Tina Brown and Barry Diller's blogger collaboration, The Daily Beast, launched this weekend. You guys remember Tina Brown right? She looks just like Jane Lynch and was the editor who helmed all the redesigns for the snazzier new Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. And Barry Diller is like the gay Rupert Murdoch who controls IAC (not AIG).
So far, the site works more as a news aggregator than an original content source, but some big names have already signed for the Huffpost-esque site. That explains why Diller, who financed the site, was so keen on snuggling up with Arianna and spending millions for their joint comedy site 23/6. Avoiding bad blood isn't cheap, esp. if you want a such a gracious soundbite from Queen Huffington:
In his first move since IAC was split into five companies earlier this month, Scrooge McDuck money scion Barry Diller has announced plans to launch a virtual tween world, called Zwinky Cuties. "In the real world girls always love to play with dolls and dress them up and have play sets. We're trying to bring that experience in the online world," says somebody at IAC behind this project.
For a small fee, anyone can sign up and create a Cutie "avatar" (side-note: its 2008, stop trying to explain avatars what are) to "socialize, shop, and play casual games." Casual games, indeed.
Sounds a little creepy? Indeed, but a virtual world like Zwinky Cuties is bound to attract more watchdog groups like Perverted Justice than a NAMBLA convention at a playground. But Diller is already having a rough year of it, what with his tug-of-war with John Malone at Liberty Media. Perhaps associating with a walking To Catch a Predator is not the best way to rehabilitate your image.
After spending a decade convincing investors that throwing together Expedia, Match.com, Ticketmaster and eVite would make for a profitable Internet mega-company, Barry Diller must now do the opposite: Convince investors that separating all those brands into five different entities will make for five profitable Internet mini-companies. Yesterday, after a months-long battle with Liberty Media's John Malone to split up the company, Diller's IAC completed the chopping up of its West Side Highway headquarters — not literally; that's one glacier that won't melt — and siphoned off its properties into subgroups. And from anecdotal first whiff evidence, everyone approves: Home Shopping Network's stock closed up 21.3 percent; Interval Leisure Group rose 12.5 percent; Ticketmaster jumped 6.7 percent; IAC saw a 8.3 percent increase. Now there's just the question of what Diller will do with the $1.3 billion in cash he has on hand post-break up. Perhaps buy one tub of Bald Head Balm — and spend the rest creating another Internet mega company?
FiLife, the new financial website that launched this week with backing from both News Corp. Wall Street Journal and Barry Diller's IAC, whose aim is to "help consumers who want to improve their financial situation figure out how they stack up against their peers when it comes to income, household debt and savings," is basically a glorified way to see if you're earning more zeros than your neighbor.
Barry Diller's IAC just bought the website GirlSense.com, where users create virtual fashions and designer stores, and whose audience of 13 million 9- to 14-year-olds is quite appealing to advertisers and Internet-savvy pedophiles. [Reuters]
Here's how Barry Diller is going to break up IAC. Don't worry, Ticketmaster will still be charging you "convenience fees." [Mediapost]
Just one week after showing how committed he was to exploiting the black community, IAC chief Barry Diller has been slapped with a race discrimination lawsuit.
Diller, who just celebrated a courtroom victory over Liberty Media's John Malone, is being targeted by a former Home Shopping Network employee, Armanda Vernon, who says "she was turned down for numerous internal jobs despite being well-qualified" and that "her treatment fit a pattern of anti-black treatment at HSN." Meanwhile, a spokesperson for IAC told Page Six "Vernon filed a charge of race discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May, and they found insufficient evidence to support her allegations."
Can Diller's company really be guilty of racist employment practices when it just launched Rushmore Drive, the black search engine that makes it easier for African-Americans to find soul food Thanksgiving recipes? CONTINUED »
Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of IAC, which owns Ask.com, Match.com, Evite, and College Humor, among many others, has just launched Rushmore Drive, a new online community geared toward blacks and centered around an “ethnic,” Ask.com-powered search engine that delivers both mainstream results and results targeted toward African Americans. “Every person is looking for a more relevant search result,” Johnny Taylor, head of IAC’s Black Web Enterprises Inc. unit and chief executive of RushmoreDrive.com, told the Charlotte Observer. “It recognizes who you are, so you can find what you’re looking for every time.”
