Gawker
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preferences
Barry Diller Will Cater to Very Specific Sexual Tastes
After pawning off his highbrow cultural shopping newsletter on the New York Observer, what does Barry Diller buy? Sites for people with fetishes for the "Big and Beautiful," Black Baby Boomers and Italians. Diller, after all, knows from picky. (Pic)
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3
By Ryan TateComment by saintjim: That is one specific fetish. Not just black, but a black baby boomer. "I just can't get off until you... 1 Responses | Other threads
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jared kushner
Typo, Filler Ad, Mainstream Movie Herald New York Observer's Second Very Short List
How is shopping newsletter Very Short List doing on the second day under the New York Observer's ownership? Poorly enough to motivate mogul wannabe Jared Kushner to hire some dedicated staff, perhaps. More »
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By Ryan TateComment by ninety_nine: Maybe they thought DO was a new section in the 'revamped' Observer. Fun fact that you might have been able... 1 Responses | Other threads
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deals
'The Observer's Very Short List' Proudly Brought to You by the New York Observer
The first edition of email newsletter Very Short List is out for the first time under the control of New York Observer publisher Jared Kushner. What advertiser do you think he lined up? More »
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By Ryan TateComment by The Dominant Glee Club: High-brown? What is going with Gawker lately? 6 Responses | Other threads
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breaking
'Very Short List's Been Sold To Jared Kushner, We're All Fired.'
A source writes in: ink on the long-rumored deal selling IAC property Very Short List to Jared Kushner and The New York Observer's dry. VSLers have been fired, and the property's clumsily fallen into the Observer's hands, now. Update: confirmed.
More »
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By Foster KamerComment by Awesome X: Ethical question. You were just canned. The new you is on the phone, asking how to do the job you'd... 4 Responses | Other threads
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moguls
The Very Long Con of a Very Short List
Barry Diller's effort to pawn off Very Short List, his failed shopping newsletter for the rich, is turning into a classic New York media folly — a big drama over a puny digital property. More »
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By Ryan TateComment by CoachHogan: Which is it, guys? 40 percent or one fifth? 5 Responses | Other threads
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mogul toys
Barry Diller's Not-So-Exclusive 'Very Short List'
Very Short List has been a favorite bauble of Barry Diller since the IAC chief established it nearly three years ago, after failing to buy Daily Candy. He envisioned VSL as a smart, tidy newsletter. But it looks worrisomely distended. More »
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By Ryan TateComment by Nick Denton: From Kurt Andersen: Hi, Nick. In addition to being un true, the suggestion in the Gawker item that "the [VSL]... 1 Responses | Other threads
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layoffs
Ticketmaster lays off an estimated 1,000 employees
The layoffs are moving up the food chain, from the startups to the larger tech beasts. FuckedStartups writes that Ticketmaster is laying off 35 percent of its 3,000-plus staff, which squares with other reports I've heard. Ticketmaster is besieged with competition from concert promoter LiveNation, and was recently spun off by IAC. If I had to bet, I'd say these cuts have as much to do with removing the layers of cruft which accumulated under years of flitty mismanagement by IAC CEO Barry Diller as they do with the economy.
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By Owen ThomasComment by CheyenneCado: Well I can confirm they laid off half of the SF office excluding Ticketweb and the other little SF company... more » | Other threads
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blogging for dollars
Tina Brown to waste $18 million on Daily Beast blog
Strip away the disclaimers, the Manhattan-media insideriness, the me-me-me from Simon Dumenco's report in AdAge on the Daily Beast, the Tina Brown-led news-aggregation website backed by Barry Diller's IAC Internet conglomerate, and you get these staggering figures: More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by sggrf: add this site to the deadpool, will never work based on unfocused edit and horrible timing more » | Other threads
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Blamestorming
Barry Diller blames investors for IAC stock price
Buried in a Wall Street Journal interview with Barry Diller, CEO of the ever-shifting Internet conglomerate IAC, which owns Ask.com and some other websites, was a nugget of insight revealing what Diller thinks of the people who invest in his company. Asked about IAC's stock performance, he replied:The truth is the market made judgments, and the recent judgments have been poor. There were legitimate reasons for that. Now, there are operating facts about this company that are irrefutable: It has revenue, it has earnings, it has a lot of cash and no debt. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by macbeach: Haven't you heard? The Dems (mostly) are working on a new plan that doesn't actually require investors. All you have... more » | Other threads
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search
Is Ask.com feeling lucky?
