Newsweek offline + online is the future, says Barry Diller
Many of you might have forgotten IAC/InteractiveCorp’s Daily Beast and Newsweek agreed to merge operations last November to create a new entity called, well… Newsweek. And that would be understandable as it’s been pretty quiet till this week’s interview scoop with the former IMF chief Dominque Strauss-Kahn’s accuser.
IAC Chairman Barry Diller (pictured, right) told Wall Street analysts today that Newsweek has a promising future very different from the floundering Newsweek of recent years. He said under the leadership of Daily Beast founder Tina Brown the weekly magazine is starting to win back advertisers and subscribers.
“The losses are not really high. In a year, year-and-a-half or so, I think it’s probably a year-and-a- half, I think we’ll have no losses and be on the positive side. And I think for a pretty small investment we’re going to build a serious long-term asset in new publishing,” which he describes as the combination or offline and online.
Diller said the publication has some 10 million unique visitors on the Web and said the effort would result in “reasonable losses”. He said total investment will probably come to a total of $50 million from “inception to conclusion of losses”.
This isn’t too dissimilar to Rupert Murdoch’s estimation for The Daily, the iPad-based daily magazine News Corp launched in February with much fanfare, a $30 million pre-launch investment and a promise to spend around $500,000 a week running it. News Corp has not said much about The Daily since its launch and in recent weeks, well… they’ve had other distractions. Still New York Observer has a story here today saying the fledgling news service is suffering start-up growth pains.
Meanwhile, IAC shares were up by as much as 16 percent on Wednesday as the home of Match.com and Ask.com beat Wall Street forecasts and investors welcomed its ever expanding share buyback. “It’s almost as if they quietly taking the company private,” said analyst Colin Gillis of BGC Partners.
(Photo: Reuters)
Whoops, Barry Diller misspoke – again
Asking Barry Diller about Ask.com is not so easy.
The media mogul caused a stir on Wednesday when he said that Ask.com, the search engine owned by his Web holding company IAC/InterActive Corp, has “no value inside IAC.”
The comments, which were made onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, generated a wave of blogs and tweets concluding that Diller had given up hope for the No. 4 search engine in the US, which had a modest 3.8 percent market share in August according to comScore.
Now Diller says he was misunderstood.
“I did not say that Ask has no value inside of IAC, period,” Diller clarified in a subsequent statement.
“In response to a specific question, I said that many of our assets are not ‘valued’ in the stock, and Ask is one of them…I was asked specifically if Ask would be better off with us or another company or standing alone. In the context of that question, I said that since it wasn’t valued in IAC - like so many of our businesses, because we have so many - that it would only be ‘valued’ stand alone.”
Lest anyone interpret the clarification to mean that Diller believes Ask would have more value as a standalone company and could thus be on its way to the auction block, another recent series of Diller statements and clarifications about Ask are worth keeping in mind.
Soccer clubs and mortgages: How a media mogul spends $10 million
Unlike many of us, media executives know what it’s like to play around with large wads of cash. So it seemed natural to ask them about what kind of investment opportunities they’re seeing when they gathered in New York this week for the Reuters Global Media Summit.
We gave each media honcho $10 million in hypothetical cash and told them to put the money to work without buying stock in their own companies.
Some executives plowed the money into broad sectors and regions, like emerging markets, while others zeroed in on specific stocks, like Electronic Arts’ CEO John Riccitiello’s penchant for software maker Adobe.
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said he already owns shares of privately-held Facebook, the Internet social network on which many of Zynga’s video games are designed to be played on, and that he’d buy more on the secondary markets (OK, so he creatively sidestepped the rule against investing in his own company).
And some media moguls seemed to have investment strategies driven by goals other than maximizing returns:
“I would put it in US-based international equities. I mean, if you said….If you forced me to invest a dollar.”
(Reuters: You can put it in your pillow if you want.) That’s what I’ve been doing. Unfortunately, the pillow was unsleepable
from Summit Notebook:
A Barry Diller sampler from the Reuters Global Media Summit
Interviewing IAC chief and media mogul Barry Diller nearly always means that you'll get more quotable quotes than you can stuff into one article. He didn't disappoint at this year's Reuters Global Media Summit on Wednesday. Here are thoughts from Diller on a range of subjects from mergers and acquisitions and Comcast to AOL, MGM and marriage.
Q: What are you going to do with the cash on the balance sheet? What's the focus? Are you still being cautious?
