Barry Diller’s IAC is reportedly looking to sell half of Vimeo. Last night PandoDaily’s Erin Griffith reported that “two sources familiar with the situation” say that IAC is pairing a spinoff of Vimeo with a $50 million round of funding
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Billion dollar valuations for Twitter and Groupon “mathematically insane,” according to IAC founder and chairman Barry Diller.
Diller addressed a packed house at the SXSW conference in Austin, and covered a range of topics from Apple’s iPad 2 and the issue of network neutrality, to Rupert Murdock’s iPad only magazine, The Daily, and Hulu.com. But what caught our ear was his more pessimistic view of some of the crazy prices people are paying for startups these days.
Twitter, which gained early publicity at the SXSW conference in 2007, received a valuation of between $4.2 billion and $4.5 billion after a fund run by Silicon Valley investor Chris Sacca, with backing from JPMorgan Chase, bought about $400 million worth of shares in February.
And group buying site Groupon, which at one point turned down a $6 billion buyout offer from Google, is pushing toward an IPO that could be worth $15 billion, according to the New York Times.
It’s mostly hot air according to Diller, who is no stranger to bubbles. He led the media conglomerate that would come to be called InterActive Corp. through the dot-com bubble late 90s. However, this time around, “all the money that’s going to be lost will be by people who can afford to lose it,” he said.
Newsweek and The Daily Beast are now The Newsweek/Daily Beast Co. LLC, as the merger between the two entities, originally announced Nov. 12, is now official.
The Daily Beast founding partner and editor-in-chief Tina Brown will serve as editor-in-chief of the combined properties, and Daily Beast president Stephen Colvin will be its CEO. Newsweek owner Sidney Harman will be executive chairman of its board, and IAC chairman Barry Diller will be a director.
Like many CEOs before him who gave up their posts, IAC chairman, senior executive, and former CEO Barry Diller retired to the farm — the content farm.
AdAge.com reports that IAC’s Pronto launched The Writers Network, which is seeking writers for short, how-to articles, similar to content farms Demand Media, Seed, and Yahoo! Contributor Network.
According to AdAge.com, most of the posted articles available for assigning seem to be targeted to another Web site also managed by Pronto, Home and Garden Ideas. Examples included “Formal Dinner Party Napkin Folding Ideas” and “How to Host a NASCAR Party,” which paid $15 and $20, respectively, in line with The Writers Network’s fees of $10-$25 per story.
IAC chairman and senior executive Barry Diller, who relinquished the CEO title Thursday to former Match.com CEO Greg Blatt, shared the Barry Diller version of “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” with Fortune.
Speaking about the time off he takes every summer for deep thinking, and the transition to Blatt, Diller told Fortune:
I call it my summer project. My executives always brace themselves. I told them the company wasn’t being managed correctly. I never thought I was a very good manager. I mean, I am decent, but I want to go back to what I am good at, which is looking for opportunities to grow the business. Greg is a better manager than I am.
One of my friends joked that this was retirement with more control, but I don’t think that’s right. It will be different. I’m also still chairman of Expedia. But four to five years from now, who knows?
Changes aplenty were announced by IAC Thursday morning, as Barry Diller (left) removed himself from the CEO spot, remaining with the company as chairman and senior executive; a match was found in Match.com CEO Greg Blatt (right) to succeed Diller; and Liberty Media swapped its equity stake in IAC for all of the capital stock of a wholly owned IAC subsidiary that includes properties such as Evite and Gifts.com.
Blatt has been CEO of Match.com since early 2009, after spending more than five years in various senior-management posts with IAC — executive vice president, general counsel, and a member of the office of the chairman. Prior to IAC, Blatt was executive VP, business affairs and general counsel at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and he also served as an associate at New York-based law firms Grubman Indursky & Schindler and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
Liberty had been tied to IAC and its previous incarnations since Diller joined Silver King Communications in 1993. In the transaction announced Thursday, Liberty traded some 12.8 million shares of IAC stock — approximately 8.5 million class-B shares and 4.3 million shares of common stock, representing some 60 percent of total votes — for all capital stock in the previously mentioned subsidiary.
