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InterActiveCorp, the sprawling conglomerate of brands helmed by media titan Barry Diller, is formally splitting into five separate companies Thursday. And it hopes to do so quietly.

The story is familiar by now: Diller, determined to solidify himself as capable of mastering both old and new media, has long insisted that a lack of confidence on Wall Street has suppressed IAC's stock price. So last November, Diller made the big announcement that IAC would be slimming down to a core of ad- and subscription-supported Internet media brands such as Ask.com, Match.com, Bloglines, Citysearch, Vimeo, and Evite.

The … Read more

A class action lawsuit filed earlier this week targets Facebook and eight of the participants in Beacon, its ill-fated advertising product that shared information about third-party site activity with the social network. The set of 20 plaintiffs, mostly residents of Texas, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday. Named as defendants are Facebook, as well as current or former Beacon participants Blockbuster, Fandango (owned by Comcast), Overstock.com, STA Travel, Zappos, Hotwire (owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp), and GameFly.

A Facebook representative told CNET News on Thursday that the company had … Read more

The bad news for the lending crisis has rippled further on the Web.

IAC/InterActiveCorp, a conglomerate of Web sites including Ask.com, LendingTree.com, and Ticketmaster, said late Tuesday that it plans to write down $170 million in charges related to its mortgage and real estate businesses because of the housing fallout, according to a report from the Associated Press. It will report the charges in the first six months of the year ended June 30.

In a regulatory filing, IAC said that it will take a charge of $100 million related to its mortgage business, which includes LendingTree. … Read more

Looks like some big-media deal-making went into this one.

Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has announced the launch of an iPhone application (download), just like everybody else.

Users can browse their Photobucket albums, as well as upload images from the iPhone to the service with a single click. The application costs $4.99.

But Photobucket had a more interesting announcement on Thursday, namely a multiyear partnership with Ask.com, the search engine owned by new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp.

Through the deal, Photobucket will use exclusively Ask.com search for its … Read more

InterActiveCorp mogul Barry Diller may be getting rid of brands like Ticketmaster, LendingTree, and HSN, but he still wants to sell ads on them.

The sprawling media company announced Monday that it will launch an ad network to handle inventory across all its brands, such as Evite and Citysearch, as well as the ones that Diller and his executive team are opting to spin off into separate publicly traded companies.

"Maybe we're not brothers and sisters, but we're cousins," IAC Advertising Solutions president Rich Stalzer told AdAge about the companies it will spin off. The AdAge … Read more

NEW YORK--Thus far, my experience with the Internet Week New York party scene has one of dichotomies. On Wednesday I went from a lively dance floor to a room full of awkward male Kevin Rose groupies. Then, on Thursday, the social agenda involved one event that was impeccably classy and one that was so consciously puerile that it could only have come from CollegeHumor.

The earlier gathering was the latest installment of Founders Club, a series of quarterly events that pull together a bunch of local A-list entrepreneurs with the VCs who fund them and the big-media folks who want … Read more

Speaking at the D6 conference Barry Diller said Google is irrelevant to his Ask.com business and explained his quest to spin off five public companies from his collection of companies and 63 brands.

As chairman and chief executive officer of IAC, as well as chairman of Expedia, Diller oversees brands including Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Lending Tree, Ask.com, Match.com, CitySearch, and Evite.

On August 1, IAC will become five separate companies--HSN, Lending Tree, Ticketmaster, Interval, and a "new" IAC, which will be a series of businesses naturally related to each other, Diller said.

A Los Angeles-based law firm with a history of targeting online media companies for click fraud filed suit Tuesday against Citysearch, the directory site owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, as well as Ticketmaster, the ticketing site that IAC is attempting to spin out into a separate publicly traded company.

"Citysearch.com is defrauding its advertising customers of millions of dollars by not only turning a blind eye to click fraud, but in fact encouraging it as well," a statement from the firm Kabateck Brown Kellner read. The class action suit encompasses anyone in the U.S. who paid for … Read more

Sprawling new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp on Tuesday announced that it has acquired StarNet Interactive, an Israel-based company that operates GirlSense, a social site for teen girls. More specifically, GirlSense describes itself as "online dress-up games for girls with fashion sense."

Terms of the deal, which is part of IAC's Consumer Applications and Portals division, were not disclosed.

Other teen-oriented properties in IAC's arsenal, with which GirlSense will likely be intertwined, include virtual world Zwinky and profile customization site Webfetti. GirlSense counts its registered users at 13 million.

"Part of our growth strategy includes acquisition of products … Read more