Why, asks CNBC, did Barry Diller split up his mega-internets corporation into five different ones? The answer: Apparently Frank Gehry's IAC headquarters can't support all that weight or something? Spin, Barry, spin! Actually it's kind of awesome that he doesn't feel the need to bother with talking points. THAT is what being rich is all about.
IAC chairman Barry Diller, a.k.a. Mr. Diane von Furstenberg, was on CNBC's Power Lunch show today, talking about his decision to break up the company into itty bitty pieces. Asked why, after years of talking up the benefits of keeping disparate Internet properties together, Diller changed direction, the media mogul dodged several times before stammering his way to an answer. "Well, as I said, having everything under one roof is good until the roof may collapse because of the, so to speak, weight growing up underneath." Come again? Diller's media training kicks in at this point, as he realizes his error. "How's that for an awkward thing?"
By our count, Ticketmaster's upcoming spinoff from IAC will be the seventh time Barry Diller has bought or sold a piece of the online-ticketing agency, starting from the first stake he acquired in it a decade ago. After the jump, a chronology of Diller's Ticketmaster deals.
Telecom mogul John Malone has been putting the squeeze on his old buddy Barry Diller, who runs IAC. So what does Diller do? Break his search and e-commerce conglomerate into five parts. Diller's sticking with the new IAC, which will mostly consist of the Ask.com search engine — oh, and Jakob Lodwick, too. HSN, Ticketmaster, LendingTree, and Interval International are getting spun off. We just want to know who's getting stuck with the bill for IAC's new headquarters in Chelsea.
Last week we wondered how IAC honcho Barry Diller was going to fix his troubles with John Malone, his #1 shareholder. The answer appears to be: Splitting IAC into five separate publicly-traded companies? Really? The majority (from College Humor to Ask.com to Match.com) remain with IAC proper; retail divisions like HSN.com go off together, as do Ticketmaster and Lending Tree. Amusingly, we hear that IAC staff haven't actually gotten official word of this yet—they all found out from their news alerts on the company. Update: Ooh, we hear the staff are going into a 10 a.m. meeting to find out all about this! Update update: Now we hear the staff meeting was postponed or something—and Barry will hold a live press conference at 11 a.m. on the roof of the IAC headquarters! (How dramatic!) Update update update: Now we hear the press conference is a no-go! Ha! But the conference call will go on as planned.
We can't really parse much of this Wall Street Journal story on the complicated tangle of investments between IAC honcho Barry Diller and John Malone, Barry's #1 stakeholder. (For instance: Who wanted it written? And why?) But! We did learn that apparently Barry Diller motors around Manhattan on a lil' scooter? That is really odd, and we had no idea. Also Barry should sue over their hideous illustration. [WSJ]
They said Barry Diller was out of his mind! And yet, according to this in-house promotional video that we've obtained, his company, IAC, has a giant Frank Gehry-designed headquarters full of young people working their internet brands like Match.com, Ask.com. It's a young company! Everyone there is in the loop! It's happening! They are an endlessly multi-product company! He has a smaller but smarter army! Also we love the part about 1:30 from the end when the guy doing payroll starts screaming at the College Humor staff too. But don't get too comfortable, staffers: "This company will change on a dime and will be able to change its strategy" at the drop of a hat, says some executive guy. Yes, that's when they take you and your once-hot young brand out back and grind you into meat.
More and more artists are striking innovative deals to sell their music — and leaving the traditional record industry contract behind. The Wall Street Journal reports that once Madonna's contract with Warner Music is up, she will link up with concert-promoter Live Nation. While not as revolutionary as Radiohead's pay-what-you-want plan, or Prince's free-music-with-newspaper deal, Live Nation is a concert production company, not a record label. Madonna's deal will bring album production and distribution, concerts, merchandise and publicity under one company.
With time running out on an advertising deal with Google, Barry Diller's Ask.com is facing bigger issues than the company's painfully unmemorable advertising. The IAC-owned search engine is dependent on Google-brokered text ads for a large portion of its revenues — but Google, which now sells ads on MySpace, among others, is not nearly as dependent on Ask.com. Fortunately for Diller, Microsoft and Yahoo are stupidly eager to prove themselves in the search-advertising market. If Google does end its ad deal with Ask.com, both companies would be happy to sign on Ask as a partner. One small problem: Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft make as much money per search as Google, which means that they have less money to split with Ask, even if they give it a more generous share. And a deal with either one would still leave Ask dependent on a rival search engine. Save for building its own advertising system, at considerable expense, Ask has no easy way out of the Google deal.
