name: People Inc / Dotdash Meredith Vocabulary
description: |
  Domain vocabulary covering the People Inc (formerly Dotdash Meredith) media
  publishing operation. Captures corporate-structure terms, brand categories,
  content surfaces, advertising products, and the AI-bot-policy regime that
  governs machine access to the brand portfolio.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/meredith/main/vocabulary/meredith-vocabulary.yml
created: '2026-05-23'
modified: '2026-05-23'

terms:

  - term: People Inc
    definition: |
      Corporate name of America's largest digital and print publisher as of
      July 31, 2025. Subsidiary of IAC. Operates 40+ consumer brands.
    aliases:
      - PEOPLE Inc
      - PeopleInc

  - term: Dotdash Meredith
    definition: |
      Prior corporate name (December 2021 to July 31, 2025) for the entity
      formed when IAC's Dotdash acquired Meredith Corporation's magazine
      and digital assets for $2.7 billion.
    aliases:
      - DDM

  - term: Meredith Corporation
    definition: |
      Founded by Edwin Thomas Meredith in 1902 as the publisher of Successful
      Farming. Acquired Time Inc in 2017 (~$1.85B). Sold its broadcast
      division to Gray Television and its magazine/digital assets to IAC's
      Dotdash on December 1, 2021.

  - term: Dotdash
    definition: |
      Formerly About.com (founded 1997 as The Mining Company). Acquired by
      IAC in 2012 for $300M. Rebranded to Dotdash in 2017. Operator of the
      Verywell, The Spruce, Investopedia, Lifewire, and Treehugger brand
      stack pre-Meredith acquisition.

  - term: IAC
    definition: |
      InterActiveCorp — NYSE-listed holding company headquartered in New York
      led by Joey Levin. Parent of People Inc, Angi, Care.com, Vimeo, and
      the Daily Beast. Spun off Match Group, Expedia, Ticketmaster, and
      multiple other companies over its history ("30 years, 10 public
      companies").

  - term: D/Cipher
    definition: |
      People Inc's proprietary cookieless intent-based contextual advertising
      platform. Derives signals from how readers engage with content across
      the brand portfolio and matches them to advertiser intent without
      relying on third-party cookies. Sold as a B2B media buy.

  - term: Specialty Marketing Solutions
    definition: |
      Bundle of B2B services within People Inc: Content Solutions (custom
      content marketing), Awards & Accolades (editorial-seal licensing),
      Targeted Media Health (point-of-care), Media Now Interactive (media
      planning/buying), and Content Licensing.

  - term: AI Bot Policy
    definition: |
      The robots.txt-encoded policy applied uniformly across People Inc brand
      domains. Fully disallows ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, anthropic-ai, CCBot,
      news-please, cohere-ai, ImagesiftBot, FriendlyCrawler, Quora-Bot,
      omgilibot, omgili, PerplexityBot, and others. Partially restricts
      ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, and GPTBot (blocking the /thmb/ image
      path). Explicitly allows Pinterest and Pinterestbot.

  - term: Essential Brands
    definition: |
      People Inc's term for its top-tier consumer brand portfolio; the brands
      surfaced on the brand-licensing and editorial-seal product surface.

  - term: Brand Licensing
    definition: |
      Revenue line where People Inc grants third parties the right to use
      brand names, marks, and editorial accolades on retail products and
      marketing. People Inc is a top global licensor per License Global.

  - term: RSS Feed
    definition: |
      The canonical machine-readable article surface on every People Inc
      consumer brand domain at /feed (RSS 2.0). The closest thing the company
      has to a developer API for content.

  - term: Sitemap Index
    definition: |
      The XML sitemap index at /sitemap.xml on each brand domain referencing
      per-section sitemap files (/sitemap_1.xml … /sitemap_N.xml). Updated
      daily. The canonical machine-readable URL inventory.

categories:
  - Health
  - Finance
  - Food And Drink
  - Home
  - Beauty And Style
  - Travel
  - Tech And Sustainability
  - Entertainment
  - Premium Publishing