Ask.com's latest revamp, unveiled by CEO Jim Safka to the New York Times, attempts to dive deeper into the Web, pulling "structured data," a fashionable buzzword, from sources like TV listings and health databases. Give Barry Diller's scrappy search engine, owned by his IAC conglomerate, this much: When at first it doesn't succeed, it tries, tries, tries again. But you can't blame the market, or users, for finding all this trying, well, trying. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by ILikeThemBig: I'd like to blame Barry for something. How about for spending nearly 2 billion on the fourth ranked search... more » | Other threads
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deathwatch
Barry Diller's finance site: "Completely pointless"
FiLife, a personal-finance site backed by IAC and the Wall Street Journal, is struggling, according to one ex-employee we eavesdropped on at the City Bakery, a coffeehouse in Manhattan's Flatiron neighborhood, as she interviewed for a new job. "The business model completely changed," she said. "It used to be personal finance for people in their 20s and 30s. Now it's just completely pointless." An embittered writer? Perhaps. FiLife hired a batch of journalists, only to switch gears shortly before launch and realize that the Web didn't need another content site. But their replacement — a set of automated tools to evaluate one's place in the financial pecking order — do seem pointless. The site only attracts 31,500 users a month. In this regard, FiLife is utterly typical — of both its backer and its genre. More » -
iac
Barry Diller shows the children his Zwinky Cuties
At an oh-so-pink party in Times Square yesterday — one stuffed with enough cupcakes to Google's Marissa Mayer proud — IAC launched a virtual world for girls aged 6 to 12, calling it Zwinky Cuties. Barry Diller presided and I captured the bizarre affair in video. More » -
caption contest
You know little boy, I have much I can teach you
At the Diane von Fürstenberg show at New York's Fashion Week, Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his 23andMe cofounder wife Anne Wojcicki were spotted front and center. Which is hilarious, since Brin is rarely seen in anything but a t-shirt and jeans — hopefully he wore more stylish footwear than Crocs. Here he's spotted in the usual ensemble with Barry Diller, CEO of IAC, who had the sense to wear actual fashion. Friday's winner was hmann with "No, it's $40 for one song. You have to buy your own drinks, and there's no touching." (Photo by Getty/Michael Tran)
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By Jackson WestComment by MosseyCade: Sergey's SHORTER than Barry Diller??!! more » | Other threads
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copyfight
Is Opentape a jab at the RIAA?