Barry Diller's IAC/InterActive Corp. launched a revamped iWon.com portal. The search engine, acquired along with Ask.com, has always drawn visitors by offering prizes. But it now promises more prizes, a social network and a more explicit link to IAC's Ask.com search engine. I, for one, am excited to have the opportunity to never visit the new site as much as I did the old one. [TechCrunch]
Shouty mogul Barry Diller gets defensive when interrogated about having once made former Universal head Stacey Snider cry. Accusations of manipulative drama queen antics follow! "Oh please! Stacey Snider cries for effect in whatever room she might be in. I mean, I didn't make Stacey Snider cry! Stacey Snider wanted to cry for her own demonstrative purposes. But, there's no question that our process, my process, is one in which I believe that in order to get to the truth of something, you have to argue it passionately. It's not a Socratic process by any stretch." [Portfoilio]
Barry Diller is easily bored. First, he was entranced by the promise of e-commerce, assembling an empire that includes such diverse offerings as Evite, the Home Shopping Network, and Ticketmaster. Then he turned his attention to search and snapped up Ask.com. With such a motley portfolio, why not add a jack-of-all-trades videogame company to your portfolio? Diller, the CEO of holding company IAC/InterActiveCorp, is focusing his energies on the videogame sector now. By acquiring a majority stake in GarageGames, which does everything from development tools and game creation to indie game publishing, Diller hopes to complement the yet-to-be launched InstantAction.com. But as usual, Diller's strategic vision isn't matched by his grasp of the technical details.
Lynn Hirschberg unloads in this weekend's Times' T mag on how all the moguls dress terribly nowadays; she lumps in the sometimes-bad dresser Barry Diller with the frequent offender Harvey Weinstein. "Scientists should stop investigating the links between fat friends, fast food and obesity and concentrate on the pernicious impact of stretch fabric. When a waistband can give and give, why should anyone stop eating? When a shirt does not need to be tucked in, who cares about the belly beneath?" Well... true! But she goes on to note that if lady-moguls dressed this poorly, their business choices would get seriously questioned. So did she miss the last two years of everyone asking if Harvey had lost it, having thrown an empire in the trash and all? And also that thing a couple weeks ago, when her fashion critic colleague Cathy Horyn called Harvey a "bearish hetero"?
The adorable scamps of CollegeHumor haven't let The Man break their spirit: They're still living the life of hard-partying sophomores, even though they've got jillions of dollars and ostensibly real jobs. Sadly, some folks aren't so amused. A note from their building's manager cites complaints about liquor bottles left in the men's room, "Drunk people hanging out the window," and, the most serious charge, "Spinning around the revolving doors over and over again." Juvenile, sure, but they're simply following in the footsteps of mentor and owner Barry Diller, who once took a shit on a QVC executive's desk "as a lark." (Kidding, Mr. Diller!)
For whatever reason, 23/6, the long-gestating humor blog collaboration between Barry Diller's IAC and The Huffington Post, has gone live on the HuffPo website. (The 23/6 domain itself remains password-protected.) The production has been described as "an online alternative to NBC's 'Saturday Night Live' or Comedy Central's 'The Daily Show'" but if what we're seeing here is any indication, we're pretty sure that Lorne Michaels isn't exactly crapping his pants in fear right now. Every joke feels strained, obvious, and rewritten to the point that all the humor has been drained from it (which is, we guess, the "Saturday Night Live" model): The whole thing makes VH1 webortion 24Sizzler read like a model of Lenny Bruceian comedic brilliance, and that site is such a disaster that the mentally retarded are suing to ensure that no one thinks they're its intended audience.
Is it true that Jakob Lodwick, the founder of IAC-controlled online-video site Vimeo, has gone on several dates with notorious nobody Julia Allison, the TV commentator and magazine columnist whose brief visit terrorized Silicon Valley and left desperately horny TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington so heartbroken he apparently threw himself into another woman's arms? Just think: Allison traveled thousands of miles to find a geek to love, and there were plenty of eligible nerd bachelors in New York all the while. From the shirtless photo he posted of himself, we can kind of see why Allison might go for him. Add to that IAC stock options and the ability to design a blog, and we'd say she's got herself quite a catch. Make a serious play for Jakob, Julia, before Barry Diller does. (Photo by Jakob Lodwick)
Now that News Corp. appears to have locked up Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, every journalist on the planet is volunteering to be an unpaid consultant to Rupert Murdoch. I'm sure he appreciates the free advice. The News Corp. CEO is so known for taking it, after all. First up, there's Kara Swisher's tabloid-headlined call for more "promiscuity," which I was about to get behind. Talk about a paper that needs sexing up! But then I discovered that the word, in Swisher's hands, has gone entirely limp. Her deflated meaning?
Media mogul Barry Diller's planned stock buyback of online travel site Expedia falls victim to the current credit crisis. (We had no idea there was a "credit crisis," but apparently "the demise of cheap money in the aftermath of the housing industry's collapse [has led to a] resulting washout of junk lending," which might explain why no one's willing to float us a twenty at closing time anymore.) [NYP]
