Keynote Speaker
Wednesday, February 7th
Barry Diller, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Chairman of Expedia, Inc.
Acquisition of Ask Jeeves
- Fear of disintermediation by search
- Defensive strategy to protect against this disintermediation
- “Value added information will live”
- “Is there an opportunity?”
- “Competing with less resources is a good thing”
- “Could we move to the left”
- How much market share can ask really build…Barry, “I think we can build double digits share”
- “Media models have multiple players”
“Ask is the glue between all of our business’s”
- Ties together multiple pieces of IAC
- “One fat datastream tamed for consumers”
Social Networks
- Barry says he is not in the scene
- Talks about Match.com
- “How can you do more social networking than flirt”
- Pure social networks are an upgrade from the mall
- “They tend to leave us and as life goes, they tend to come back” in reference to Match.com (got quite a laugh)
UGC
- “we come up with these terms that don’t mean very much”
“the professional talent pool is finite”
- People doing things that lots of people want to see
- “As time goes on, professionally made products…..that is going to be where this is going to develop into”
- “news gathering organizations are not going away, they simply need to find a form factor”
- “the issue is form factor so the people get it….in that delivery there is going to have to be reinvention”
Recent acquisition of College Humor/Content Play
- We really want to invent product. Start with an idea and then….
- 100 million dollars of capital to invest in products
- We much prefer to start than buy
- “I never left programming”
- Everything will be in a digital form, any screen,
- Programming is Services or Stories distributed through net neutral pipe
- Importance of the fact that distribution is not scarce
- “Buying things for more than they are worth generally does not work out” (tongue in cheek)
- “This is a much more practical time than in the early 2000’s”
- Diller on Valuation- “How much can I lost?” is the most important question
- “It is the height of craziness to read forward on anything”
Fragmentation
- Diller “I don’t think it is happening”
- “Editorship is what everything is about”
- “The Internet is this miracle”
Commoditization in E-commerce
- I don’t think there is a lot of innovation out there in terms of retailing
- There is very little “merchant” on the Internet
- You haven’t yet seen great merchant experience on the internet
- Optimistic about invention
- New ideas will come, it is not all about brick and mortar building a website
- “Our conglomerate is interrelated”
- “in a world that is constantly changing the best practices are those which you discover”
- Diller talks about SEO and how it tripled CitySearch traffic
- Final Convergence within 3 years
- No limit to how big IAC can get
- Tight control distribution models will not exist in 10 years
- “Jack Welch is the best manager ever invented”
Tags: Barry Diller, Media Summit NYC, 2007, SEO, IAC, Citysearch, ecommerce, convergence, programming, internet, adam broitman, college humor, content, valuation, disintermediation, datastream, match.com, networking, social networking, UGC, professional content, amatuer