Following the shutdown of Muxtape, a site for posting online mixtapes, in a dispute with the music industry, someone has launched Opentape.fm, where you can download code to easily create your own Muxtape-like online mixtapes of MP3 files. And if the creators of Muxtape aren't directly responsible, they probably fed Opentape's developers everything they would need. The first clue is that the site is powered by the favored online publishing platform of millennial hipsters, Tumblr. Another clue is that the domain registration information points to 152 W. 57th Street in Manhattan, which just happens to be IAC CEO Barry Diller's address (Justin Ouellette, Muxtape's founder, worked at IAC site Vimeo). Then there are two small hints in the code: More »
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By Jackson WestComment by FaceMelter: This package communicates with the internet via cURL and sends information that identifies the host website. How funny would... 1 Responses | Other threads
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new york, minute
IAC building power outage kills New York tech meetup, spares us all
New York wantrepreneurs preparing for a night of rejection and glazed looks can relax — tonight's New York Tech Meetup is canceled due to a power outage at IAC. "We tried to find a replacement venue for tonight, but couldn't find anything for all 400 of us at this late notice," reads a memo sent to all invitees. The group won't meet again until September 2. Trust us: You'll survive four weeks without learning about the next great Muxtape killer. (Photo by waywuwei)
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Comment by CassidyMonet: I know that Barry's going through some rough times right now, but did he really forget to pay the... more » | Other threads
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clips
Classic Jakob Lodwick video further explains post-Lodwick productivity surge
Even when Manhattan's favorite Internet hipster Jakob Lodwick isn't high, he's not that hard-working. Connected Ventures cofounder Zach Klein reminisces about the early days of Connected Ventures, the IAC-backed testosteronefest behind CollegeHumor and Vimeo. Lodwick leads the startup's crew in singing "Semi-Charmed Kind of Life," and trashes cofounder Ricky Van Veen's cardboard cutout of Shaquille O'Neal. Any questions on why Vimeo's performance soared after IAC fired Lodwick? shaq attack from Amir Cohen on Vimeo. -
earnings
IAC down more than half a billion in second quarter
In the second quarter, IAC swung from a $94.6 million profit last year to a $421.6 million loss this year. Don't blame Jakob Lodwick! His former company, Vimeo, is nowhere near the top of IAC/InterActiveCorp's expense report for the past quarter. The real problem at Barry Diller's Internet empire is Cornerstone Brands, a rollup of catalog companies undermined by weak consumer spending in home and apparel retail. Cornerstone's losses led to a $300 million writedown in goodwill in IAC's second quarter. In addition, the soft real estate market cut revenue for home financing site LendingTree nearly in half. More » -
copyfight
Muxtape creator battles Firefox script kiddies while waiting for the RIAA
Justin Ouellette's Muxtape, a site which hosts online mixtapes, is on shaky legal ground — and not just over the way Ouellette left his former employer, IAC-owned video site Vimeo. Making a mixtape for personal use is clearly accepted; but posting it online, for everyone on the Internet to listen to? Unclear at best. Ouellette himself has hinted that he's worried about being sued. On Userscripts.org, a site where people post and discuss add-ons to the Firefox Web browser, Ouellette has been scolding programmers for creating tools that let Muxtape users download MP3 files directly from the site — even as he was claiming that he wasn't worried about copyright issues. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by ans: Wait... what was that?... did I just hear the sound of 2,000 ruby coders canceling their muxtape variants and returning... more » | Other threads
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vimeo
Amateur video site overrun by — no, not porn
Victim of their own success: Vimeo, the online video-sharing venture owned by Barry Diller's IAC. The site has been been doing well since IAC fired Vimeo's founder, wacky Web 2.0 poster boy Jakob Lodwick. But Vimeo's ample capacity is now bogged down by a glut of videogame screen-capture movies, sometimes called fraps. Why is that a problem? More »
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By Paul BoutinComment by VuzeJohn: Have you checked out Vuze? You can publish video-game screen capture movies (including HD) for free, and Vuze won't... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
The bubble in personal-finance websites
AOL has launched Walletpop, a personal-finance site; IAC and Dow Jones have FiLife; and TheStreet.com has MainStreet.com. All hope to attract a younger audience to personal-finance news than the conventional stock talk and online portfolios offered by the staid likes of Yahoo Finance and CNNMoney. The bets are wrong both in their timing and their premise. Stockbrokers and mortgage lenders, reliable advertisers during good times, are both ducking for cover and pulling back their budgets. Froth might have sustained these sites a couple of years ago, but not now. No matter when they launched, though, their proponents should have remembered this maxim: Financial advice, like youth itself, is wasted on the young. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by Ted Dziuba: Who needs financial advice? I just charge everything to visa anyway. Easy. more » | Other threads
