IAC/InterActiveCorp

NEW YORK--Barry Diller doesn't want to predict the future.

"I'm not a great predictor of these things," the IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO said onstage at his Wednesday keynote for the Advertising 2.0 conference, when interviewer and BusinessWeek reporter Jon Fine asked him when he thought the depressing economic news would finally end. (His personal belief is that it won't get much worse.) "Not that, by the way, anybody's predictions are worth very much to anybody." And he was particularly wary of commenting on the macro economy. "Oh, you certainly don't … Read more

Ask.com said on Tuesday that its chief executive, Jim Safka, is leaving the company after 18 months in the job.

"Jim has decided to move on from Ask.com, following the recent passing of his brother which has led him to re-evaluate his personal and professional priorities. We wish him the very best and thank him for his efforts at Ask.com," Ask spokeswoman Mary Osako said in a statement. "Ask will be led by Scott Garell, who has been promoted to President of Ask Networks, who has already been principally involved every day with the … Read more

Update at 8:12 a.m. PST: Analyst comments and stock price added.

InterActiveCorp turned a profit in the fourth quarter but took a 7 percent revenue hit, amid a sharp downturn in its advertising and media business, the company said Tuesday.

Barry Diller's media conglomerate reported revenue of $351 million in the quarter, down from $378.9 million in the same quarter a year earlier. That performance missed Wall Street expectations of $368 million, analyst Imran Khan of J.P. Morgan said in a note.

The company, however, posted a profit of $227.4 million, or $1.57 … Read more

Citysearch, the online business directory owned by Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, has gotten a full makeover. It's available now at beta.citysearch.com--there's a more streamlined and Ajax-y interface, but a few important features have been tweaked as well. According to company representatives, this is about a year and a half in the making.

First of all, instead of focusing on a select number of metro areas, Citysearch has expanded to a whopping 75,000 towns and neighborhoods, meaning that you can narrow down your focus to New York's East Village or Los Angeles' Culver … 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

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

Just how much does Ask.com own the word "Ask?" Enough to have a problem with a question-and-answer site called "Askpedia," apparently. Representatives from the start-up Askpedia.com told CNET News.com that the search engine's parent company, InterActiveCorp, sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this month, citing intellectual property violations in the name "Askpedia."

"(This) is likely to cause consumer confusion, particularly inasmuch as Askpedia purports to provide online informational services that are substantially similar to those provided by Ask," the letter dated March 13 reads. "In using and incorporating … Read more

It's no secret that InterActiveCorp is facing a corporate hurricane. But CEO Barry Diller's plan to split the company in five parts might not calm the waters.

In the fall, the sprawling new media conglomerate announced a plan to spin off many of its brands into a total of five publicly traded companies, focusing its core business on ad-supported media, in order to revive investor confidence. It needs that revival: on Wednesday morning, the company posted its 2007 fourth-quarter earnings, reporting a net loss of $369.9 million as revenues rose eight percent to $1.86 billion.

IAC … Read more

This post was updated at 9:18 a.m. PST.

InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller was remarkably candid in his acknowledgment Monday that his media conglomerate will be splitting up into five publicly traded companies because it's simply spread itself too thin.

"We've been a complex enterprise almost from the very beginning 12 years ago, with hundreds of transactions over those years," Diller said in the company's announcement. "And while we've created a lot of value; I've always believed (that) our complexity and many mouthfuls of sentences to explain who we are and … Read more