Is that true? Just to test out that theory, and being of the core demographic, I searched some general terms on both Rushmore Drive and Ask.com to see how the first-page results differed.
Tina Brown and Barry Diller will finally be sharing a bed. The Princess Di biographer and the vindicated IAC chief are teaming on a news aggregator website, where there will be "no ideological stance" on the glorified RSS feed.
Former WSJ deputy managing editor Edward Felsenthal will lead things off (given that other high-profile types, including business scribes at the Times, turned down offers).
But Tina isn't saying much about what the site will actually do, let alone when it'll launch. In the meantime, there will always be The Huffington Post, Brijit, Newser, and a slew of others already doing whatever it is Diller thinks will rescue his company.
After an exhaustive and mostly trivial court battle, IAC chief Barry Diller has won the right to split up his company into five separate units as he sees fit. Liberty Media's John Malone, who tried to wrest power from Diller, won the right to issue a carefully worded press release. [Fortune]
The item we thought we were running was about about how Barry Diller and John Malone are having settlement talks while suing each other in Delaware.
And then we found ourselves unable to ignore this expanding General Electric ad on Bloomberg.com, which displays a live interview with GE chief Jeff Immelt. After watching a minute or two of it, you'll be directed to this site, where you can continue watching what's essentially a shareholder conference call disguised as a "conversation about GE's performance and the outlook for 2008." The ad unit comes from rich media company Eye Wonder and, for us at least, is the first live streaming video we've seen in an ad. It's quite captivating, and almost makes us forget about Immelt's denials that he wants to sell off NBC.
The ad also lets you submit questions to Immelt. We asked, "Who makes your tie?" because all the other crap they were talking about was filled with too much financial jargon.
Yesterday's trial between IAC chief Barry Diller and Liberty Media's John Malone was never even supposed to happen. Weren't these two supposed to everything out – choosing whether to split IAC into five units, and how that would affect Malone's voting capacity – on their own without ever seeing the inside of a courtroom? No matter, though, because the testimony is providing great fodder for onlookers like us, like when Malone went after Diller's leadership methods: "He frequently refers to it as his business. [... He is] extremely well compensated [... and made a] fine art [of using the corporate jet]." Meanwhile, IAC shares continue to slide; they're down 20 percent from January, which will make the theoretical pie pieces of IAC that much more attractive to potential buyers. Firesale on Ticketmaster!
"Please do your best to ignore it. I will try as well but probably fail." That's IAC chief Barry Diller in a memo to staffers about what to do about the coming onslaught of press interest as he battles Liberty Media's John Malone in court over the future of the company. Though, um, the media blitz is sorta kinda absolutely indeed already here. But today, as the trial begins in Delaware, is when the fun starts. That's when company documents and sniping testimony will be on the table for all to gawk at.
Continues Diller: "At the end of the day, it’s purely a business dispute. We are highly confident in our legal position and are looking forward to proving our case to the judge. But, whatever the outcome, you have much to be proud of. And no one, including those seeking to dramatize this dispute with generic and often wrongheaded characterizations of our Company, can or should take that away from you."
And he's right: Nobody can take that away from IAC staffers. Except Diller himself. Which he did to 40 Ask.com employees alst week when he fired them.
FILED: OBVIOUS DEPARTMENT "A closer examination of the financial performance of the operations controlled by IAC and Liberty would be a fair way to determine who is better at managing shareholder value, rather than asset flipping." MediaPost's Diane Mermigas is genius! [MP]
Ask.com isn't just laying off 8 percent of its work force — Barry Diller's struggling search engine is remaking itself into a women's website, with a focus on entertainment and health. Of course, the IAC-owned unit has been down this road before. When it continued losing market share to Google and its pals, it ditched its "Jeeves" branding for a more streamlined look. That gimmick didn't work, either.
Editorial Director