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max levchin
Barry Diller reveals he still likes them young in Sun Valley
At Allen & Co.'s annual schmoozefest in Sun Valley, Idaho, there were a lot of regulars, like IAC's Barry Diller — and a few new faces, like Slide CEO Max Levchin. Julia Boorstin of CNBC reports that the two were "lingering" together at lunch. This after Kevin Rose reported how Diller charmed More » -
blogging for dollars
CollegeHumor turns blogrolling into a business
In a more innocent age, much earlier in this decade, bloggers traded links out of a sense of camaraderie. Over time, it turned into more of a quid pro quo: You scratch my back, I boost your pageviews. Now, blogs routinely auction off space in their blogroll. CollegeHumor, the IAC-owned juvenile-jokes site, has refined this business model even further. A come-on from CollegeHumor's marketing department encourages Valleywag to participate in its Linkswap program. Every link to CollegeHumor, it promises, will be returned one for one with a link to Valleywag. Thanks, but I think we'll pass. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by Gilbert: The update nearly made me piss my pants. I commend you, Owen. more » | Other threads
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Andrew Pile
New Vimeo boss mocks Jakob Lodwick's pet wantrepreneur
On Monday, we posted Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette's accidentally-emailed-to-the-Internet photo of a napkin on which he'd scribbled details of his investment deal with Jakob Lodwick. Lodwick, best known for getting fired from Vimeo, an online video-sharing site he founded, now owned by IAC. He now spends his days playing the solipsistic teenager in a man's Crocs-shod body. Now Lodwick's replacement at Vimeo, director of development Andrew Pile, joins the fun. More »
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Comment by jadedperson: @dalasv: hey, let's rent cars to people who need them! And make it really cool and convenient! But let's steal... more » | Other threads
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the chart
Vimeo without founder Jakob Lodwick: quite successful
Is IAC's Vimeo, the video-sharing site founded by bizarrely charismatic (and just plain bizarre) New York entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick, missing its founder? In a word, no. Lodwick lost his job due to insubordination last November; his dare-you-to-sue-me funding of an IAC employee's music startup, in an apparent violation of his noncompete agreement, is right in line with the nose-thumbing he did while on the job. We heard IAC finally fired Lodwick because he would blow off meetings with upper management when it wanted to talk to him about things like marketing and growth. So who got it right — IAC chairman Barry Diller's suits, or the wannabe iconoclast? More »
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Comment by fluffy: Vinny is spot on. You have to look at the massive impact the closure of Stage6.com had on high-quality... more » | Other threads
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justin
Music-startup founder leaked damning deal memo by confusing email with Tumblr
Yesterday, we asked why Justin Ouellette, the founder of Brooklyn's favorite music-sharing site, Muxtape, would post the terms of Jakob Lodwick's investment in Muxtape to his personal blog — especially when those terms might prove dangerous for Ouelette's friend Lodwick, an oddly charismatic tech entrepreneur who had a frosty falling out with IAC chief Barry Diller? The answer: Because even for the founder of a Web service that's grown to 140,000 users in just 5 months, sometimes email is hard. Writes Ouellette in a post replacing the now removed image: More »
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Comment by innocentchild: If I ever have to cross paths with that chode sucker I'm first going to laugh and point. Then I'm... more » | Other threads
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confirmed
Napkin shows New York ubergeek Jakob Lodwick encouraged IAC employee to two-time Barry Diller
Once an oversharer, always an oversharer — no matter what it costs, personally or financially. When IAC fired Jakob Lodwick — the Internet's own Howard Roark — from Web video site Vimeo, IAC agreed to pay Lodwick $100,000 a year until 2011, just so long as he stayed away from IAC employees in any new ventures. Lodwick, reportedly bipolar and never much one for consistency, has proven unable to resist the temptation. An image posted to former IAC employee Justin Ouellette's personal blog seems to confirm what's already been rumored: Lodwick funded Ouellette's side project, an online-music site called Muxtape, with enough cash — $95,000 in exchange for 1 percent of Muxtape's equity, going by the scribbled napkin — so that Oullette could quit IAC to run Muxtape full time. More »
