Diller said on Monday that there is an opportunity in the movement of news from newspapers to the Internet:
[from IAC's Diller sees opportunity in news online]"I actually think that there's going to be real opportunity in the conversion of print journalism to online, real opportunity, which I think very few people have attacked head on," Diller told the Reuters Media Summit in New York.
"We're doing it in our way from an original product creation at this point. I can't really talk about what we're doing because we're, I think, fairly close to announcing it," he said.
Diller said IAC's mix of dozens of different Internet properties working together is beginning to prove itself and the advantages should become clearer in a few years.
[...]
IAC's search and media business includes Ask.com and Citysearch, which compete with industry leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc..
"We've said we are an integrated conglomerate, which is different from conglomerates as we know them, which can go from ... light bulbs to the Today show," he said, referring to General Electric Co. and its NBC Universal media unit. "We started to say it and more than saying it, we started to act like it."
My experience with Diller's IAC is quite limited, based on a short stint working with Zero Degrees, a social networking application acquired by IAC, and now shuttered. Whiel I was working with the founders of Zero Degrees, there was a lot of optimistic speechifying about synergies between the various "properties" in IAC, and the billion dollar complex Diller was planning to build in Hollywood, next to the original Tower records store.
But I have yet to see those synergies, although I don't dispute his basic point: there is a huge opportunity in online news. It will have to take on a completely different character than simply trying to take the traditional newspaper model and putting it online, however. Which perhaps is the message in Diller's saying that he is not interested in acquiring a newspaper as part of the plan.
He is taking on Google and Yahoo. Looks like a daunting task. Might be a good time to talk to Jason Calacanis, Ross Levinsohn, and any other loose cannons out there. Take a look at Techmeme, and NowPublic. There are new approaches just waiting to explode in news like YouTube and MySpace have in the social networking side.
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Posted by: matthew | November 29, 2006 at 10:08 PM
He's thinking Tailrank dude... Tailrank!
Posted by: Kevin Burton | November 30, 2006 at 12:38 AM