Diller now owns shares representing about 34 percent of the total vote classes of IAC stock, and he was granted the right to exchange up to 1.5 million additional shares of common stock he may acquire within the next nine months for an equal number of class-B shares, potentially boosting his voting control to 41 percent.
Once thought to be on life support, the agreement to merge Newsweek and The Daily Beast roared to recovery and became a reality Friday morning, as the magazine and Web site announced that they will merge their operations into a joint venture owned equally by Sidney Harman, who recently gained control of Newsweek, and Barry Diller-helmed IAC.
Harman will be executive chairman of The Newsweek Daily Beast Co., and Diller will be one director, with one apiece to be named from each side. The Daily Beast founding partner and editor-in-chief Tina Brown will be editor-in-chief of both entities, and the CEO of the joint venture will be The Daily Beast president Stephen Colvin.
Brown described the revival of the merger in a post on The Daily Beast:
Some weddings take longer to plan than others. The union of The Daily Beast and Newsweek magazine finally took place with a coffee-mug toast between all parties Tuesday evening, in a conference room atop Beast headquarters, the IAC building on Manhattan’s West 18th Street. The final details were only hammered out last night.
What does this exciting new media marriage mean? It means that The Daily Beast’s animal high spirits will now be teamed with a legendary, weekly print magazine in a joint venture, named The Newsweek Daily Beast Co., owned equally by Barry Diller’s IAC and Sidney Harman, owner (and savior) of Newsweek. As for me, I shall now be in the editor-in-chief’s chair at both The Daily Beast and Newsweek, bringing with us as CEO my Daily Beast business partner, Stephen Colvin, who launched The Week Magazine in the United States, as well as Maxim, as president of Dennis Publishing. His dynamism has created 66 new ad campaigns for us since I persuaded him to join The Daily Beast a year ago.
Algorithmic search technology is out at Ask.com and question-and-answer is in, as Bloomberg reports that parent company IAC will slash 130 engineering jobs and pull out of the search-engine business to focus on the online Q&A part of the business.
The search unit will be based in Oakland, Calif., with the affected jobs in Edison, N.J., and Hangzhou, China, and IAC will invite 20 of the New Jersey engineers to move out West, Bloomberg reported.
Ask.com president Doug Leeds told Bloomberg:
(Google has) become this huge juggernaut of a company that we really thought we could compete against by innovating. We did a great job of holding our market share, but it wasn’t enough to grow the way IAC had hoped we would grow when it bought us.
“We’ve realized in the last few years you can’t compete head on with Google,” IAC chairman and CEO Barry Diller added.
IAC CEO Barry Diller said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call that The Daily Beast was considering the launch of a companion print product, paidContent reported.
Diller on the call, via paidContent:
One way or another, I suspect we’ll either find something or we’ll create (it) somehow. The Daily Beast is 24/7. The print product (would) clearly not (be), and that has some benefits.
We’re very pleased with the progress of The Beast. We don’t need to do anything. We’re on track in terms of reducing the loss. Breaking even is not on some distant shore. Not that I can exactly see Russia from Alaska, but it’s a bit more in view.
Valleywag’s Ryan Tate has the wrap on last night’s Founder’s Club Internet Week bash here in New York:
There were so many old-media bigwigs at the Internet Week event, it’s surprising there were any admission badges left for Web startups. Bonnie Fuller, Jeff Zucker, Steven Brill and Jimmy Fallon joined Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller. Myspace’s Jon Miller and AOL’s Tim Armstrong represented the new blood. There was enough space left over for a substantial contingent of New York Web entrepreneurs; the rope-line squeeze might have erupted into a media war had more of Silicon Valley turned up for Gotham’s promotional festivities.
Gawker’s Nick Denton, Mahalo’s (and formerly Weblogs, Inc.’s) Jason Calacanis and Business Insider’s Henry Blodget.
Our boss was there too, Tweeting away…
