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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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.
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.