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Comment by FiveStarEggRoll: Did somebody e-mail this to IAC? Harry "juicy" Wang more » | Other threads
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clips
The Web's 10 best fireworks displays
A full half of our usual readership came to Valleywag on Christmas day last year. Even more showed up on New Year's Eve. We figure a good percentage of you will be stuck at the office today, too. So if you can't come out to see the Fourth of July fireworks tonight, we'll bring them to you, with the Web's 10 best fireworks videos. A surprising six come from IAC's Vimeo, proving that hosting expensive high-definition content is totally worth it at least once a year. All of them are guaranteed not to maim small children or start wildfires. More »
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Comment by raincoaster: Uh-huh. But for Canada Day last year, Vancouver had fireworks in the shape of pot leaves. Let's just say they... more » | Other threads
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tumblr
Puppet video reveals all you need to know about Silicon Alley
Gary the Puppet — who in the clip embedded below tours the offices of Tumblr, Next New Networks, Gawker, CollegeHumor, and Wallstrip — might be the perfect metaphor for the New York tech scene. It makes a big show of itself, but it's kind of flimsy and despite how it may look, somebody much larger and more powerful is actually running things. For New York tech, the puppeteer's hand is old media companies. IAC and CBS own College Humor and Wallstrip, respectively. Tumblr has its roots in Hanna-Barbera cartoons. So does Next New Networks, which just agreed to distribute its videos over Hulu, a News Corp. and NBC joint venture. And what's Gawker but a tape worm in Old Media's belly? Still, New York tech has this over the Valley: perhaps because of those old media connections, it knows how to present itself with a hokey smirk instead of new media's typical sassback. More »
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Comment by justinj82: @Michael_Irie: I wrote and edited this piece, and have never seen the 1938 Media video, so to way it's a... more » | Other threads
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online advertising
Barry Diller, IAC, kick out third-party ad networks
After selling its premium advertising inventory, the 63 companies that used to make up Barry Diller's IAC sell the remnants to third-party ad networks, which pay $1 or $1.50 per thousand pagviews. Not a great business. In an effort to boost those CPMs nearer to $6, IAC will from now on instead pool the inventory from the 63 companies and then divide it up based on advertiser-friendly demographics. AdAge reports that IAC will define its wealthy users, for example, as More » -
stocks
Amazon.com and Google to rule Web, according to Wall Street's Captain Obvious
Yahoo, IAC and eBay are in for rough sailing, but Google and Amazon.com should cruise smoothly and emerge as the big winners in the coming years, according to analyst Jeffrey Lindsay of Wall Street research firm Sanford C. Bernstein in a 310-page report published yesterday titled "U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning." Tellingly, there's no mention in the summary article of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans for a totes awesome IPO. [Reuters] -
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By Nick DentonComment by Durannie: AvF looks an awful lot like a guy with whom I did a scene for a porn video recently. Hmmmmm............ more » | Other threads
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hires
IAC's Jason Rapp ends months of career purgatory at Gifts.com
Hail the survivor! We'd heard that IAC dealmaker Jason Rapp's career was on the rocks. Turns out it was just in a deep freeze. Rapp has been named CEO of minor IAC property Gifts.com. The holdup? More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by sggrf: this may actually prove to be his punishment:) more » | Other threads
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click fraud
IAC's Citysearch faces class-action lawsuit over click fraud
Los Angeles-based law firm Kabateck Brown Kellner filed a class action suit against IAC property Citysearch, alleging the site charges pay-per-click advertisers for fraudulent clicks. The firm has won similar cases against Yahoo and Google. All the major search firms now belong to anti-click fraud coalitions and make lots of nice noises about the problem. Truth is, click fraud isn't much of one. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt explained during an unguarded moment a couple years ago, click fraud will never be that much of a problem because if fraudulent clicks devalue the worth of click for an advertiser, that advertiser can always pay less per click. -
girlsense
Barry Diller likes to play dress-up, too
Having reached 13 million girls with the chance to design glittery jpegs for each other, social site Girlsense has a new parent: InterActiveCorp. IAC already has teen virtual world Zwinky and its 6 million users, part of their aim to take on a "broader teen mindshare." Girlsense brings a different slice of the demo — the girls who go for Glam Ads and butterflies, and maybe a few of their doting rainbow-loving boys-who-are-friends, too.