A: "I'd say we still are. It's definitely a looming problem. The only thing worse than spending cash stupidly is essentially not to put it down at all, not to do anything."
Q: What would be the right opportunity to buy something?
A: "There's no road map here. Anything of size, let's call it $1 billion plus, is known. ... Of the potential availables, nothing seems smart right now."
Q: What about AOL?
A: "Steve Case came to me ... and offered us AOL. In 1992 or 1993, Paul Allen was selling his stake, which was about 25 percent of the company. We were very fresh into buying QVC and overly cautious and missed the opportunity; opportunity since then I'm kind of glad I missed."
from Summit Notebook:
Daily Beast staff ‘happy as clams,’ says Barry Diller
The journalists and staff who work at The Daily Beast don't look at life like you other sad-sack scribes out there who are watching your job market wash out to sea with the ebb tide. In fact, they are happy in a particularly mollusk-like way.
"They're as happy as clams," said Barry Diller, chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which is financing the online news outlet with its editor, Tina Brown. "They wake up every morning filled with possibility."
That's because they are not working at sinking-ship news outlets like most of the rest of their colleagues in mainstream U.S. journalism.
Hear Diller on this, speaking at the Reuters Global Media Summit:
"Look at what's going on in publishing. The talk about the destruction that's taking place there. It's the perfect time to start something that's an original product. The Daily Beast is a daily newspaper or magazine. It's primarily original and is there every day. It's got real staff, making real money, paying a lot of them -- journalists -- to make things for us, make stories... They're covering books, art, the daily features and national and international stories. And it's incredibly ambitious. It's gotten a real audience. It is absolutely an original product."
Who wouldn't like that? Even better, Diller seems OK with the whole "it doesn't make money" aspect of the Beast. He declined to say what the targets are, like, when he expects it to make a profit, when he expects it to make some revenue and how it will do those things. "We're going to know at a rational point," he said.
The best part is, I don't even end this blog with: "And then I woke up." Now the question is whether we can find some more sugar-moguls to sweeten our journalistic career paths.
Live blog from the Reuters Global Media Summit
Reuters reporters will be sending live updates from interviews with guests including Disney’s Anne Sweeney, IAC’s Barry Diller, WPP’s Martin Sorrell, Sirius XM’s Mel Karmazin and more.
Media, tech moguls meet in New York (You are NOT invited)
Media and technology executives are meeting Wednesday and Thursday in New York City at a conference hosted by private equity firm Quadrangle. Note the word private.
When they meet at the Plaza, they will talk about a ton of different things that their customers, their investors and other readers want to know. I have to apologize for them because they’re not letting in any riff-raff. And that includes reporters who get paid to spend all day figuring out how these people decide what kind of entertainment you want, what kind of technology you pay them for and what deals they pursue with the money that you give them when you buy their stock. This event always excludes press, but that’s no reason not to highlight what you probably are missing because of this. After all, who wants to wait for the 8-K filing?
Some press will be allowed, but it will be an assortment of celebrity journalists who will moderate panels and, according to Peter Kafka, author of “MediaMemo” at News Corp’s AllThingsD blog, will not write about the event (I’m talking about Maria Bartiromo and David Faber of CNBC, The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, etc).
Peter wrote two posts about this, here and here. He also issued me a challenge to sneak into the conference, but horror of horrors, I’m on a deadline that I can’t shirk any longer. So consider this an invitation from me to you to go to the Plaza and catch these guys on the way in and out of the building. It’s a fun way to spend the day, and maybe you’ll learn something interesting.
Here is the agenda, courtesy of Peter Kafka. Below that is a list of speakers. Outrage breeds corrections: I have to amend the record: The list I had posted here of topics is last year’s agenda. My mistake. The list of speakers appearing THIS year still appears below.
