A few weeks ago, it was the deeply sad story of <\/span>Levi Wright<\/a>, the three-year-old son of a rodeo star who rode his toy tractor into a river. But there\u2019s also a tremendous amount of Jennifer Lopez\/Ben Affleck\/Jennifer Garner coverage, an average number of Kardashian posts, and solid numbers of Taylor Swift outfit and relationship updates. Occasionally, there will be an \u201cexclusive\u201d interview with a star who \u201ctells all\u201d (most recently: Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds <\/span>interview <\/a>each other<\/a>) <\/span><\/em>but the vast majority of content can be sorted into five buckets: <\/span><\/p>\n A celebrity posts something on social media, and a <\/span>People<\/em> article then links to the social media post and repeats what they said (from Monday: \u201c<\/span>Richard Gere Poses with His Sons in Rare Photos Shared by Wife Alejandra: ‘Always There for Us<\/a>\u2019\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n A celebrity does an interview with a higher profile magazine or television show and <\/span>People<\/em> aggregates one or two quotes from <\/span>that<\/em> interview (\u201c<\/span>Anne Hathaway Reveals She Had a Miscarriage in 2015, Recalls ‘Pain’ of Trying for Baby<\/a>\u2019) <\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Something very weird or very random or very horrible happens to a non-celebrity, and <\/span>People<\/em> picks it up (\u201c<\/span>Woman Eats Only Two Foods for Five Years Due to Severe Allergies (Exclusive)<\/a>\u201d plus a lot of other influencer and true crime related gruesome stuff I won\u2019t link to) <\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Something \u201cgoes viral\u201d in some way on a social media platform and it\u2019s spectacularly easy to make a post about it without doing even a minute\u2019s worth of additional reporting (\u201c<\/span>Dad Skips Son’s High School Graduation for Another Family Event: ‘I Will Always Come Second<\/a>‘;\u201c<\/span>Pregnant Mom’s Viral Search for Baby Name in Cemetery Is Complete! Find Out the Unique Name She Chose Off a Grave<\/a>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n A celebrity photo used as a peg for a shopping post filled with affiliate links (<\/span>Reese Witherspoon Keeps Wearing Shirts and Dresses with This Pretty Detail \u2014 Shop the Trend from $16<\/a>) <\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n This sort of aggregation and low-lift content creation is not novel \u2014\u00a0it was the backbone of BuzzFeed for years and now serves as its entire skeleton; it shows up in slightly different form in local stories that get picked up by the Associated Press and reprinted in papers all over the country. Print and television tabloids have exploited human interest\/<\/span>it could happen to you<\/em>\/true crime components of <\/span>People<\/em> content for decades. <\/span><\/p>\n But there\u2019s something else going on here, too. Earlier this year, HouseFresh founders Gisele Navarro and Danny Ashton <\/span>unpacked how big publishing conglomerates like Dotdash Meredith have adopted a private equity model<\/a> that \u201cutilizes public trust in long-standing publications to sell every product under the sun\u201d via Google SEO optimization. The end result: sites like RealSimple.com and BetterHomesandGardens.com pump out \u201cbest of\u201d product recommendation lists to game Google\u2019s search algorithms. <\/span><\/p>\n These recommendations are rarely as reliable as those coming from actual product recommendation sites like Housefresh or Wirecutter \u2014 usually because the recommendations aren\u2019t coming from product category experts, just writers who are expected to churn out content. (If you\u2019re interested in this sort of thing, I cannot recommend <\/span>the entire piece enough<\/a> \u2014 it\u2019s a pretty devastating indictment packed with receipts). These recommendation posts are reverse-engineered (using language like \u201cby experts\u201d in the headline) to surface at the top of results for anyone poking around on Google for \u201cthe best air purifier.\u201d The success of this type of post leads to its endless replication: not just across categories (\u201cBest Handheld Vacuum,\u201d \u201cBest Leafblower\u201d) but also across the media conglomerate: <\/span><\/p>\n <\/a> No publication \u2014 at least at Dotdash Meredith \u2014 is spared. If you read <\/span>the pos<\/a>t, you\u2019ll see that some of the top SEO chum (for air filters, but also all manner of \u201cbest\u201d recommendations) is coming from People.com. All of this is pretty grim shit: the result of executives who understand legacy publications, from <\/span>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!HnqM!,w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F45a9c4d7-e780-4258-a56e-94d4817ab967_940x1178.png)
<\/picture><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!E_DG!,w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcf3d0eaa-ce89-485e-8ac9-e0276367accb_2760x1256.png)
<\/picture><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!zAXo!,w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F87f8292c-a26f-4c33-91d0-d1343673c41c_2406x1208.png)
<\/picture><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!XkPu!,w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F121c0560-4090-40e2-b62e-d7e21325ac03_1860x620.png)
<\/picture><\/div>\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!eG8r!,w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe7446753-d274-4910-856a-3f8e58b53db9_2792x5598.png)
<\/picture><\/div>\n