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Comment by vulturesquadron: Another startlingly obvious misfire by IAC. They are the AOL of the aughts, minus the brand consolidation. Nothing... more » | Other threads
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acquisitions
Ask.com buys reference site Lexico
Lexico, the company behind reference sites like Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, has been acquired by also-ran search engine Ask.com, a unit of Barry Diller's IAC, for an undisclosed sum. It will mean an 11 percent boost in traffic for Ask and more revenue for Lexico's sites, as Google had cut a special deal with IAC for a higher revenue share than it would give to the likes of Dictionary.com. Possibly tipping their hand about future moves, Ask CEO Jim Safka told the AP the site was also looking to improve results related to health and entertainment, presumably through more acquisitions. The move comes after IAC's Barry Diller settled a fight with Liberty's John Malone, a major IAC shareholder, over plans to split the company into five different parts.
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By Jackson WestComment by vulturesquadron: @narnio: My problem is IAC is just based on their silly approach of creating a conglomerate of decent companies that... more » | Other threads
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online advertising
CollegeHumor smack talk hits Facebook where it hurts — the click-through rates
When Google took on Facebook in ultimate frisbee, Facebook took the series 2-0. Now we hear a contest of beer pong — the drinking game involving ping pong balls, Solo cups and Milwaukee's Best — has been scheduled between Mark Zuckerberg's finest and the New York-based, IAC-backed CollegeHumor. CollegeHumor cofounder Ricky Van Veen began the smack talk early posting the above image to his blog. It reads:Dear Facebook, Looking forward to Thursday. Your winning percentage will be even lower than your click-through rates. Love, CollegeHumor
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Comment by NoletaAntiphus: What a sad sad world we live in now. is this online life the only one we have? as for facebook... more » | Other threads
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10 best workspaces
Rank tech's 10 best workspaces
After reviewing our post "Tech's top 10 workspaces" commenter Dweezil complained that our choices were full of "to much modernism bullshit." Commenter Web2PointOhShit tore at everybody:Six Apart's offices seem pretty ordinary to me. Their meeting space is *tiny*. Googleplex's niceties are all about enticing their workers to stay at work longer — yeah, that's real HAWT!. Valleywag offices look like a dump to me.
So, OK, not everybody goes for our taste in brick, exposed ceilings and Googley amenities. Let's find out who's in the minority. Below, vote for your favorites and help us rank tech's 10 best workspaces. More »
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Comment by webwebweb: just visited the UGO Networks offices in the east village, coooooooooooool. more » | Other threads
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iac
Humble Diller Not That Humble
Having escaped John Malone's hook, former studio boss and internet tycoon Barry Diller is attempting to reinvent himself, says Portfolio's Duff McDonald. The new Diller trademark? Humility. "We were kidding ourselves if we thought we could pull off an integrated conglomerate that acts like G.E. or P&G in anything less than 10, 20, or 30 years." Diller is indeed cutting internet conglomerate IAC down to a more manageable rump of web sites such as Ask, Citysearch and Evite. But the 65-year-old tycoon hasn't entirely lost his trademark vindictiveness. Doug Lebda—who sold Diller online mortgage search engine Lending Tree for $726m before the real-estate bubble burst—was prepared to buy the business back at a discount. Why hasn't that happened? "No one is allowed to school Diller twice," says a mogul watcher.
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By Nick DentonComment by ifstone: Diller still hasn't lost his sense of tackiness, which was always odd given what a bright guy he is. more » | Other threads
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cubicle culture
Tech's top 10 workspaces
What makes for an appealing workspace? The envelopes they leave in your mailbox every two weeks. But after that, it comes down to design and amenities. Also, we like windows and brick. Lots and lots of brick. After spending some time on Office Snapshots, we present the ten best-looking offices in tech, below. More »
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