2009 SPEAKERS EMILIO AZCÁRRAGA President, Board of Directors and CEO, Grupo Televisa DENNIS CROWLEY Co-Founder, foursquare BARRY DILLER Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc. BRIAN DUNN CEO, Best Buy CHARLES FORMAN Founder, OMGPOP REED HASTINGS Founder, Chairman and CEO, Netflix REID HOFFMAN Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation CHAD HURLEY CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube JEFF IMMELT Chairman and CEO, GE PAUL JACOBS Chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated OLLI-PEKKA KALLASVUO President and CEO, Nokia JASON KILAR CEO, Hulu LESLIE MOONVES President and CEO, CBS Corporation ANNE MULCAHY Chairman, Xerox Corporation JAMES MURDOCH Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe & Asia, News Corporation BRIAN PHILLIPS CEO and Co-Founder, Thread DAN PORTER CEO, OMGPOP BRIAN ROBERTS Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation PAUL SAGAN President and CEO, Akamai ERIC SCHMIDT Chairman and CEO, Google IVAN SEIDENBERG Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications BIZ STONE Co-Founder, Twitter HOWARD STRINGER Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation BEN VERWAAYEN CEO, Alcatel-Lucent DAVID ZASLAV President and CEO, Discovery Communications
MODERATORS MARC ANDREESSEN General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz KEN AULETTA Author and Writer, “Annals of Communications”, The New Yorker MARIA BARTIROMO Anchor, Closing Bell; Host & Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal Report, CNBC JAMES CITRIN Co-Leader, Board & CEO Practice, North America, Spencer Stuart DAVID FABER Anchor, Reporter, CNBC MICHAEL HUBER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group BECKY QUICK Co-Anchor, Squawk Box, CNBC GEOFFREY SANDS Director & Leader, Global Media, Entertainment & Information Practice, McKinsey & Co. JOSHUA L. STEINER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS Anchor, This Week; Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News
Haha. I absolutely loved the tone and tenor of this write-up. Says a lot! (And oh, why did Reuters have to allow blogs and columns after I left–conspiracy!)Also loved the Michael Moore comment. Last journo left standing?;-)
Barry Diller’s take on Microsoft, Yahoo and more
Few in the media business know dealmaking better than Barry Diller.
So it comes as little surprise that the head of IAC/Interactive was asked about both the Microsoft-Yahoo deal and the AOL separation during an earnings conference call today. He sounded upbeat on both situations.
Here are some excepts:
Microsoft-Yahoo:
One significant thing that happened is we’re not going have to talk about whether or not it’s going to happen anymore [Ed -Amen to that!]. Look, Microsoft will be able to report a greater share in terms of search and get — at least in some minds of the talkers — into being up there in competing terms with Google. And Yahoo doesn’t have to spend anymore money on search. As far as being able to execute, that is very complicated.
For us, I think that the significance is we want, need, must have at least two competitive forces, big competitive forces… I want to have two players out there wanting to get our incremental business, which is, of course, of real value to the companies.
So, I think it’s good for all parties.
AOL:
On AOL, I have a lot of confidence in Tim Armstrong. I think he’s coming there as a great whoosh of energy and real change, I think, for the first time, in my god, in I don’t know how long.
I have high expectations for what he’s going to be able to do.
As far as strategies with the spinoff company or the company’s configurations in the future, we’re talking with them about ideas about commercial relationships and both in the local area and search area. We’ll see what happens.
There is no possibility of really speculating beyond the fact that it’s obvious there are interesting relationships between what AOL does and what aspects of IAC does.
We’ll have to wait and see.
Now that Yahoo will let Bing power its search, Microsoft still needs the same alliance with Ask.com in order to have a chance of competing against Google Search.
Sun Valley: Ken Auletta paints it, black
Allen & Co’s Sun Valley media and technology conference forbids journalists from attending the morning sessions that executives and other media power players attend before they go out to play and talk about deals in the afternoon. That means the last, best hope they have is to get the low-down from a journalist who was invited.
There’s no pride in it, but at least you hear what happened from a reliable source.
In this case, that’s Ken Auletta, New Yorker media writer and author of several books about the media business. He moderated a panel about surviving in the digital age.
The answer? No answer, Auletta said.
Among the big minds pondering the issue were IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller, Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger (who on Tuesday told reporters that he’s not worried about how to get people to pay for content) and Liberty Media Chairman John Malone.
Questions asked at the session, Auletta said: How do you “monetize” on the Web? Can you? Is your “brand” an advantage?
Twitter, which is one of the media-anointed darlings of this year’s session, was also up for discussion, Auletta said. According to him, Diller said he was pessimistic about Twitter’s chances of making money. Auletta quoted Diller as saying it’s about “how to advertise in a way that doesn’t feel like an interruption.”
Sun Valley: A Who’s Who in pictures
Nearly every powerful media and technology executive you can think of will be camping out in the idyllic and affluent ski resort town of Sun Valley this week. Here are just a few…
Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, Michael Larson of Cascade Investments and Ron Meyer, president and COO Universal Studios arrive at the Sun Valley Inn.
Fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg and her husband Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of IAC/InterActivecorp, arrive at the Sun Valley Inn with Eric Eisner.
Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom, arrives at the Sun Valley Inn with his wife Debbie
